A conflict between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria,is known as the first Chechen war. This war is also known as War in Chechnya.It was fought from December 1994 to August 1996. After 1994-1995, Russian federal forces attempted to seize control of the mountainous area of Chechnya but were set back by Chechen guerrilla warfare and raids on the flatlands in spite of Russia's overwhelming manpower, weaponry, and air support. The widespread demoralization of federal forces, and the almost universal opposition of the Russian public to the conflict, led Boris Yeltsin's government to declare a ceasefire in 1996 and sign a peace treaty a year later. The official figure for Russian military death toll is 5,500, while most estimates put the number between 3,500 and 7,500, or even as high as 14,000.There are no accurate figures for the number of Chechen militants killed, various estimates put the number at about 3,000 to over 15,000 deaths. Various figures estimate the number of civilian deaths at between 30,000 and 100,000 killed and possibly over 200,000 injured, while more than 500,000 people were displaced by the conflict, which left cities and villages across the republic in ruins.
Origins of the war in Chechnya
Chechnya within Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
In the 1817-1864 Caucasian War, Russia finally defeated Chechnya and annexed it in the 1870s. The Chechens' attempts at gaining independence after the fall of the Russian Empire failed and in 1922 Chechnya was incorporated into Bolshevist Russia and later into the Soviet Union (USSR). In 1936, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1944, on the orders of NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, more than 1 million Chechens, the Ingush, and several other North Caucasian peoples were deported to Siberia.and Central Asia, officially as punishment for alleged collaboration with the invading German forces; the Chechen-Ingush Republic was abolished. Eventually, Soviet first secretary Nikita Khrushchev granted the Vainakh (Chechen and Ingush) peoples permission to return to their homeland and restored their republic in 1957.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation Treaty
Russia became an independent nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
There was an urgent need for a law to clearly define the powers of each federal subject. Such a law was passed on March 31, 1992, when Yeltsin and Ruslan Khasbulatov, then chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet and an ethnic Chechen himself, signed the Federation Treaty bilaterally with 86 out of 88 federal subjects. In almost all cases, demands for greater autonomy or independence were satisfied by concessions of regional autonomy and tax privileges.. Eventually, in the spring of 1994, President Yeltsin signed a special political accord with Mintimer Shaeymiev, the president of Tatarstan, granting many of its demands for greater autonomy for the republic within Russia; thus, Chechnya remained the only federal subject that did not sign the treaty. Neither Yeltsin nor the Chechen government attempted any serious negotiations and the situation would deteriorate into a full-scale conflict.
Chechen declaration of independence
Chechnya (red) and the Russian Federation
Meanwhile, on September 6, 1991, militants of the All-National Congress of the Chechen People (NCChP) party, created by the former Soviet Air Force general Dzhokhar Dudayev, stormed a session of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR Supreme Soviet with the aim of asserting independence. It caused the death of the head of the Grozny's branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vitaly Kutsenko, who was thrown out of a window or fell trying to escape, and effectively dissolved the government of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic of the Soviet Union. In the following month, Dudayev won overwhelming popular support (as evidenced by the later presidential elections with high turn out and a clear Dudayev victory, see works of Derluguian or Tony Wood) to oust the interim administration supported by central government. He was made president and declared independence from the Soviet Union.
In November 1991, Yeltsin dispatched Internal Troops to Grozny, but they were forced to withdraw when Dudayev's forces surrounded them at the airport. After Chechnya made its initial declaration of sovereignty, the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic split in two in June 1992 amidst the Ingush armed conflict against another Russian republic, North Ossetia. The newly-created republic of Ingushetia then joined the Russian Federation, while Chechnya declared full independence from Moscow in 1993 as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (ChRI).
The Russian war in Chechnya
Initial stages
Chechen women praying in Grozny, December 1994.
On December 11, 1994, Russian forces launched a three-pronged ground attack towards Grozny. The main attack was temporarily halted by deputy commander of the Russian Ground Forces, Gen. Eduard Vorobyov, who then resigned in protest, stating that it is "a crime" to "send the army against its own people."[18] Many in the Russian military and government opposed the war as well. Yeltsin's adviser on nationality affairs, Emil Pain, and Russia's Deputy Minister of Defense Gen. Boris Gromov (esteemed commander of the Soviet-Afghan War), also resigned in protest of the invasion ("It will be a bloodbath, another Afghanistan," Gromov said on television), as did Gen. Borys Poliakov. More than 800 professional soldiers and officers refused to take part in the operation; of these, 83 were convicted by military courts and the rest were discharged. Later Gen. Lev Rokhlin also refused to be decorated as a Hero of Russia for his part in the war.
The Chechen Air Force (as well as the republic's civilian aircraft fleet) was completely destroyed in the air strikes of the very first few hours of the war, while around 500 people took advantage of the mid-December amnesty declared by Yeltsin for members of Dzhokhar Dudayev's armed groups. Nevertheless, Boris Yeltsin's cabinet's expectations of a quick surgical strike, quickly followed by Chechen capitulation and regime change, were misguided. Russia found itself in a quagmire practically instantly. The morale of the Russian troops, poorly prepared and not understanding why and even where they were sent, was low from the beginning. Some Russian units resisted the order to advance, and in some cases, the troops sabotaged their own equipment. In Ingushetia, civilian protesters stopped the western column and set 30 military vehicles on fire, while about 70 conscripts deserted their units. Advance of the northern column was halted by the unexpected Chechen resistance at Dolinskoye and the Russian forces suffered the first serious losses.[18] Deeper in Chechnya, a group of 50 Russian paratroopers surrendered to the local militia, after being deployed by helicopters behind enemy lines and then abandoned.
Yeltsin ordered the Russian Army to show restraint, but it was neither prepared nor trained for this. Civilian losses quickly mounted, alienating the Chechen population and raising hostility to the Russian forces, even among those who initially supported the attempts to unseat Dudayev. Other problems occurred as Yeltsin sent in freshly trained conscripts from neighboring regions rather than regular soldiers. Highly mobile units of Chechen fighters caused severe losses to Russia's ill-prepared, demoralized troops. The Russian military command then resorted to carpet bombing tactics and indiscriminate barrages of rocket artillery, causing enormous casualties among the Chechen and Russian civilian population.[19] On December 29, in a rare instance of a Russian outright victory, the Russian airborne forces seized the military airfield next to Grozny and repelled a Chechen armored counterattack in the battle of Khankala; the next objective was the city itself. With the Russians closing in on the capital, Chechens began to hastily set up defensive fighting positions and group their forces in the city.
3rd Battle of Grozny and the Khasav-Yurt Accord
Despite Russian troops in and around Grozny numbering approximately 12,000, more than 1,500 Chechen guerrillas (whose numbers soon swelled) overran the key districts within hours in an operation prepared and led by Maskhadov (who named it Operation Zero option) and Basayev (who called it Operation Jihad). The separatists then laid siege to the Russian posts and bases and the government compound in the city centre, while a number of Chechens deemed to be Russian collaborators were rounded up, detained and, in some cases, executed. At the same time, Russian troops in the cities of Argun and Gudermes were also surrounded in their garrisons. Several attempts by the armored columns to rescue the units trapped in Grozny were repelled with heavy Russian casualties ( the 276th Motorized Regiment of 900 men suffered 50% casualties in a two-day attempt to reach the city centre). Russian military officials said that more than 200 soldiers had been killed and nearly 800 wounded in five days of fighting, and that an unknown number were missing; Chechens put the number of Russian dead at close to 1,000. Thousands of troops were either taken prisoner or surrounded and largely disarmed, their heavy weapons and ammunition commandeered by the separatists.
On August 19, despite the presence of 50,000 to 200,000 Chechen and Russian civilians and thousands of federal servicemen in Grozny, the Russian commander Konstantin Pulikovsky gave an ultimatum for Chechen fighters to leave the city within 48 hours, or else it would be leveled in a massive aerial and artillery bombardment, including by strategic bombers (not used in Chechnya up to this point) and ballistic missiles. This announcement was followed by chaotic scenes of panic as civilians tried to flee before the army carried out its threat, with parts of the city ablaze and falling shells scattering refugee columns.[40] The bombardment was however soon halted by the ceasefire brokered by Gen. Alexander Lebed, Yeltsin's national security adviser, on August 22. Gen. Lebed called the ultimatum, issued by Gen. Pulikovsky (now replaced), a "bad joke".[41]
Aftermath
Casualties
According to the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, 3,826 troops were killed, 17,892 were wounded, and 1,906 are missing in action.[42] According to NVO, the authoritative Russian independent military weekly, at least 5,362 Russian soldiers died during the war, 52,000 got wounded or sick, and some 3,000 more remained missing by 2005.[43] The estimate of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, however, put the number of the Russian military dead at 14,000,[6] based on information from wounded troops and soldiers' relatives (counting only regular troops, i.e. not the kontraktniki and special service forces).[44] In 2009 the official Russian number of troops still missing from the two wars in Chechnya and presumed dead was some 700, while about 400 remains of the missing servicemen were said to be recovered up to this point.
STEPS TAKEN TO CONTROL THE WAR:
The Moscow peace treaty
Street of the ruined capital Grozny after war
The Khasav-Yurt Accord paved the way for the signing of two further agreements between Russia and Chechnya. In mid-November 1996, Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed an agreement on economic relations and reparations to Chechens who had been "affected" by the 1994-96 war. In February 1997, Russia also approved an amnesty for Russian soldiers and Chechen separatists alike who committed illegal acts in connection with the war in Chechnya between December 1994 and September 1996.[53]
Six months after the Khasav-Yurt Accord, on May 12, 1997, Chechen-elected president Aslan Maskhadov traveled to Moscow where he and Yeltsin signed a formal treaty "on peace and the principles of Russian-Chechen relations" that Maskhadov predicted would demolish "any basis to create ill-feelings between Moscow and Grozny."[54] Maskhadov's optimism, however, proved misplaced. Little than two years later, some of Maskhadov's former comrades-in-arms, led by radical field commanders Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab, launched an incursion into Dagestan in the summer of 1999 - and soon Russia invaded Chechnya again, marking beginning of the Second Chechen War.
