Moscow ? Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced stepped-up military action in Chechnya on Sunday in a bid to crush rebel plans for “new terrorist acts” like the recent mass hostage seizure at a Moscow theater that ended in huge loss of life.

Shortly after he spoke, the reality of the ongoing war in the separatist republic hit again with reports that Chechen fighters had shot down a Russian military helicopter, killing nine soldiers.

“In recent days, we keep getting more and more information that on the territory of Chechnya and not only there new terrorist acts are being prepared,” Ivanov told reporters. “In some villages, the recruiting of suicidal mercenaries is under way.” He labeled the recruits “zombies.”

In response, Russian forces “will engage in large-scale and tough but at the same time targeted operations aimed at preventing and eliminating such threats in the bud,” Ivanov said.

He added that plans for a possible reduction of Russian troops in Chechnya, which he announced this summer, will be put on hold.

The get-even-tougher policy in the war-shattered region comes as many residents of Chechnya already fear a worsening of violence from a Russian backlash against the theater takeover, which ended with the deaths of at least 119 of the more than 750 hostages. Nearly all died from a gas used to overcome the armed hostage-takers before police stormed the theater. About 50 rebels who seized the theater during the performance of a musical were killed.

“The capture of hostages in Moscow was absolutely against the interests of the Chechen people,” Khas-Magomed Edelkhanov, 51, a Chechen farmer, said Sunday. “This operation ‘proved’ to the rest of the world the official propaganda lies of the Kremlin that Chechens are mostly bandits and terrorists rather than peaceful citizens.

“Everyone is tense and worried,” Edelkhanov said. “People are afraid that any day now, cruel ‘mopping-up’ operations will begin again all over Chechnya and no one will say a protective word for us anymore.”

Chechens won a degree of autonomy for their republic in the Caucasus region after defeating Russian troops in a 1994-96 war. But Moscow’s forces marched back into the republic in 1999 and have battled guerrillas there since.

Pavel Felgengauer, an independent defense analyst in Moscow, questioned Sunday whether any effort at new, tougher tactics can produce a military solution to the conflict.

“They have been trying to achieve this for several years now with basically zero success,” Felgengauer said. “Ivanov’s statement to the effect that the army will from now on resort to some kind of tough but targeted sort of pinpoint blows makes me think only of more massive bombing and rocket strikes.”

In the wake of the theater seizure, however, public opinion polls show a clear toughening of Russian attitudes toward the Chechnya conflict.

A poll conducted at the end of September by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center showed that 34 percent of respondents favored a continuation of military operations in Chechnya, while 57 percent supported the opening of peace negotiations. At the end of October, after the theater hostages’ deaths, support for military action had jumped to 46 percent, while just 44 percent supported a start to negotiations.