First Chechen War

Date:11 December 1994 – 31 August 1996 (1 year, 8 months, 2 weeks and 6 days)

Location:Chechnya, Russia ;Parts of Ingushetia, Stavropol Krai and Dagestan

Result:Chechen Victory

■Khasavyurt Accord

■Withdrawal of Russian troops.

■Continuation of Chechnya's de facto independence.

Belligerents

Russia

Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

oreign mujahideen

Commanders and leaders

Boris Yeltsin

Pavel Grachev

Anatoly Kulikov

Konstantin Pulikovsky

Anatoliy Romanov

Anatoly Shkirko

Vyacheslav Tikhomirov

Gennady Troshev

Dzhokhar Dudayev

Aslan Maskhadov

Ibn Al-Khattab
Shamil Basayev

Strength

38,000 (December 1994)

70,500 (February 1995)

Russian estimate of some 300,000 soldiers and 15,000 irregulars

Casualties and losses

Military:

5,732 killed or missing (Russian official figure)

Civilian:

At least 161 killed outside Chechnya

Military: 17,391 killed or missing (Russian official 2001 estimate)

Civilian:

50,000–100,000 Killed

80,000

The First Chechen War, also known as the War in Chechnya, was a conflict between the Russian
Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, fought from December 1994 to August 1996.
After the initial campaign of 1994–1995, culminating in the devastating Battle of Grozny,
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 despite Russia's
overwhelming manpower, weaponry, and air support. The resulting 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 with the Chechens in 1996 and sign a peace
treaty a year later. The official figure for Russian military deaths is 5,500, while most estimates
put the number between 3,500 and 7,500, or even as high as 14,000. Although 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
Following long resistance during the 1817−1864 Caucasian War, Russia finally defeated the
Chechens and annexed their lands in the 1870s. The Chechens' subsequent 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 a half million Chechens, the Ingush and
several other North Caucasian peoples were deported to Siberia and Central Asia, officially as
punishment for the collaboration with the invading German forces during the 1940–1944
insurgency in Chechnya; 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 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation Treaty

Russia became an independent nation after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December
1991. While Russia was widely accepted as the successor state to the USSR, it lost a significant
amount of its military and economic power. While ethnic Russians made up more than 80% of
the population of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, significant ethnic and
religious differences posed a threat of political disintegration in some regions. In the Soviet
period, some of Russia's approximately 100 nationalities were granted ethnic enclaves that had
various formal federal rights attached. Relations of these entities with the federal government
and demands for autonomy erupted into a major political issue in the early 1990s. Boris Yeltsin
incorporated these demands into his 1990 election campaign by claiming that their resolution
was a high priority.

There was an urgent need for a law to clearly define the powers of each federal subject. Such a
law was passed on 31 March 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. The treaty
outlined three basic types of federal subjects and the powers that were reserved for local and
federal government. The only federal subjects that did not sign the treaty were Chechnya and
Tatarstan. 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 deteriorated into a full-scale conflict.

Chechen declaration of independence

 Meanwhile, on 6 September 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. The storming caused the death of the head of Grozny's branch of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vitaly Kutsenko, who was thrown out of a window or fell
while trying to escape. This 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 turnout and a clear
Dudayev victory) to oust the interim administration that was supported by the 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).

Internal conflict in Chechnya and the Grozny-Moscow tensions

From 1991 to 1994, tens of thousands of people of non-Chechen ethnicity left the republic
amidst reports of violence and discrimination against the non-Chechen population (mostly
Russians, Ukrainians and Armenians).Chechen industry began to fail as a result of many Russian
engineers and workers leaving or being expelled from the republic combined with the Soviet
era's crippling of the non-Russian/Armenian/Ukrainian populace (Chechens, some Ingush and
Nogais, Jews) through Russian-only schooling, heavy discrimination in the public sector of the
workforce, and other similar measures (even as late as 1989, Checheno-Ingushetia was ruled by
a bureaucracy of ethnic Russians). During the undeclared Chechen civil war, factions both
sympathetic and opposed to Dudayev fought for power, sometimes in pitched battles with the
use of heavy weapons. In March 1992, the opposition attempted a coup d'état, but their
attempt was crushed by force. A month later, Dudayev introduced direct presidential rule, and
in June 1993, dissolved the Chechen parliament to avoid a referendum on a vote of non-
confidence. In late October 1992, Russian forces dispatched to the zone of the Ossetian-Ingush
conflict were ordered to move to the Chechen border; Dudayev, who perceived this as "an act
of aggression against the Chechen Republic", declared a state of emergency and threatened
general mobilization if the Russian troops did not withdraw from the Chechen border. To
prevent the invasion of Chechnya, he did not provoke the Russian troops.

After staging another coup d'état attempt in December 1993, the opposition organized
themselves into the Provisional Council of the Chechen Republic as a potential alternative
government for Chechnya, calling on Moscow for assistance. In August 1994, the coalition of
the opposition factions based in north Chechnya launched a large-scale armed campaign to
remove Dudayev's government.

However, the issue of contention was not independence from Russia: even the opposition
stated there was no alternative to an international boundary separating Chechnya from Russia.
In 1992, Russian newspaper Moscow News made note that, just like most of the other seceding
republics except for Tatarstan, ethnic Chechens universally supported the establishment of an
independent Chechen state.Again, in 1995, during the heat of the First Chechen War, Khalid
Delmayev, an anti-Dudayev belonging to an Ichkerian liberal coalition, stated that "Chechnya's
statehood may be postponed... but cannot be avoided".Opposition to Dudayev came mainly
due to his domestic policy and personality: he once notoriously claimed that Russia intended to
destabilize his nation by "artificially creating earthquakes" in Georgia and Armenia. This did not
go off well with most Chechens, who came to view him as a national embarrassment at times (if
still a patriot at others), but it did not, by any means, dismantle the determination for
independence, as most Western commentators note.

Moscow clandestinely supplied separatist forces with financial support, military equipment and
mercenaries. Russia also suspended all civilian flights to Grozny while the aviation and border
troops set up a military blockade of the republic and eventually unmarked Russian aircraft
began combat operations over Chechnya. The opposition forces, who were joined by Russian
troops, launched a clandestine but badly organized assault on Grozny in mid-October 1994,
followed by the second, larger attack on 26–27 November 1994. Despite Russian support, both
attempts were unsuccessful. In a major embarrassment for the Kremlin, Dudayev loyalists
succeeded in capturing some 20 Russian Army regulars and about 50 other Russian citizens who
were clandestinely hired by the Russian FSK state security organization to fight for the
Provisional Council forces. On 29 November, President Boris Yeltsin issued an ultimatum to all
warring factions in Chechnya ordering them to disarm and to surrender. When the government
in Grozny refused, Yeltsin ordered the Russian army to "restore constitutional order" by force.

Beginning on 1 December, Russian forces openly carried out heavy aerial bombardments of
Chechnya. On 11 December 1994, five days after Dudayev and Russian Minister of Defense
Gen. Pavel Grachev of Russia had agreed to "avoid the further use of force", Russian forces
entered the republic in order to "establish constitutional order in Chechnya and to preserve the
territorial integrity of Russia." Grachev boasted he could topple Dudayev in a couple of hours
with a single airborne regiment, and proclaimed that it will be "a bloodless blitzkrieg, that
would not last any longer than December 20."

The Russian war in Chechnya

Initial stages

On 11 December 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." 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 that occurred on 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 almost instantly. The morale of the Russian troops, poorly prepared
and not understanding why and even where they were being 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 their first serious losses.Deeper in Chechnya, a group of 50 Russian
paratroopers surrendered to the local Chechen 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 the hostility
that they showed towards the Russian forces, even among those who initially supported the
Russians' 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. Although
the Russian military command ordered to only attack designated targets, due to the lack of
training and experience of Russian forces, they attacked random positions instead, turning into
carpet bombing and indiscriminate barrages of rocket artillery, and causing enormous
casualties among the Chechen and Russian civilian population. On 29 December, 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, the Chechens
began to hastily set up defensive fighting positions and grouped their forces in the city.

Storming of Grozniy

When the Russians besieged the Chechen capital, thousands of civilians died from a week-long
series of air raids and artillery bombardments in the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe
since the destruction of Dresden. The initial assault on New Year's Eve 1995 ended in a major
Russian defeat, resulting in heavy casualties and at first nearly a complete breakdown of morale
in the Russian forces. The disaster claimed the lives of an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Russian
soldiers, mostly barely trained and disoriented conscripts; the heaviest losses were inflicted on
the 131st 'Maikop' Motor Rifle Brigade, which was completely destroyed in the fighting near
the central railway station.Despite the early Chechen defeat of the New Year's assault and the
many further casualties that the Russians had sustained, Grozny was eventually conquered by
Russian forces amidst bitter urban warfare. After armored assaults failed, the Russian military
set out to take the city using air power and artillery, At the same time, the Russian military
accused the Chechen fighters of using civilians as human shields by preventing them from
leaving the capital as it came under continued bombardment. On 7 January 1995, Russian
Major-General Viktor Vorobyov was killed by mortar fire, becoming the first on a long list of
Russian generals to be killed in Chechnya. On 19 January, despite heavy casualties, Russian
forces seized the ruins of the Chechen presidential palace, which had been heavily contested
for more than three weeks as the Chechens finally abandoned their positions in the destroyed
downtown area. The battle for the southern part of the city continued until the official end on 6
March 1995.

By the estimates of Yeltsin's human rights adviser Sergei Kovalev, about 27,000 civilians died in
the first five weeks of fighting. Russian historian and general Dmitri Volkogonov said the
Russian military's bombardment of Grozny killed around 35,000 civilians, including 5,000
children, and that the vast majority of those killed were ethnic Russians. While military
casualties are not known, the Russian side admitted to having 2,000 soldiers killed or missing.
The bloodbath of Grozny shocked Russia and the outside world, causing severe criticism of the
war. International monitors from the OSCE described the scenes as nothing short of an
"unimaginable catastrophe", while former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev called the war a
"disgraceful, bloody adventure" and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl called it "sheer madness".

Continued Russian offensive

Following the fall of Grozny, the Russian government slowly but systematically expanded its
control over the lowland areas and then into the mountains. In what was dubbed the worst
massacre in the war, the OMON and other federal forces killed at least 103 civilians while
seizing the border village of Samashki on 7 April (several hundred more were detained and
beaten or otherwise tortured). In the southern mountains, the Russians launched an offensive
along the entire front on 15 April, advancing in large columns of 200-300 vehicles. The ChRI
forces defended the city of Argun, moving their military headquarters first to completely
surrounded Shali, then shortly after to Serzhen-Yurt as they were forced into the mountains,
and finally to Shamil Basayev's ancestral stronghold of Vedeno. Chechnya's second-largest city
of Gudermes was surrendered without a fight, but the village of Shatoy was fought for and
defended by the men of Ruslan Gelayev. Eventually, the Chechen command withdrew from the
area of Vedeno to the Chechen opposition-aligned village of Dargo, and from there to
Benoy.According to an estimate cited in a United States Army analysis report, between January
and June 1995, when the Russian forces conquered most of the republic in the conventional
campaign, their losses in Chechnya were approximately 2,800 killed, 10,000 wounded and more
than 500 missing or captured. However, some Chechen fighters infiltrated already pacified
places hiding in crowds of returning refugees.

As the war continued, separatists resorted to mass-hostage takings, attempting to influence

the Russian public and leadership. In June 1995, a group led by the maverick field commander
Shamil Basayev took more than 1,500 people hostage in southern Russia in the Budyonnovsk
hospital hostage crisis; about 120 Russian civilians died before a ceasefire was signed after
negotiations between Basayev and the Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The raid
enforced a temporary stop in Russian military operations giving the Chechens time to regroup
during their greatest crisis and to prepare for the national militant campaign. The full-scale
Russian attack led many of Dudayev's opponents to side with his forces and thousands of
volunteers to swell the ranks of mobile militant units. Many others formed local self-defence
militia units to defend their settlements in the case of federal offensive action, officially
numbering 5,000–6,000 armed men in late 1995. Altogether, the ChRI forces fielded some
10,000–12,000 full-time and reserve fighters at a time, according to the Chechen command.
According to a UN report, the Chechen separatist forces included a large number of child
soldiers, some as young as 11 and including females. As the territory controlled by them shrank,
the separatists increasingly resorted to using classic guerrilla warfare tactics, such as setting
booby traps and mining roads in enemy-held territory. The successful use of improvised
explosive devices was particularly noteworthy; they also effectively exploited a combination of
mines and ambushes.

In the fall of 1995, Gen. Anatoliy Romanov, the federal commander in Chechnya at the time,
was critically injured and paralyzed in a bomb blast in Grozny. Suspicion of responsibility for the
attack fell on rogue elements of the Russian military, as the attack destroyed hopes for a
permanent ceasefire based on the developing trust between Gen. Romanov and the ChRI Chief
of Staff Aslan Maskhadov, a former colonel in the Soviet Army; in August, the two went to
southern Chechnya in an effort to convince the local commanders to release Russian prisoners.
In February 1996, the federal and pro-Russian Chechen forces in Grozny opened fire on a
massive pro-independence peace march which had involved tens of thousands of people, killing
a number of demonstrators.The ruins of the presidential palace, the symbol of Chechen
independence, were then demolished two days later.

Human rights and war crimes

Human rights organizations accused Russian forces of engaging in indiscriminate and

disproportionate use of force whenever encountering resistance, resulting in numerous civilian
deaths (for example, according to Human Rights Watch, Russian artillery and rocket attacks
killed at least 267 civilians during the December 1995 separatist raid on Gudermes. The
dominant Russian strategy was to use heavy artillery and air strikes throughout the campaign,
leading some Western and Chechen sources to call the air strikes deliberate terror bombing on
parts of Russia.Ironically, due to the fact that ethnic Chechens in Grozny were able to seek
refuge among their respective teips in the surrounding villages of the countryside, a high
proportion of initial civilian casualties were inflicted against ethnic Russians who were unable to
procure viable escape routes. The villages, however, were also heavily targeted from the first
weeks of the conflict (the Russian cluster bombs, for example, killed at least 55 civilians during
the 3 January 1995 Shali cluster bomb attack). The Russian soldiers often prevented civilians
from evacuating from areas of imminent danger and prevented humanitarian organizations
from assisting civilians in need. It was widely alleged that Russian troops, especially those
belonging to the MVD, committed numerous and in part systematic acts of torture and
summary executions on separatist sympathizers; they were often linked to zachistka
("cleansing" raids, affecting entire town districts and villages suspected of harboring boyeviki -
the separatist fighters). Humanitarian and aid groups chronicled persistent patterns of Russian
soldiers killing, raping and looting civilians at random, often in disregard of their nationality.
Separatist fighters took hostages on a massive scale, kidnapped or killed Chechens considered
to be collaborators, and mistreated civilian captives and federal prisoners of war (especially
pilots). Both the separatists and the federal forces kidnapped hostages for ransom and used
human shields for cover during the fighting and movement of troops (for example, a group of
surrounded Russian troops took approximately 500 civilian hostages at Grozny's 9th Municipal
Hospital]).

The violations committed by members of the Russian forces were usually tolerated by their
superiors and were not punished even when investigated (the story of Vladimir Glebov serving
as an example of such policy). However, television and newspaper accounts widely reported
largely uncensored images of the carnage to the Russian public. As a result, the Russian media
coverage partially precipitated a loss of public confidence in the government and a steep
decline in president Yeltsin's popularity. Chechnya was one of the heaviest burdens on Yeltsin's
1996 presidential election campaign. In addition, the protracted war in Chechnya, especially
many reports of extreme violence against civilians, ignited fear and contempt of Russia among
other ethnic groups in the federation.

Spread of the war

Chechnya's Chief Mufti Akhmad Kadyrov's declaration that the ChRI was waging a Jihad
(struggle) against Russia raised the spectre that Jihadis from other regions and even outside
Russia would enter the war. By one estimate, up to 5,000 non-Chechens served as foreign
volunteers, motivated by religious and/or nationalistic reasons.

Limited fighting occurred in the neighbouring small Russian republic of Ingushetia, mostly
when Russian commanders sent troops over the border in pursuit of Chechen fighters, while as
many as 200,000 refugees (from Chechnya and the conflict in North Ossetia) strained
Ingushetia's already weak economy. On several occasions, Ingush president Ruslan Aushev
protested incursions by Russian soldiers and even threatened to sue the Russian Ministry of
Defence for damages inflicted, recalling how the federal forces previously assisted in the
expulsion of the Ingush population from North Ossetia.Undisciplined Russian soldiers were also
reported to be committing murders, rapes, and looting in Ingushetia (in an incident partially
witnessed by visiting Russian Duma deputies, at least nine Ingush civilians and an ethnic Bashkir
soldier were murdered by apparently drunk Russian soldiers; earlier, drunken Russian soldiers
killed another Russian soldier, five Ingush villagers and even Ingushetia's health minister).Much
larger and more deadly acts of hostility took place in the republic of Dagestan. In particular, the
border village of Pervomayskoye was completely destroyed by Russian forces in January 1996 in
reaction to the large-scale Chechen hostage taking in Kizlyar in Dagestan (in which more than
2,000 hostages were taken), bringing strong criticism from this hitherto loyal republic and
escalating domestic dissatisfaction. The Don Cossacks of southern Russia, originally sympathetic
to the Chechen cause, turned hostile as a result of their Russian-esque culture and language
and stronger affinity to Moscow than Grozny (their long history of conflict with indigenous
peoples such as the Chechens should also be considered), and the Kuban Cossacks started
organising themselves against the Chechens, including manning paramilitary roadblocks against
infiltration of their territories.

Meanwhile, the war in Chechnya spawned new forms of separatist activities in the Russian
Federation. Resistance to the conscription of men from minority ethnic groups to fight in
Chechnya was widespread among other republics, many of which passed laws and decrees on
the subject. For example, the government of Chuvashia passed a decree providing legal
protection to soldiers from the republic who refused to participate in the Chechen war and
imposed limits on the use of the federal army in ethnic or regional conflicts within Russia. Some
regional and local legislative bodies called for the prohibition on the use of draftees in quelling
internal conflicts, while others demanded a total ban on the use of the armed forces in such
situations. Russian government officials feared that a move to end the war short of victory
would create a cascade of secession attempts by other ethnic minorities.

On 6 March 1996, a Cypriot passenger jet was hijacked by Chechen sympathisers while flying
toward Germany. On 9 January, a Turkish passenger ship carrying 200 Russian passengers was
taken over by what were mostly Turkish gunmen who were seeking to publicize the Chechen
cause. Both of these incidents were resolved through negotiations and the hijackers
surrendered without any fatalities being inflicted.

Continued Russian offensive

On 6 March, between 1,500 and 2,000 Chechen fighters infiltrated Grozny and launched a
three-day surprise raid on the city, overrunning much of it and capturing cachés of weapons
and ammunition. Also in March, the Chechen fighters attacked Samashki, where hundreds of
villagers were killed. A month later, on 16 April, forces of Arab commander Ibn al-Khattab
destroyed a large Russian armored column in an ambush near Shatoy, killing at least 53 soldiers
(most estimates put the number at around 100, however); in another one, near Vedeno, at
least 28 Russian troops were killed.

As military defeats and growing casualties made the war more and more unpopular in Russia,
and as the 1996 presidential elections neared, Yeltsin's government sought a way out of the
conflict. Although a Russian guided missile attack assassinated the ChRI President Dzhokhar
Dudayev on 21 April 1996, the separatists persisted. Yeltsin even officially declared "victory" in
Grozny on 28 May 1996, after a new temporary ceasefire was signed with the ChRI Acting
President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. While the political leaders were discussing the ceasefire and
peace negotiations, military forces continued to conduct combat operations. On 6 August 1996,
three days before Yeltsin was to be inaugurated for his second term as Russian president and
when most of the Russian Army troops were moved south due to what was planned as their
final offensive against remaining mountainous separatist strongholds, the Chechens launched
another surprise attack on Grozny.

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) 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 19 August, despite the presence of 50,000 to 200,000 Chechen 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. He stated that federal forces would use 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. The
bombardment was however soon halted by the ceasefire brokered by Gen. Alexander Lebed,
Yeltsin's national security adviser, on 22 August. Gen. Lebed called the ultimatum, issued by
Gen. Pulikovsky (now replaced), a "bad joke".

During eight hours of subsequent talks, Lebed and Maskhadov drafted and signed the Khasav-
Yurt Accord on 31 August 1996. It included: technical aspects of demilitarization, the
withdrawal of both sides' forces from Grozny, the creation of joint headquarters to preclude
looting in the city, the withdrawal of all federal forces from Chechnya by 31 December 1996,
and a stipulation that any agreement on the relations between the Chechen Republic of
Ichkeria and the Russian federal government need not be signed until late 2001.

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. According to the NVO, the authoritative
Russian independent military weekly, at least 5,362 Russian soldiers died during the war,
52,000 were wounded or became diseased and some 3,000 more remained missing by 2005.
The estimate of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, however, put the number of the
Russian military dead at 14,000, based on information from wounded troops and soldiers'
relatives (counting only regular troops, i.e. not the kontraktniki and special service forces). List
of names of the dead soldiers, drawn up by the Human Rights Center "Memorial" contains 4393
names. 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.

Chechen casualties are estimated at up to 100,000 dead or more, of which most were
civilians.Various estimates put the number of Chechens dead or missing between 50,000 and
100,000. Russian Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov claimed that fewer than 20,000 civilians were
killed. Sergey Kovalyov's team could offer their conservative, documented estimate of more
than 50,000 civilian deaths. Aleksander Lebed asserted that 80,000 to 100,000 had been killed
and 240,000 had been injured. The number given by the ChRI authorities was about 100,000
killed. According to Russian newspaper Gazeta, approximately 35,000 ethnic Russian civilians
were killed by Russian forces operating in Chechnya, most of them during the bombardment of
Grozny.

The ChRI separatists estimated their combat deaths were about 3,000 (including some 800 in
the first three months of the war and said to be mostly killed by mortar fire, although this
number is almost certainly too low. Tony Wood, a journalist and author who has written
extensively about Chechnya, estimated about 4,000 Chechen combatant losses. It is impossible
to know exactly how many Chechen separatists were killed, however, because many fought
independently and were not under the control of Dudayev (as such, their deaths were not
counted among official Chechen losses). The Russian estimate is much higher; Russia's Federal
Forces Command estimated that 15,000 Chechen fighters had been killed by the end of the
war.

Prisoners and missing persons

In the Khasav-Yurt Accord, both sides agreed to an "all for all" exchange of prisoners to be
carried out at the end of the war. However, despite this commitment, many persons remained
forcibly detained. A partial analysis of the list of 1,432 reported missing found that, as of 30
October 1996, at least 139 Chechens were still being forcibly detained by the Russian side; it
was entirely unclear how many of these men were alive. As of mid-January 1997, the Chechens
still held between 700 and 1,000 Russian soldiers and officers as prisoners of war, according to
Human Rights Watch.According to Amnesty International that same month, 1,058 Russian
soldiers and officers were being detained by Chechen fighters who were willing to release them
in exchange for members of Chechen armed groups. American freelance journalist Andrew
Shumack has been missing from the Chechen capital, Grozny since July 1995 and is presumed
dead.

The Moscow peace treaty

 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.

Six months after the Khasav-Yurt Accord, on 12 May 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."Maskhadov's optimism, however, proved
misplaced. Little more 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 invasion of
Dagestan in the summer of 1999 – and soon Russia invaded Chechnya again, marking the
beginning of the Second Chechen War.