First Chechen War
Chechen fighter stands near the destroyed government building in Grozny (January 1995)
| date | December 11, 1994-31. August 1996 |
|---|---|
| place | Chechnya , partly Ingushetia , Dagestan , Stavropol region |
| output | Khassavyurt Agreement Withdrawal of Russian troops De facto independence of Chechnya |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
|
|
|
| Commander | |
|
Boris Jelzin |
Dzhokhar Dudayev |
| losses | |
|
5732 - Russian official figure |
3000 - Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Claim |
The First Chechen War was a military conflict between the Caucasus Republic of Chechnya and Russia from 1994 to 1996.
backgrounds
In 1921/1922 Chechnya became part of Soviet Russia . In the Soviet Union , Chechnya was the last autonomous republic within the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR). During the Second World War , the Chechen population was deported to Central Asia at the instigation of Stalin for alleged collaboration with the invaders and was only able to return after 1956; autonomy was restored. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved.
On November 1, 1991, Chechen President Jokhar Dudayev declared his country's independence. The Russian government in Moscow initially supported Dudayev's political opponents and strengthened its troops on the borders with Chechnya.
See :
- History of Chechnya
- Collapse of the Soviet Union
- History of Russia: Russian Federation
- Russian-Chechen conflict
Course of war
On November 29, 1994, the Security Council of the Russian Federation under its First Secretary Oleg Lobov decided to intervene in Chechnya without consulting the other institutions. On December 11, 1994, President Boris Yeltsin finally gave the order for military intervention , even though Chechen President Dudayev had indicated that he was ready to negotiate.
The Chechen separatists were well armed. When the Soviet / Russian armed forces and security forces in the country came under massive pressure from the Chechen government and various other forces after the collapse of the Soviet Union , they withdrew until mid-1992, leaving behind most of their equipment (including armored vehicles, artillery systems and over 20,000 automatic weapons). The “safe conduct” was recently even negotiated with Defense Minister Grachev .
On the other hand, the Russian armed forces could generally hardly be motivated to work in an internal conflict. Neither the General Staff nor the North Caucasus Military District were really involved in the planning, which added to the confusion. Leading and prominent military figures such as Boris Gromow and Alexander Lebed were against the war. It was widely seen as an action that intelligence chief Stepashin and defense minister Grachev were promoting for selfish political motives. The deputy commander of the land forces, General Eduard Vorobyov, was to take command. He denied responsibility and was released. Hundreds of other opposition officers were dismissed in 1994/95, disciplined or withdrawn from the army themselves.
The invasion of Chechnya began on December 11, 1994 in three columns that were to attack from the west (Ingushetia), east (Dagestan) and north. The advance of the western was delayed by passive civil resistance. The eastern one had to move north. Initially, over 20,000 men from the army and the Ministry of the Interior were deployed. The army (including soldiers who had recently withdrawn from Germany ) could for the most part only deploy composite units without internal cohesion. As a result, other combined formations from all over Russia, including above all airborne troops and also marine infantry , around 40,000 men at the beginning of January 1995, were called in.
By December 26, all three columns had reached the suburbs of Grozny. Even before reinforcements arrived, the Russian attack on the capital began at the turn of the year 1994/95, which initially failed with heavy losses in street fighting. After two months of fighting, the city was taken. When the city was besieged in January 1995, it is estimated that around 25,000 people died from days of artillery fire . Protests abroad triggered the apparently poorly targeted air strikes , which resulted in massive destruction and the majority of whom were civilians, including a significant proportion of Russian citizens. By April 1995, the Russian army was able to take control of around 80 percent of Chechen territory. The largely insufficiently equipped and trained Russian troops, many of them conscripts , found themselves in a guerrilla war . Parts of the army were demoralized. The Chechen separatists were also supported by Islamist mujahideen from various Arab countries , as well as by volunteers from UNA-UNSO , an anti-Russian, right-wing nationalist group from Ukraine .
Dudayev's supporters continued to pursue the guerrilla tactics: on June 14, 1995, militants led by Shamil Basayev took control of a hospital during the hostage-taking of Budyonnovsk and entrenched themselves there with 1,000 hostages. After unsuccessful attempts to storm the hospital, the Russian government responded to the demands of the opponents and assured an immediate end to military actions, the beginning of peace talks and free withdrawal.
Negotiations began in Moscow under the auspices of the OSCE and ended with the signing of a military agreement on July 30, 1995. It provided for the renunciation of further fighting, the disarmament of the Chechens and the reduction of the Russian troops in Chechnya to 6,000 men. However, the ceasefire that came into force on August 2, 1995 was not permanent, as the Chechen separatists underlined their claims to independence with new attacks. So they pressed led by Salman Radujew on 9 January 1996 in a hospital in Kizlyar and occupied a few days after the hostage-taking, the Dagestani village Perwomaiskoje . The Russian government again responded to these hostilities with violence. 5000 soldiers and 80 tanks destroyed the village, 78 people died in the fighting.
The Chechen rebel chief Dudayev was killed on the evening of April 21, 1996 near the village of Gechi-Chu. According to official statements, he was during a call through a targeted attack with a ballistic missile of the type -21 Scarab SS fatally injured. However, there was also speculation that Dudayev fell victim to internal Chechen power struggles or even survived.
In the summer of 1996, around 65,000 Russian armed and security forces were available for the war in Chechnya in the North Caucasus military district under the command of the 58th Army.
Before the Russian presidential elections on June 16, 1996 , a ceasefire agreement was reached, but both sides initially failed to comply. In August 1996, then the Russian General acted Alexander Lebed with the head of the Chechen interim government Aslan Maskhadov a new cease-fire agreement from which even the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya included (Convention of Khasavyurt ). Maskhadov had recaptured the Russian army-controlled city of Grozny in August 1996 with 5,000 fighters. The war had thus taken an unfavorable turn for the Russian side.
According to estimates, the almost two-year war cost at least 80,000 lives. According to official observers, the Russian army and Chechen rioters have repeatedly been guilty of serious war crimes and human rights violations .
Further development
In the autumn and towards the end of 1996, several bomb attacks were carried out on facilities of the Russian army in Dagestan and the wider area of Chechnya.
At the beginning of January 1997, the withdrawal of Russian troops was completed, at the end of January parliamentary and presidential elections were held in Chechnya, from which Maskhadov emerged as head of state; on May 12, 1997, Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a formal peace treaty. The controversial political status of Chechnya was not clarified in this treaty, but was postponed to December 31, 2001.
On December 22, 1997, a multi-ethnic group attacked a Russian barracks in Gerlakh near Buinaksk and, according to their own statements, destroyed several tanks. Three civilians lost their lives in the attack.
Since August 7, 1999, the situation has escalated again: around 400 Chechen militants under the command of Shamil Basayev and the Arab Islamist Ibn al-Khattab attacked the neighboring republic of Dagestan, including in Botlich district . In fighting (see Dagestan War) up to August 26, 1999 over 70 Russian soldiers were killed and 259 wounded. On September 5, 1999, around 2,000 Chechen rebels under Basayev and al-Khattab attacked Dagestan again, killing several hundred people in Novolakskoye district by September 15.
After the situation in Dagestan had already escalated and there had been intense armed conflict, assassins in Russia carried out explosive attacks on houses in Moscow and other cities in September, killing several hundred people.
The former KGB and FSB employee and allegedly poisoned Alexander Litvinenko had repeatedly alleged that these attacks were carried out or instigated by the Russian secret service FSB in order to provide an excuse for a second Chechnya war and to support Vladimir Putin's presidential election campaign.
See also
literature
- Sultan Yashurkaew : Scratched on splinters . Grozny 1995. Diary from Chechnya. Translated by Marianne Herold and Ruslan Bazgiew. Kitab Verlag Klagenfurt-Wien, 2008, ISBN 978-3-902585-21-9
- Hans Krech : The Russian War in Chechnya (1994–1996). A manual , Berlin: Verlag Dr. Köster, 1997. (Armed Conflicts after the End of the East-West Conflict, Vol. 3). (2nd unchanged edition 2000).
- Heiko Sauer, Niklas Wagner: The Chechnya conflict and international law. Chechnya secession, Russia's military interventions and the reactions of the international community to the test of international law . In: AVR , Vol. 45 (2007), pp. 53-83.
Web links
- Information on the Second Chechen War from the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg
- TAZ of May 25, 2004: Peace has no chance in Grozny
- La première guerre de Tchétchénie, by Paul Labarique
- Infantry Magazine by Adam Geibel ( Memento from June 21, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.regnum.ru/news/588687.html
- ↑ Алла Тучкова. Солдатские матери проголосуют за мир
- ↑ Gregory Fremont-Barnes (Ed.): A History of Counterinsurgency [2 volumes], Praeger Security International , Verlag ABC-CLIO, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4408-0425-0 , page 351
- ↑ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18188085
- ^ Rüdiger Dingemann : Westermann Lexicon of trouble spots in the world. Conflicts and wars since 1945 , Westermann , Braunschweig 1996, ISBN 3-07-509516-8 . P. 646
- ↑ Anatol Lieven: Chechnya. Tombstone of Russian Power. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999 (pb. Ed.), Pp. 64/65.
- ↑ Anatol Lieven: Chechnya. Tombstone of Russian Power. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999 (pb. Ed.), Pp. 105/106.
- ^ Pavel K. Baev: The Russian Army in a Time of Troubles. SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 1996, pp. 143/44.
- ↑ Florian Angerer; The conventional decapitation in the context of modern wars: political, economic and social aspects, strategy and conflict research , vdf Hochschulverlag AG, 2010, ISBN 978-3-7281-3316-8 , page 166
- ^ The International Institute for Strategic Studies: The Military Balance 1996/97. London 1996, p. 104.
- ^ Dodge Billingsley: Fangs of the Lone Wolf: Chechen Tactics in the Russian-Chechen War 1994-2009 . Helion & Company, Solihull 2013, ISBN 978-1-909384-77-4 , pp. 3 .
- ↑ Alexander Litvinenko, Yuri Felshtinsky : Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within . SPI Books, New York 2002, ISBN 1-56171-938-2 .