The Second Chechen War (Russian: Втора́я чече́нская война́, Chechen: Шолгӏа оьрсийн-нохчийн тӏом, lit. 'Second Russian-Chechen War') took place in Chechnya and the border regions of the North Caucasus between the Russian Federation and the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, from August 1999 to April 2009.
In August 1999, Islamists from Chechnya infiltrated Dagestan in Russia. Later in September, apartment bombings occurred in Russian cities, killing over 300 people. Russian authorities were quick to blame Chechens for the bombings, although no Chechen, field commander or otherwise, took responsibility for the attacks. During the initial campaign, Russian military and pro-Russian Chechen paramilitary forces faced Chechen separatists in open combat and seized the Chechen capital Grozny after a winter siege that lasted from December 1999 until February 2000. Russia established direct rule over Chechnya in May 2000, although Chechen militant resistance throughout the North Caucasus region continued to inflict many Russian casualties and challenge Russian political control over Chechnya for several years. Both sides carried out attacks against civilians. These attacks drew international condemnation.
In mid-2000, the Russian government transferred certain military responsibilities to pro-Russian Chechen forces. The military phase of operations was terminated in April 2002, and the coordination of the field operations was given first to the Federal Security Service and then to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in mid-2003.
By 2009, Russia had disabled the Chechen separatist movement, and mass fighting ceased. Russian army and Interior Ministry troops ceased patrolling. Grozny underwent reconstruction, and much of the city and surrounding areas were rebuilt quickly. Sporadic violence continued in the North Caucasus; occasional bombings and ambushes against federal troops and forces of the regional governments in the area still occur.
In April 2009, the government operation in Chechnya officially ended. As the bulk of the army was withdrawn, responsibility for dealing with the low-level insurgency was shouldered by the local police force. Three months later, the exiled leader of the separatist government, Akhmed Zakayev, called for a halt to armed resistance against the Chechen police force from August. This marked the end of the Second Chechen War. The death toll of the conflict is unknown, but the total loss of human life, including combatants and non-combatants, is estimated to be over 60,000.
Names
The Second Chechen War is also known as the Second Chechen Campaign (Russian: Втора́я чече́нская кампа́ния) or the Second Russian Invasion of Chechnya from the Chechen insurgents' point of view.
Historical basis of the conflict
Russian Empire
Chechnya is an area in the Northern Caucasus which has constantly fought against foreign rule, including the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century. The Russian Terek Cossack Host was established in lowland Chechnya in 1577 by free Cossacks who were resettled from the Volga to the Terek River. In 1783, the Russian Empire and the Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, under which Kartli-Kakheti became a Russian protectorate. To secure communications with Georgia and other regions of the Transcaucasia, the Russian Empire began spreading its influence into the Caucasus region, starting the Caucasus War in 1817. Russian forces first moved into highland Chechnya in 1830, and the conflict in the area lasted until 1859, when a 250,000-strong army under General Aleksandr Baryatinsky broke down the highlanders' resistance. Frequent uprisings in the Caucasus also occurred during the Russo–Turkish War of 1877–78.
Soviet Union
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Chechens established a short-lived Caucasian Imamate which included parts of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia; there was also the secular pan-Caucasian Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus. Most of the resistance was defeated by Bolshevik troops by 1922. Then, months before the creation of the Soviet Union, the Chechen Autonomous Oblast of the Russian SFSR was established. It annexed a part of the territory of the former Terek Cossack Host. Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia formed the Checheno–Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936. In 1941, during World War II, a small-scale Chechen revolt broke out, led by Hasan Israilov. In 1944, the entire Chechen people were deported to the Kazakh SSR and Kirghiz SSR in an act of ethnic cleansing; this was done under the false pretext of Chechen mass collaboration with Nazi Germany. An estimated 1/4 to 1/3 of the Chechen population perished due to the harsh conditions. Many scholars recognize the deportation as an act of genocide, as did the European Parliament in 2004. In 1992 the separatist government built a memorial dedicated to the victims of the acts of 1944. The pro-Russian government would later demolish this memorial. Tombstones which were an integral part of the memorial were found planted on the Akhmad Kadyrov Square next to granite steles honoring the losses of the local pro-Russian power.
First Chechen War
During the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was an anti-Soviet revolution in Chechnya, which ultimately led to Chechnya declaring independence. In 1992, Chechen and Ingush leaders signed an agreement splitting the joint Checheno–Ingush republic in two, with Ingushetia joining the Russian Federation and Chechnya remaining independent. The tension between Chechnya and Russia over independence ultimately led to Russian intervention in the republic, in which the Russians covertly tried to oust the government of Dzhokhar Dudayev. The First Chechen War began in 1994, when Russian forces entered Chechnya on the premise of restoring constitutional order. Following nearly two years of brutal fighting, with a death toll exceeding 100,000 by some estimates, the 1996 Khasavyurt ceasefire agreement was signed and Russian troops were withdrawn from the republic.
Prelude to the Second Chechen War
Instability in Chechnya
The authority of the government in Grozny was opposed by extremist warlords like Arbi Barayev, who, according to some sources, was in cooperation with the FSB. Kidnapping in Chechnya reached large proportions, and the total turnover reached tens of millions of dollars. In 1998, a group of four Western hostages was murdered. Russian special services were accused of being involved in kidnappings. In 1998, a state of emergency was declared by the authorities in Grozny. In July 1998, a confrontation occurred in Gudermes between Chechen National Guard troops and a fundamentalist faction, leading to many casualties.
Some scholars linked Chechen resistance to Russia to the Al-Qaeda global jihad movement. According to Gordon Hahn, the connections between the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and Al-Qaeda "were common knowledge by the late 1990s among U.S. government officials, intelligence analysts, and terrorism experts" and there were about five hundred foreign jihad fighters in Chechnya at the start of the second war. Most Western observers prior to 11 September regarded the alleged al-Qaida links claimed by the Russian government with skepticism. The Clinton and Bush administrations, as well as other NATO governments, uniformly dismissed Moscow's rhetoric concerning the existence of Chechens in Afghanistan and Afghans in Chechnya as Soviet-style "agitprop" (agitation-propaganda) until 11 September occurred.
Russian–Chechen relations (1996–1999)
Political tensions were fueled in part by allegedly Chechen or pro-Chechen terrorist and criminal activity in Russia, as well as by border clashes. On 16 November 1996, in Kaspiysk (Dagestan), a bomb destroyed an apartment building housing Russian border guards, killing 68 people. The cause of the blast was never determined, but many in Russia blamed Chechen separatists. Three people died on 23 April 1997, when a bomb exploded in the Russian railway station of Armavir (Krasnodar Krai), and two on 28 May 1997, when another bomb exploded in the Russian railway station of Pyatigorsk (Stavropol Krai). On 22 December 1997, forces of Dagestani militants and Chechnya-based Arab warlord Ibn al-Khattab raided the base of the 136th Motor Rifle Brigade of the Russian Army in Buynaksk, Dagestan, inflicting heavy casualties.
The 1997 election brought to power the separatist president Aslan Maskhadov. In 1998 and 1999, President Maskhadov survived several assassination attempts, blamed on the Russian intelligence services. In March 1999, General Gennady Shpigun, the Kremlin's envoy to Chechnya, was kidnapped at the airport in Grozny and ultimately found dead in 2000 during the war. On 7 March 1999, in response to the abduction of General Shpigun, Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin called for an invasion of Chechnya. However, Stepashin's plan was overridden by the prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov. Stepashin later said:
The decision to invade Chechnya was made in March 1999... I was prepared for an active intervention. We were planning to be on the north side of the Terek River by August–September [of 1999] This [the war] would happen regardless to the bombings in Moscow... Putin did not discover anything new. You can ask him about this. He was the director of FSB at this time and had all the information.
According to Robert Bruce Ware, these plans should be regarded as contingency plans. However, Stepashin did actively call for a military campaign against Chechen separatists in August 1999 when he was the prime minister of Russia. But shortly after his televised interview where he talked about plans to restore constitutional order in Chechnya, he was replaced in the PM's position by Vladimir Putin.
In late May 1999, Russia announced that it was closing the Russian-Chechnya border in an attempt to combat attacks and criminal activity; border guards were ordered to shoot suspects on sight. On 18 June 1999, seven servicemen were killed when Russian border guard posts were attacked in Dagestan. On 29 July 1999, the Russian Interior Ministry troops destroyed a Chechen border post near the city of Kizlyar and marched several kilometers into Chechnya. On 22 August 1999, 10 Russian policemen were killed by an anti-tank mine blast in North Ossetia, and, on 9 August 1999, six servicemen were kidnapped in the Ossetian capital Vladikavkaz.
Dagestan
On 7 August 1999, Shamil Basayev together with Ibn al-Khattab, led two groups of up to 2,000 Chechen, Dagestani, Arab mujahideen from Chechnya into the neighboring Republic of Dagestan. This war saw the first (unconfirmed) use by Russia of aerial-delivered fuel air explosives (FAE) in mountainous areas, notably in the village of Tando. By mid-September 1999, the militants were routed from the villages they had captured and retreated into Chechnya. According to Russia, several hundred militants were killed in the fighting and the Russian side reported 275 servicemen killed and approximately 900 wounded.
Russian apartment bombings
Before the wake of the Dagestani campaign had settled, a series of bombings took place in Russia (in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buynaksk). On 4 September 1999, 62 people died in an apartment building housing members of families of Russian soldiers. Over the next two weeks, the bombs targeted three other apartment buildings and a mall; in total, over 350 people were killed. Then Prime Minister Putin quickly blamed the attacks on Chechen militants and despite no evidence linking the bombings to Chechens; ordered the bombing campaign of Chechnya. In February 2000, the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated they had not seen any evidence that tied the bombings to Chechnya.
On 22 September 1999, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents were caught by local police planting a bomb at an apartment complex in Ryazan. They were later released on orders from Moscow. FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev announced on television that the apparent bomb had been part of a "training exercise".
A Russian criminal investigation of the bombings was completed in 2002. The results of the investigation, and the court ruling that followed, concluded that they were organized by Achemez Gochiyaev, who remains at large, and ordered by Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif (both of whom were later killed), in retaliation for the Russian counteroffensive against their incursion into Dagestan. Six other suspects have been convicted by Russian courts.
Many observers, including State Duma deputies Yuri Shchekochikhin, Sergei Kovalev and Sergei Yushenkov, cast doubts on the official version and sought an independent investigation. Some others, including David Satter, Yury Felshtinsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, as well as the secessionist Chechen authorities, claimed that the 1999 bombings were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya, which boosted the popularity of Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin, brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma in the 1999 parliamentary election, and secured Putin as president within a few months. A description of the bombings as FSB false-flag operations appears in the book Blowing Up Russia, which is banned in the Russian Federation.
1999–2000 Russian offensive
Air war
In late August and early September 1999, Russia mounted a massive aerial campaign over Chechnya, with the stated aim of wiping out militants who invaded Dagestan earlier in the same month. On 26 August 1999, Russia acknowledged bombing raids in Chechnya. The Russian air strikes were reported to have forced at least 100,000 Chechens to flee their homes to safety; the neighbouring region of Ingushetia was reported to have appealed for United Nations aid to deal with tens of thousands of refugees. On 2 October 1999, Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations reported that 78,000 people had fled the air strikes in Chechnya; most of them went to Ingushetia, where they arrived at a rate of 5,000 to 6,000 a day.
As of 22 September 1999, Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov said that Russian troops had surrounded Chechnya and were prepared to retake the region, but the military planners were advising against a ground invasion because of the likelihood of heavy Russian casualties.