MOSCOW - Chechen rebel leaders who signed a weekend peace deal with Moscow after President Yeltsin ordered a full troop withdrawal from the region, cautiously claimed victory yesterday.
"We did not aim at gaining a military victory over the Russian army, which is big and has nuclear missiles," said the head of the Chechen rebel government, Mr Aslan Maskhadov.
"We fought to have no Russian soldier on our territory so that our citizens were not killed and I think we have achieved this," he told a news conference at a Moscow hotel.
