Within the military, the most openness regarding anti-terrorist operations in Chechnya and their consequences has come, oddly enough it would seem, from military environmentalists.

"A good number of people in Chechnya had long been making a living out of ‘cottage industry' oil refining. Rebels set fire to oil wells and also made and detonated highly explosive shells filled with chloride and ammonia," said Maj. Gen. Boris Alexeyev, head of the Armed Forces Environmental Security. "We were the first to alert the public to the full scale of this environmental disaster."

Alexeyev said that in an attempt to avoid further disaster, General Headquarters, acting on his service's proposal, issued a directive banning federal troops in Chechnya from using artillery or aviation against the Rodon nuclear waste storage facility. The directive also applies to artillery or aviation strikes against oil installations, refineries, factories or installations where chloride and ammonia are stored or used.

The directive gives the location of all these places, which are now under guard. But it is hard to avoid an environmental catastrophe in Chechnya. The military environmentalists said that in their attempts to make money between 1996-1999, the Chechen separatists turned the republic into one huge oil refinery with 15,000 mini-factories producing petrol and kerosene. The residue produced in the process – about 70 percent thick, sticky oil waste – was simply dumped.

This waste oil flowed with water runoff into rivers and reservoirs. As a result, almost all the fish coming from the Caspian Sea to upstream spawning grounds smell of oil. Some of the fish are losing their scales. The concentration of oil products and heavy metals in the Sunzha, Argun and Belka rivers is 1,000 times over the acceptable limit.

Today, 30 percent of Chechen territory is an environmental disaster zone and 40 percent is in bad environmental condition. General Alexeyev said that the environmental damage threatens not only Chechnya but its neighbors as well.

"Of the state bodies able to do something about the environmental threat in Chechnya, the Defense Ministry environmental services seem best placed to effectively tackle the situation, as they're doing now," said Alexei Yablokov, director of the Environmental Policy Center.

"I agree with what [President-elect Vladimir] Putin's government is doing, but I don't think they have sufficient resources. At least 1 billion rubles is needed to prevent an environmental disaster, but what's being given out is hundreds of times less than that," Yablokov said.

Yablokov said a possible solution could be to form local conscripts into special environmental army units, along the lines of army construction brigades. This could also be a kind of alternative military service for young men not wanting to serve in the regular forces, Yablokov said.

"We're looking at the idea," Col. Alexander Kozhushko, one of the officials responsible for conscription at General Headquarters said of Yablokov's proposal. Kozhushko pointed out that in January, Putin asked the Defense Ministry, Environment Committee, Emergency Situations Ministry and Energy Ministry to identify and monitor environmentally dangerous installations in Chechnya and draw up proposals for dealing with the consequences of environmental damage.

The idea now is to form a military brigade of conscript-age locals that would work within the Emergency Situations Ministry to battle the republic's environmental problems.

"What the military environmentalists are doing in Chechnya indicates the changes underway in the army," said Capt. Igor Kastyshin of the Defense Ministry press service. "The service was only set up in 1997. Its job is to identify and control environmental threats, to prevent pollution, clean it up and protect the soldiers from these threats."

Kastyshin said there are now a whole number of state organizations ostensibly involved with environmental issues, though actual prevention and cleanup is mostly done by the Defense Ministry.

"A lot of this pollution is linked to the military's activities. No one was really concerned with all this during the Soviet era, but now with the army scaling back its numbers, thousands of environmental problems are coming to light," Kastyshin said.

Kastyshin said that up to 20 percent of waste water is dumped untreated at army bases and defense installations.

There are also pollution problems at weapons storage facilities. Army and Navy bases have caused oil pollution. Concentration of oil products in the sea water is eight times above the norm in some parts of Vladivostok, 12 times higher in Baltiisk and 16 times higher in Sevastopol. Nuclear waste from submarines also causes disposal and storage problems.

"Going by a government resolution from 1998, the Atomic Energy Ministry was to be responsible for nuclear waste from nuclear submarines, but in practice, it's the Defense Ministry that has to deal with all the problems," said a Navy representative, Counter Adm. Nikolai Yurasov.

"The Atomic Energy Ministry is supposed to help organize treatment of solid and liquid atomic waste from the submarines, but everything moves so slowly, and in the meantime, the environmental situation is getting worse," Yurasov said.

"Russia will only solve its environmental problems once it has recovered from its major financial and economic problems. At the moment, it's more advantageous to have developed countries and part of the Armed Forces share part of the environmental burden," said Andrei Vaganov, a nuclear physicist and science editor at Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

"As Yablokov suggested, alternative service could be organized to deal with environmental problems. I think this could be an optimum solution," Vaganov said.