Chechen Wars
Two wars in the Caucasus, from 1994 to 1996 and 1999 to the 2000s, that humiliated the Russian army, flattened a European city, and made Vladimir Putin.
Chechnya is a territory the size of Connecticut in the North Caucasus with roughly a million people, and Russia has fought over it for two hundred years. It was conquered only after a long nineteenth-century war, and in February 1944 Stalin deported the entire Chechen and Ingush population to Central Asia on charges of collaboration, a deportation that killed a quarter or more of them. Survivors were allowed home in 1957. That memory is the starting condition for everything that followed.
The first war, 1994 to 1996
When the Soviet Union dissolved, the Chechen republic under a former Soviet air force general, Dzhokhar Dudayev, declared independence. Moscow tolerated the situation for three years, then invaded in December 1994, with the defense minister claiming the job could be done by one airborne regiment in two hours.
The New Year's Eve assault on Grozny was one of the worst-planned operations in modern military history. Armored columns of conscripts were sent into a city without maps, without infantry protection, and without a coherent command, and were destroyed street by street; one brigade was effectively annihilated. Russia then reduced Grozny by artillery and air power instead, killing large numbers of civilians, many of them ethnic Russians who had nowhere to go.
The war did not go better outside the capital. Chechen raids reached into Russia proper, most notoriously the seizure of a hospital at Budyonnovsk in 1995. Dudayev was killed by a missile homing on his satellite phone in 1996, and in August that year Chechen fighters retook Grozny outright. Russia signed the Khasavyurt Accord on 30 August 1996, withdrawing and deferring the question of status for five years. Estimates of the dead range from 5,500 to 14,000 Russian soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians.
It was the first war Moscow had lost to a domestic rebellion, it was televised by a free Russian press, and it broke what remained of the army's prestige and Boris Yeltsin's.
The second war
The interval was not peace. De facto independent Chechnya slid into warlordism and a kidnapping economy, and foreign jihadists arrived, shifting the cause from national independence toward something more like a religious war. In August 1999 Shamil Basayev and the Saudi commander Khattab led an incursion into neighboring Dagestan.
Then, in September 1999, apartment buildings in Moscow and two other cities were blown up in the night, killing more than 300 people. The bombings were blamed on Chechens; a persistent body of allegation holds that Russian security services were involved, and the case has never been resolved, in part because those who investigated it kept dying. What is not in dispute is the political effect. Vladimir Putin, an almost unknown prime minister appointed weeks earlier, promised to wipe out the terrorists wherever they were found, launched a second invasion in October, and rode the war to the presidency in March 2000.
This time Russia fought slowly and without restraint. Grozny fell in February 2000 after months of bombardment, and the United Nations later described it as the most destroyed city on earth. Moscow then applied Chechenization, installing a local strongman, the former separatist mufti Akhmad Kadyrov, and after his assassination in 2004 his son Ramzan, and turning the counterinsurgency over to Chechens.
The war continued as terrorism in Russia: the Moscow theater siege in 2002, where the rescue gas killed about 130 hostages, and the school seizure at Beslan in September 2004, where 334 people died, 186 of them children.
The echo
Three things came out of these wars and are still operating.
Putin's presidency is the first. He was made by a war, and the political formula of that period, security in exchange for freedoms, has governed Russia ever since.
The second is Kadyrov's Chechnya: formally part of Russia, in practice a personal fiefdom with its own armed forces, funded by federal transfers and loyal to Putin personally rather than to the Russian state. Those forces have since been deployed in Ukraine, which is what a private army is for.
The third is a doctrine. The methods rehearsed in Grozny, flattening a city rather than fighting through it, and the tolerance for civilian casualties that goes with them, reappeared in Aleppo and then in Mariupol and Bakhmut. The Chechen wars were not a Caucasian sideshow. They were the rehearsal.