First Chechen War

The First Chechen War was fought from December 1994 to August 1996 between the Russian Federation and the separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the North Caucasus. Moscow expected a quick operation to restore its authority, but its forces were drawn into a long and destructive campaign that devastated Grozny and killed tens of thousands of civilians. A Chechen counter-offensive in 1996 forced a ceasefire and a Russian withdrawal, though fighting returned three years later in the Second Chechen War.

Chechen resistance to Russian rule stretched back to the late eighteenth century and the long Caucasian War of the nineteenth. Under Soviet rule, Chechnya became part of an autonomous republic within Russia. In 1944, under Joseph Stalin, the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria ordered more than 500,000 Chechens, Ingush and others deported to Siberia and Central Asia; they were allowed home only in 1957.

During the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, supporters of Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, stormed the local parliament on 6 September. Dudayev won the presidency in an election on 27 October that Moscow called illegal, and declared independence. Russian troops flown into Grozny in November were forced to withdraw. Chechnya was one of only two regions, with Tatarstan, that refused to sign the 1992 Federation Treaty. Over the next three years its economy collapsed amid smuggling and lawlessness, tens of thousands of non-Chechens left, and armed factions for and against Dudayev fought each other. Moscow covertly armed the opposition, but its attacks on Grozny in October and November 1994 failed.

President Boris Yeltsin ordered the factions to disarm, and on 11 December 1994 about 40,000 Russian troops entered Chechnya to "establish constitutional order". Several senior officers resigned in protest. A New Year's Eve assault on Grozny ended in heavy Russian losses, and the army turned to massive air and artillery bombardment. Russian forces took the ruined presidential palace on 19 January 1995 and declared the city captured on 6 March. Yeltsin's human rights adviser Sergei Kovalev put civilian deaths in the opening five weeks at about 27,000, many of them ethnic Russians who had nowhere else to flee. International monitors described the destruction as a catastrophe, and the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev condemned it as a "disgraceful, bloody adventure".

Russian forces then pushed into the lowlands and mountains. Human rights groups documented summary executions, torture and indiscriminate fire against civilians; at Samashki in April 1995, federal troops reportedly killed up to 300 civilians. Chechen fighters, increasingly using guerrilla tactics, also committed abuses, including mass hostage-taking. In June 1995 fighters led by Shamil Basayev seized more than 1,500 hostages at a hospital in Budyonnovsk in southern Russia, and about 120 civilians died before a ceasefire was negotiated.

The war grew deeply unpopular in Russia, where uncensored television coverage damaged Yeltsin before the 1996 presidential election. On 21 April 1996 a Russian guided missile killed Dudayev. Resistance continued under Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. On 6 August, as Russian troops prepared a final mountain offensive, Chechen units under Aslan Maskhadov and Basayev infiltrated Grozny and surrounded its garrisons. Yeltsin's security adviser Alexander Lebed negotiated with Maskhadov, and the Khasavyurt Accord of 31 August 1996 ended the fighting. Russian forces were to withdraw by the end of the year, and the question of Chechnya's status was postponed until 2001.

Casualty figures remain disputed. Russia officially reported 5,500 military deaths, while independent figures run from 5,000 up to 14,000. Estimates of Chechen fighters killed range from about 2,800, according to Maskhadov, to 10,000–15,000 by the end of 1995 alone, according to the Russian interior ministry. Between 30,000 and 100,000 Chechen civilians are estimated to have died, and over half a million people were forced from their homes. A peace treaty followed in 1997, but in 1999 Russian forces invaded again, beginning the Second Chechen War.

Our 1985 map shows the region inside the Soviet Union, and the 1994 map shows it within the newly independent Russian Federation on the eve of the war.