The home for pensioners and invalids in southern Grozny, a yellow, Mediterranean-style villa set in spacious gardens, must once have been an elegant place. “Oh, it was lovely before the war,” said Zhenya, 70, huddled in the freezing corridor. She was wearing almost every article of clothing she had.

She turned and looked at the grand staircase, lined with baskets of dying plants, now covered in rubble and broken glass after Russian bombs shattered the windows on both sides of the building in an air raid. “Now there are only 60 of us left,” she said.

“We haven’t had any bread for 10 days,” whispered her friend Lucy, 68, shivering next to her. “Twenty-seven of us are bedridden. We can’t change their sheets, and they are all damp and dirty, and we haven’t got any medicine.”

The two women, both Russians who retired here from Moscow 11 years ago, cannot remember the last time they had any heating. “Did we have it for a week in November, Zhenya?” wondered Lucy.

Outside, the crumbling columns on the verandah, littered with human excrement, teeter precariously. A staring elderly woman who said her name was Katyusham ran round the snow-covered courtyard, talking to the stray dogs in the abandoned gardens.

At night the residents, semi-supervised by a young disabled Chechen woman, huddle in the small kitchen. “We had soup today,” announced Lucy. Often there is nothing.

It is three weeks since the Russians began their assault on Grozny to crush the Chechens’ three-year independence drive. Last week the Chechen resistance forces abandoned the presidential palace to the Russians, moving their headquarters south across the Sunzha River, bringing the heart of the conflict ever closer to Zhenya and Lucy’s bombed-out shelter.

“You know, I lived through the blockade of Leningrad,” said Zhenya. “I was an orphan in a children’s home. Two of my sisters died during the siege. Of course it was awful, but at least then you knew that if you worked, you’d get 250 grams of bread at the end of the day. Here you never know. And at least in Leningrad there were air-raid sounds to tell you when the German planes were coming.”

Russian jets screamed overhead as she spoke. The Sukhoi Su24s, known to all in Chechnya as the most terrifying weapon of destruction in the Russian arsenal, streaked straight over the building, a mere 500ft above us. My face must have registered my fear, because the women reached out to reassure me. “Don’t worry, my dear. It will be all right,” they said.

“Aren’t you scared?” I asked. “Well, yes,” said Lucy. “But we Russian women are very strong. We’ve lived through a lot already. And anyway, it’s better to die here with people you know than to die as a refugee all alone.”

Zhenya shuffled out into the snow in her slippers. “You know the other reason this war is worse than Leningrad? Because at least then you knew who the enemy was and where they were. Now, the Russians are shooting their own.”

The Russians are likely to kill more of their own as the determined Chechen fighters continue to impose heavy losses on the demoralised army.

Akhmed Zubkhdzhiyev, head of the Chechen presidential guard, had just withdrawn from the presidential palace when I found him at his family home in a village near Grozny. He insisted that the Chechens’ abandonment of the palace, so long the focus of the battle, did not mean defeat.

“We have not left the city, and we will never leave,” said Zubkhdzhiyev. “We left the building because there was no longer any point in staying there.”

The order to leave was issued by Aslan Maskhadov, the commander of the Chechen forces, after heavy bombs penetrated the bottom floors of the palace last week, killing 58 people in the basement, including 35 Russian prisoners of war.

Zubkhdzhiyev, a tall, well-built, bearded man of 27, described how 600 fighters, civilians and prisoners, many of them wounded, were led to relative safety from the palace in the middle of the night.

Claiming to have killed 70 Russians with his huge Dragunov sniper rifle, he insisted that even if the Chechens lose Grozny, it would not spell defeat. “Napoleon conquered Moscow but he didn’t win the war,” he said with a smile.

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