Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis

• 1. Introduction

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  The Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis began with a convoy that claimed to be carrying the dead. In June 1995, three KamAZ military trucks followed a police VAZ-2106 car north out of Chechnya. The drivers wore Russian uniforms and told anyone who asked that they were bringing home a load of dead Russian troops, labeled "Cargo 200". They passed more than 20 checkpoints. Some policemen and soldiers demanded small bribes, and the drivers paid them. Nobody searched the trucks. Inside were more than 100 Chechen separatist fighters under Shamil Basayev, men who called themselves smertniki, meaning ready to die. Their target was a southern Russian city near the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, at a time when the First Chechen War was still being fought. What they did there became the first hostage crisis in modern Russia. How did so many armed men reach a Russian city unchallenged? Why did a hospital become their stronghold? And how did one of the most powerful governments in the region end up bargaining with the man who held it hostage?

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• 2. Seizing the City

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  At about noon on the 14th of June 1995, local police stopped the column at Budyonnovsk, a city some 110 km, or 68 miles, north of Chechnya. Some sources spell it Budennovsk. The convoy had come from southern Chechnya, crossed the Russian republic of Dagestan, and entered the region of Stavropol Krai. The officer at the roadblock wanted a bribe, and the men in the trucks could not afford it. Instead, the column was ordered to drive to the city's main police station for an inspection. That order was the last mistake the police made that day. On arrival, the Chechen fighters climbed out of the trucks and opened fire. They stormed and captured the police headquarters and the city hall, and they raised Chechen flags over local administration offices. As Russian reinforcements arrived over the next several hours, the attackers pulled back into a residential district. They took hostages along the way and regrouped inside the city's main hospital. By then they had killed as many as 41 people, among them police officers, soldiers, personnel from the Budyonnovsk air base, and civilians. They had not yet stated a single demand, and the hospital was where they would make them.

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• 3. Inside the Hospital

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  Basayev's group numbered 119 men, and they quickly turned the hospital complex into a fortress, mining its ground floor with explosives. More than 2,000 people were trapped inside, and some estimates run as high as 5,000. Most were civilians. They included 150 children and several women with newborn infants. Basayev set out his terms in an ultimatum. He wanted an end to the First Chechen War, an amnesty for Chechen fighters, and direct Russian negotiations with representatives of Chechen president Dzokhar Dudayev. He also wanted reporters brought to the scene at once and allowed to enter the Chechen position. Russia answered with a threat of its own, to kill 2,000 Chechen prisoners if Basayev did not surrender. President Boris Yeltsin vowed to do everything possible to free the hostages and called the attack "unprecedented in cynicism and cruelty". Even so, low-level negotiations freed over 300 hostages on the 14th and the 15th of June.

  At about 8 pm on the 15th of June, the Chechens killed one hostage, a military registration and enlistment official. The next day, the reporters had not arrived at the arranged time, and Basayev ordered five more male hostages shot. The New York Times quoted the hospital's chief doctor, who said that "several of the Chechens had just grabbed five hostages at random and shot them to show the world they were serious in their demands that Russian troops leave their land." Reports conflict on who the five men were. They were either five military helicopter pilots or three pilots and two policemen. Basayev said he chose the pilots because of a "special relationship" with them. Two weeks earlier, an airstrike had killed his wife, his child, and his sister, and he had sworn to avenge them. Russian security minister Sergei Stepashin dismissed the reports of the killings as "a bluff". Later, the authorities relented and let a group of journalists into the hospital, where Basayev repeated his demands at a press conference. Basayev now had his audience, and the Russian side was already preparing a different answer.

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• 4. The Assault

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  At dawn on the 17th of June 1995, Russian special forces moved on the hospital compound. The order had come on the third day of the siege. The task went to a grouping of Internal Affairs (MVD) and Federal Security Service (FSB) units, including the elite Alfa and Vympel teams. Armored vehicles and armed helicopters supported them. The Chechens met them with fierce resistance. After several hours of fighting, many hostages had died in crossfire, and the two sides agreed to a local ceasefire. Basayev used the pause to release more hostages, among them all the pregnant women and nursing mothers with their children. A second assault a few hours later failed, and so did a third, each adding to the casualties. The Russian authorities accused the Chechens of using the hostages as human shields.

  Sergey Kovalyov, a human rights advisor to Yeltsin, was present and later described what followed the shooting. "In half an hour the hospital was burning," he said. He recalled seeing, with his own eyes, "pieces of human flesh stuck to the walls and the ceiling and burned corpses". Still, the attacks had freed some hostages, and Basayev soon let go of all the remaining women and children. Both sides agreed to let fire trucks and ambulances enter to put out the fires and evacuate the dead. The failed assaults left the government with one option, and it came the next day in a conversation shown on television.

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• 5. The Televised Bargain

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  On the 18th of June, prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin spoke directly with Basayev in a televised conversation. Chernomyrdin agreed to halt military actions in Chechnya and to begin top-level talks with separatist leaders. He then signed a formal statement setting out the agreement. The deal released 350 more hostages. Yeltsin was not in Russia to see it. He had gone to the G7 summit in Canada, where the Group of Seven condemned violence on both sides of the Chechen conflict after meeting him. A journalist asked Yeltsin about the crisis, and he denounced the rebels as "horrible bandits with black bands on their foreheads".

  On the 19th of June, the remaining hostages went free, but more than one hundred people chose to stay as volunteer hostages. Their presence was meant to guarantee Basayev's group safe passage. The volunteers included 16 journalists and nine State Duma deputies, among them Kovalev and Oleg Orlov, along with other government officials and medical workers. Together they boarded six buses and traveled to Chechnya through North Ossetia and Dagestan. Along the way, interior ministry general Anatoly Kulikov hatched a rogue plot to eliminate Basayev in an ambush at the Chechen border. It came to nothing, and the convoy reached the Chechen settlement of Zandak, near the border with Dagestan. The volunteers were released there. Basayev, accompanied by some of the journalists, went on to the southern Chechen village of Dargo in the Vedensky District.

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• 6. Counting the Dead

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  According to official figures, at least 129 people were killed and 415 were injured, and 18 of the injured later died of their wounds. One official breakdown listed 105 civilians, 11 police officers, and at least 14 military dead. A report that Russia submitted to the Council of Europe gave different numbers. It counted 130 civilians, 18 policemen, and 17 soldiers killed, with more than 400 people wounded. An independent estimate was far higher, suggesting that as many as 166 hostages were killed and 541 injured in the special forces assault on the hospital. Basayev's side lost 11 men, and one more went missing. Most of the bodies were returned to Chechnya.

  The town itself was badly damaged. Over 160 buildings were destroyed or damaged, including 54 municipal buildings and 110 private houses. Many of the former hostages suffered psychological trauma and were treated at a special facility set up in Budyonnovsk. In Moscow, the question was who would answer for all of it.

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• 7. Political Fallout

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  In the State Duma, a motion of no confidence in the government passed by 241 votes to 72. It was seen as purely symbolic, and the government did not resign. Many Russians nonetheless judged the handling of the crisis to be inept. Former hostages testified that many of the casualties came from indiscriminate firing by the security forces. On the 30th of June 1995, FSB director Sergei Stepashin and interior minister Viktor Yerin both resigned. Yeltsin also faced criticism. His absence during the crisis, and a later mishandling of a similar hostage crisis in Dagestan, raised serious questions about his leadership. Parliament then passed a law to prevent authorities from accepting terrorist demands while hostages are being held.

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• 8. Turning Point

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  The war ended in August 1996 with the signing of the Khasavyurt Accord, and many see the Budyonnovsk agreement as the turning point on the road there. The deal lifted morale among the hard-pressed Chechen separatists, shocked the Russian public, and discredited the Russian government. The talks it set off also gave the Chechens time to regroup and rearm. When peace talks broke down and fighting resumed, Russian forces never truly regained a position of strength.

  The raid left one more legacy. Basayev obtained caesium-137 from an x-ray machine taken in the raid. It was later distributed around Moscow, in what is described as the world's first act of radiological terrorism. In the years that followed, more than 40 of the attackers were tracked down and killed. They included Basayev himself in 2006 and his deputy Aslambek Abdulkhadzhiev in 2002. The Stavropol territorial court sentenced at least 20 others to various terms of imprisonment.

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