Second Chechen War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second Chechen War began on the 7th of August 1999, when Shamil Basayev and the Arab warlord Ibn al-Khattab led up to 2,000 fighters across the border from Chechnya into the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan. Within weeks, apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities were reduced to rubble by a series of bombings that killed over 350 people. Then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin blamed Chechen militants and ordered a bombing campaign. By October, Russian ground troops were crossing into Chechnya. In February 2000, the United Nations would eventually call Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth. What brought two peoples to this catastrophic collision? What happened inside Grozny's ruins, inside Russian villages far from the front, and inside the corridors of power where the war's origins remain bitterly contested to this day?

• 2. A Century of Resistance

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  Russian Cossacks first settled in lowland Chechnya in 1577, when the Terek Cossack Host was established by free Cossacks resettled from the Volga to the Terek River. The relationship between Russia and the mountain peoples of the Caucasus would never be easy. The Russian Empire launched the Caucasus War in 1817 to secure communications with Georgia after signing the Treaty of Georgievsk with the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti in 1783. Russian forces pushed into highland Chechnya in 1830, and the fighting did not end until 1859, when a 250,000-strong army under General Aleksandr Baryatinsky finally broke the highlanders' resistance. Uprisings flared again during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and the pattern of revolt and suppression continued into the Soviet era.

  Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chechens established a short-lived Caucasian Imamate, but Bolshevik troops crushed most resistance by 1922. Then, months before the formal creation of the Soviet Union, Moscow established the Chechen Autonomous Oblast, annexing part of the old Terek Cossack Host's territory. In 1944, Soviet authorities committed what many scholars and the European Parliament in 2004 would recognize as genocide: the entire Chechen population was deported to the Kazakh SSR and Kirghiz SSR under the false accusation of mass collaboration with Nazi Germany. Between a quarter and a third of the Chechen people perished from the brutal conditions of that forced removal. In 1992, a separatist government built a memorial to those victims. A pro-Russian government later demolished it, and the tombstones were found replanted at Akhmad Kadyrov Square next to granite steles honoring the losses of the local pro-Russian power.

• 3. The First War's Long Shadow

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  Chechnya declared independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in 1992 Chechen and Ingush leaders signed an agreement splitting their joint republic, with Ingushetia joining the Russian Federation while Chechnya remained separate. Russian forces entered Chechnya in 1994, claiming to restore constitutional order. The First Chechen War lasted nearly two years, with a death toll exceeding 100,000 by some estimates, before the Khasavyurt ceasefire agreement of 1996 brought Russian troops home. The peace was hollow. Kidnapping inside Chechnya reached enormous proportions, with the total turnover reaching tens of millions of dollars. In 1998, a group of four Western hostages was murdered, and in July of that year a violent confrontation erupted in Gudermes between Chechen National Guard troops and a fundamentalist faction.

  Tension between Russia and the newly elected separatist president Aslan Maskhadov mounted through 1998 and 1999, when Maskhadov survived several assassination attempts he blamed on Russian intelligence. On the 16th of November 1996, a bomb destroyed an apartment building in Kaspiysk, Dagestan, killing 68 people, and many in Russia blamed Chechen separatists. In March 1999, Russia's Kremlin envoy to Chechnya, General Gennady Shpigun, was kidnapped at the Grozny airport. He was found dead in 2000 during the war. Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin called for an invasion of Chechnya in response, but Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov overrode him. Stepashin would later say that invasion plans had been drawn up for August or September 1999 and that 'this would happen regardless to the bombings in Moscow.'

• 4. The Bombings and Their Contested Origins

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  On the 4th of September 1999, an apartment building housing families of Russian soldiers collapsed in a bomb blast, killing 62 people. Over the following two weeks, three more apartment buildings and a mall were targeted; in total, more than 350 people were killed. Putin, then prime minister, quickly attributed the attacks to Chechen militants despite, as US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated in February 2000, no evidence tying the bombings to Chechnya. Then, on the 22nd of September 1999, local police in the city of Ryazan caught Russian Federal Security Service agents planting what appeared to be a bomb at an apartment complex. The agents were released on orders from Moscow, and FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev announced on television that the apparent device had been part of a training exercise.

  A Russian criminal investigation completed in 2002 concluded the bombings were organized by Achemez Gochiyaev and ordered by Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif, both of whom were later killed, as retaliation for Russia's counteroffensive in Dagestan. Several others were convicted. Yet a parallel group of analysts, including Duma deputies Yuri Shchekochikhin, Sergei Kovalev, and Sergei Yushenkov, sought an independent investigation and rejected the official account. Others, among them Alexander Litvinenko and historian David Satter, alleged the bombings were a false flag operation orchestrated by the FSB to generate public support for a new war, boosting Putin's popularity and helping the pro-war Unity Party win seats in the 1999 parliamentary elections. The book making this claim, Blowing Up Russia, is banned in the Russian Federation.

• 5. The Assault on Grozny

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  Russia's air campaign over Chechnya began in late August and early September 1999, and by the 2nd of October Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations reported that 78,000 people had fled the strikes, arriving in Ingushetia at a rate of 5,000 to 6,000 a day. On the 1st of October, Putin declared Maskhadov's authority illegitimate and announced that Russian troops would advance on land but progress only as far as the Terek River, intending to establish what he called a cordon sanitaire. He later acknowledged that the cordon alone was 'pointless and technically impossible' given Chechnya's rugged terrain. Russian forces crossed the Terek on the 12th of October and began a two-pronged advance on Grozny.

  On the 21st of October 1999, a Russian Scud ballistic missile struck the central Grozny marketplace, killing more than 140 people including many women and children. Russian officials claimed the market was targeted because separatists used it as an arms bazaar. Eight days later, Russian aircraft attacked a large convoy of refugees heading to Ingushetia, killing at least 25 civilians including Red Cross workers and journalists. On the 12th of November, Russian forces raised their flag over Gudermes, Chechnya's second largest city, after local commanders defected to the federal side. The formal siege of Grozny began in early December and ended on the 2nd of February 2000, when the Russian army seized the city. Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev reported that at least 1,500 separatists were killed trying to leave Grozny. The sieges and bombardment caused between 5,000 and 8,000 civilians to perish inside the city, and the United Nations in 2003 called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth since World War II.

• 6. War Crimes and Civilian Suffering

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  Human Rights Watch documented Russian forces' use of fuel-air explosives, known in Russia as 'vacuum bombs,' against civilian areas on multiple occasions throughout the campaign. On the 4th to the 6th of February 2000, the village of Katyr-Yurt, packed with refugees far from the front lines, was hit by Russian aircraft, helicopters, Grad missiles, and fuel-air bombs. After the bombing, Russian forces allowed buses to enter and a white-flag refugee convoy to depart; they then bombed that convoy as well. Hundreds of civilians died in the assault and the sweep that followed.

  The Novye Aldi massacre stands as one of the conflict's most documented atrocities. Russian troops entered the village and conducted what witnesses described as summary executions of dozens of people, ranging from a one-year-old baby to an 82-year-old woman. Soldiers removed gold teeth from their victims and burned homes to destroy evidence. Russian authorities denied the accounts, with a Defense Ministry spokesperson calling them 'a concoction not supported by fact or any proof.' A separate inquiry into the Alkhan-Yurt massacre found that Russian general Shamanov dismissed accountability with the words: 'Don't you dare touch the soldiers and officers of the Russian army. They are doing a sacred thing today.' Amnesty International's 2001 report stated that Chechen civilians, including medical personnel, had been deliberately targeted by Russian forces. As of June 2008, there were 57 registered mass grave sites in Chechnya. The largest, uncovered in Grozny in 2008, contained some 800 bodies from the earlier conflict of 1995. Russia's general policy has been to not exhume these graves.

  The UNICEF recorded 2,340 civilian land mine and unexploded ordnance casualties in Chechnya between 1999 and the end of 2003. In 2004, Chechnya became the most mine-affected region in the world. Western European rights groups estimated approximately 5,000 forced disappearances in Chechnya since 1999, with Amnesty International in 2007 reporting up to 25,000 civilian deaths since the start of the second war.

• 7. Terror, Radicalization, and the Expanding Front

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  Between June 2000 and September 2004, Chechen insurgents carried out 23 suicide attacks inside and outside Chechnya. The most devastating was the Beslan school hostage crisis of 2004, in which at least 334 people died. The 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis ended when FSB Spetsnaz forces used an unknown incapacitating chemical agent to storm the building on the third day; 133 of the 916 hostages died, many from lack of sufficient medical care. These attacks were directed mostly by Shamil Basayev, who was killed in July 2006.

  On the 8th of March 2005, Russian security forces killed separatist president Maskhadov in the Chechen community of Tolstoy-Yurt. He had issued a ceasefire call just weeks earlier addressed directly to Putin, calling it a gesture of goodwill. With Maskhadov gone, the movement shifted further toward Islamism. In May 2005, Chechen separatists officially announced the Caucasus Front, pulling in jamaats from across Russia's south including Stavropol, Kabardin-Balkar, and Adyghe. In October 2007, Doku Umarov proclaimed the Caucasus Emirate and called for global Jihad. Separatist spokesman Movladi Udugov declared in April 2006 that their goal was 'total war, war everywhere our enemy can be reached.' The political radicalization of the movement damaged its standing internationally. In 2013, the Tsarnaev brothers cited jihad when they launched an attack in Boston, weakening sympathy for the Chechen resistance globally. On the 16th of April 2009, FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov officially announced that Russia's counter-terrorism operation in Chechnya had ended, though clashes with militants continued in Dagestan and Ingushetia.

• 8. A Society Remade by War

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  A 2006 report by Medecins Sans Frontieres found that the majority of Chechens still struggled through lives burdened by fear, uncertainty, and poverty. A survey conducted by MSF in September 2005 found that 77% of respondents showed discernible symptoms of psychological distress. As of 2008, Chechnya's infant mortality rate stood at 17 per 1,000, the highest in Russia, with one child in ten born with some anomaly requiring treatment. By 1999, UNICEF estimated that approximately 25,000 children in Chechnya had lost one or both parents since 1994. In 2007, the Chechen interior ministry identified 1,000 street children involved in vagrancy, and the number was rising.

  The war's effects inside Russia were profound and long-lasting. Young veterans returning from Chechnya brought with them what psychiatrists and journalists came to call 'Chechen syndrome,' a condition compared to the post-traumatic stress suffered by Soviet veterans of Afghanistan. According to Yuri Alexandrovsky, deputy director of the Moscow Serbsky Institute in 2003, at least 70% of the estimated 1.5 million Chechnya veterans suffered from this condition. A 2007 study by the Memorial and Demos human rights organizations linked service in Chechnya to rising brutality and criminalization within the Russian police. Russia's Interior Ministry's own internal affairs department reported that crimes committed by police officers rose 46.8% in 2005. In a 2005 nationwide poll, 41% of Russians said they lived in fear of police violence. The war also accelerated ethnic violence: the number of murders officially classified as racist more than doubled in Russia between 2003 and 2004. In 2007, an 18-year-old named Artur Ryno claimed responsibility for 37 racially motivated murders in a single year, saying he had hated people from the Caucasus since school. Chechnya's unemployment rate stood at 32.9% in August 2009, though by 2017 that figure had fallen to 13.9% as reconstruction efforts gradually rebuilt housing, roads, and public facilities across the republic.