First Russian-Chechen War (1994–1996)

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia presented its attacks as a forced response and shifted the blame for the war onto Ichkeria.

Russian President Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the government, Defense Minister Grachev and the commanders of the occupation troops declared the offensives of the Russian army a response to attacks and provocations by the army of Ichkeria, and blamed the leadership of Ichkeria for the breakdown of negotiations^[1]. The commanders said this to journalists of Russian news agencies, radio and television^[1][34].

On the night of 29 November 1994, Russian President Yeltsin declared that the fighting in Ichkeria could not be stopped, and threatened to use all the forces of the state if the army of Ichkeria and the puppet opposition did not lay down their arms within 48 hours^[35][36]. Russia itself had armed the puppet opposition and led it into battle, and on 29 November the Security Council of Russia decided to start the war^[1].

On 18 February 1995, during the "ceasefire", Russian artillerymen shelled the positions of the army of Ichkeria near Shali, Argun and Gudermes, towns to the east of Grozny, and the defenders did not return fire (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[1]. On 19 February, the Russian government declared that the army of Ichkeria had attacked Russian units on the southern outskirts of Grozny and wrecked the negotiations^[1][37].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. On 7 and 8 April, the occupiers killed 103 peaceful Chechens in the village (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8]. On the evening of 7 April, Russian television channels, citing the military, reported that fighters of the army of Ichkeria had shot the village elders. That day, Russian soldiers had fired on the cars in which the elders were travelling, and all eight people survived (see: "Lies about Its Own Actions")^[8]. On 1 May 1995, Sergei Kovalyov, a deputy of the Russian parliament, said at a hearing in the US Congress that this report had served as a pretext for a punitive action against the village^[38]. In July 1995, six of the ten deputies of the Russian parliament's commission that investigated the causes of the war wrote in their conclusion that the command of the occupation troops had decided to storm Samashki "after yet another killing of three servicemen (border guards)"^[8][39][40]. The border guards had been killed in January 1995, three months before the storming, in the neighboring stanitsa of Assinovskaya^[8].

After unknown persons made an assassination attempt in Grozny on 6 October 1995 on Romanov, the commander of the occupation troops, Russian President Yeltsin on 9 October and Defense Minister Grachev on 10 October blamed the attempt on supporters of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria. Russia suspended negotiations with Ichkeria and ordered the troops to resume the offensive^[1][41]. On 14 December, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Gudermes, the second-largest town of the republic, and the occupiers stormed it until 20 December and killed at least 267 townspeople (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[1]. On 26 December, Shkirko, the commander of the occupation troops, stated that whoever opens fire first is to blame for the deaths, and that the fighters of the army of Ichkeria attack first^[34].

In January 1996, the Russian government wrote to the UN Secretary-General that Russia had from the very beginning wanted to settle the matter by negotiations, and that supporters of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria, were wrecking the peace process with provocations^[42]. In late January, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, in a letter to deputies of the Russian parliament, blamed the leadership of Ichkeria for the breakdown of negotiations and promised to launch propaganda before new strikes on the republic. The head of the government warned that casualties were inevitable, including among peaceful Chechens^[1].

On 7 May 1996, the crews of five Russian helicopters fired rockets at Urus-Martan, a town south-west of Grozny where there had been no fighting for a year and a half, and killed five Chechens at the market (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1][43]. Fatima Ashgerieva, who was travelling by bus to Urus-Martan that day, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Prague in May 1996: "We did not hear a single shot from the direction of Urus-Martan, only shots from the helicopters"^[24]. On 10 May, Russian pilots again killed one Chechen in Urus-Martan and seriously wounded eight, among them four children. On 12 May, the crews of Russian helicopters killed 20-year-old Khasmagomed Arsemikov and wounded eight women^[1][24].

On 12 May 1996, Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation troops, justified the strike on Urus-Martan on the Vesti program of the RTR television channel: "There was at the same time an attempt to provoke actions by the federal [Russian] troops… And at the same time fire at the helicopters. Which, of course, provoked retaliatory actions by the federal troops"^[1]. On 13 May, officials of the Russian-controlled Urus-Martan district said on the Vremya program of the ORT television channel that there were no armed units in the town and that no one had fired at the Russian helicopters^[44]. On 13, 14 and 17 May, police of the occupation administration and the Russian military searched houses in Urus-Martan but did not find a single fighter of the army of Ichkeria^[1].

On 9 July 1996, a month after Russia and Ichkeria agreed on a ceasefire in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, the occupiers began a new offensive (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[16]. On 17 July, while Russian pilots were bombing the surroundings of Shatoy and Vedeno, villages in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, stated that Ichkeria had been the first to resort to provocation, contrary to the agreements signed in Moscow and Nazran^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt, a town in Russian-controlled Dagestan (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. Three years later, on 21 September 1999, Russian pilots began bombing Grozny, and on 29 September the Russian army invaded the republic again^[1]. Russia officially called the new war a "counter-terrorist operation"^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Throughout the war, Russia called the army and the authorities of Ichkeria "bandits", "bandit formations" and "terrorists", and Chechens "militants".

On 2 November 1993, Russian president Yeltsin, by decree No. 1833, approved a military doctrine under which the army could be used against "illegal armed formations"^[45][46]. With these words Russian officials designated the Armed Forces of Ichkeria^[1].

On 27 December 1994, Russian president Yeltsin, in a televised address to the citizens of Russia, called some of the defenders of Ichkeria professional "terrorists" and mercenaries from other states. The president set Russian soldiers and police officers the task of disarming the "bandit formations". Yeltsin warned Russians that their relatives could fall victim to the "rampant banditry" in Ichkeria^[47]. Commanders of the occupation forces called the people in Grozny and in the villages that the Russian army was pounding "bandit formations" and "militants"^[1].

A soldier of the Russian border troops who fought in Ichkeria told the newspaper Rossiyskiye Vesti about retraining in Stavropol, a city in the south of Russia. There the soldiers were told to set booby traps without thinking about who would be blown up by them: a child would grow up to be a "mujahid", and a woman would give birth to a new "militant"^[1].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) began the assault on Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria^[8]. On 8 April, a Russian soldier was driving women and children out of a cellar on Vygonnaya Street. Mariet T., a Chechen woman from that street, told observers of Memorial that the occupier shouted at them: "These aren't women, they're bitches, whores, they kill ours too, and we're supposed to spare theirs?!" Then the Russian military herded some of the women into a room and others into a cellar and shot at them (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). Ruslan N. from Samashki recalled how MVD soldiers detained him that day: "They took my passport and right there, in front of me, tore it up… 'You'll go down as a militant. You've got a militant's mug'". At a military unit north of the village, the servicemen beat him unconscious. Ruslan N. survived^[48].

Russian officials and military men, from the prime minister to the soldier conducting a search, called the authorities of Ichkeria "bandits"^[19][20], its army "bandit formations"^[1] and "terrorists"^[21][22], and Chechen civilians "bandits"^[23] and "militants"^[24]. On 4 January 1996, Tikhomirov, commander of the occupation forces, in an interview with the Russian agency Interfax, spoke of Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, as a "bandit"^[1].

On 11 and 12 July 1996, unknown persons blew up two trolleybuses in Moscow^[1]. According to Amnesty International, at the site of the second explosion Moscow mayor Luzhkov told a Russian police general that all Chechens should be expelled from the city. The general replied that if he were allowed to, he would introduce terror on the streets. The Russian television channel NTV showed this conversation on the day of the explosion^[49][1]. At a press conference at the mayor's office, Luzhkov told journalists that a "Chechen trace" could be seen in the explosions^[50][51][1]. Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, and the historian Yuri Felshtinsky write that those who blew up the trolleybuses "were not caught and… it was not determined whether they were Chechens or not"^[52]. Human rights defenders of Human Rights Watch wrote in their report for 1996 that Luzhkov's televised statements "set the tone" for raids on markets and dormitories. In the two days after the explosions, the Moscow police, which verified documents "overwhelmingly against dark-skinned people", detained 5,770 people for violating residence registration rules^[27]. In a 1999 report, Amnesty International wrote that for several years Luzhkov's statements served the police as an implied instruction to persecute and intimidate Chechens solely because they were Chechens^[53].

At a hearing in the US Congress, the Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats said that those whom Russia called "bandits" were ordinary citizens who had stood up for their land, their houses and their families^[38]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that until June 1995, and again from late January 1996, Russia waged the war without calling it a war or the enemy an enemy^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Throughout the war, Russian President Yeltsin, Russian ministers and generals denied the crimes of the occupation troops, attributed them to the army of Ichkeria, and passed off peaceful Chechens killed by the Russian military as its fighters.

On 1 December 1994, ten days before the open invasion, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, by Directive No. 1886-r created the Temporary Information Center (see: "Censorship")^[54]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that the center almost immediately began to spread disinformation and to obstruct the work of Russian and foreign journalists in Ichkeria^[1].

To inquiries from UN rapporteurs and deputies of the Russian parliament, the Russian government, the command of the occupation troops and the military prosecutor's office replied that the soldiers had been attacked by the army of Ichkeria and that no reports of crimes had been received^[30][1].

Russian ministers, generals and press services denied that the army had fought in Ichkeria in the autumn of 1994^{[55][56][57][58][1]}, and that pilots had bombed Grozny in December 1994^[1][23][3]. On 4 February 1995, Russian Justice Minister Kovalyov said that he and his colleagues had visited Ichkeria and had not found a single case of looting by Russian soldiers^[1].

The operational headquarters of the Russian government and the Russian military attributed to the army of Ichkeria the destruction of residential districts of Grozny in December 1994^[59][1] and the killings of peaceful people in the towns of Shali in January 1995^[60][1] and Gudermes in April 1995^[1].

Russian President Yeltsin promised to stop the bombing or declared the fighting over on 27 December 1994^[1], 19 January 1995^[19][61], 10 May 1995^[62] and 5 April 1996^[24], and Chernomyrdin, chairman of the government, on 17 July 1996^[1]. After each statement, Russian troops went on bombing and storming the villages and towns of Ichkeria^[1][24].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. On 7 and 8 April, the occupiers killed 103 peaceful Chechens in the village (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8]. On the evening of 7 April, the first channel of Russian television and the NTV television channel, citing the Interfax news agency and the Russian military, reported that fighters of the army of Ichkeria had shot the village elders. That day, Russian soldiers had fired on the cars in which the elders and the mullah were returning from negotiations. All eight people in the cars survived. On 11 April, five elders of Samashki handed human rights defenders of Memorial a statement: "The statement of the military leadership of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs is a fabrication from beginning to end"^[48]. On 29 May, the Russian parliament's commission investigating the causes of the war in Ichkeria found the reports of the shooting of the elders to be a lie^[8].

On 8 April 1995, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported that Russian troops had killed more than 130 fighters of the army of Ichkeria in battle in Samashki. On 11 April, a representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs told an NTV correspondent of 120 fighters killed by the Russian military and said that the peaceful Chechens had left before the storming. That day, Soskovets, deputy chairman of the Russian government, answered an NTV correspondent's question about the killings of women and men in the village: "No, there is nothing of the kind"^[8]. Russian investigators in the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, offered Makhmudemin Iziev from Samashki to sign testimony that the Chechen fighters had fired first. On 18 April, the Russian military released him without charges^[1][8]. Govorukhin, chairman of the Russian parliament's commission investigating the causes of the war, told the deputies after his trip to Samashki on 14 April that he had counted there "about fifty destroyed or damaged houses"^[8]. On 1 May 1995, the human rights defender Sergei Kovalyov said at a hearing in the US Congress that his group of human rights defenders had compiled a list of 374 destroyed houses in the village^[38]. In July, some members of the Russian parliament's commission wrote a conclusion in the name of the whole commission: "men must be excluded from the list [of Chechens killed in the village]. People who held an assault rifle or a grenade launcher in their hands cannot be considered peaceful residents". The report of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights defenders says that in this way the deputies recorded all the men of Samashki as fighters of the army of Ichkeria. The Mission named all 103 Chechens killed by the occupiers - 90 men and 13 women. Four of them had held weapons in their hands^[8]. On 15 August 1995, the Russian government replied to the UN Special Rapporteur on torture that the houses in Samashki had been destroyed by fighters of the army of Ichkeria, and that the military prosecutor's office had received no reports of executions of Chechens without trial^[17].

Shkirko, the commander of the occupation troops, denied the bombing of the village of Roshni-Chu in October 1995^[63]. Russian generals denied the shelling of the settlement of Novogroznensky in February 1996^[1]. Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation troops, stated in March 1996 that the military prosecutor's office had received no reports of looting^[1], and in April 1996 denied that his subordinates had killed Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria^[1].

Shkirko, the commander of the occupation troops, gave a figure of 267 casualties among the townspeople of Gudermes, which Russian troops stormed in December 1995. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that this figure is greatly understated^[1]. Russian Defense Minister Grachev recorded as fighters of the army of Ichkeria the peaceful Chechens whom his troops killed in the settlement of Novogroznensky in February 1996^[1]. A representative of the Russian military attributed to Chechen fighters dressed in Russian uniforms the looting that Russian soldiers carried out in the village of Sernovodsk in March 1996 (see: "Pillage")^[1].

On 28 March 1996, a Russian pilot dropped a bomb on Katyr-Yurt, a village south-west of Grozny, and killed nine people of the Khazhgiriyev family (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). The next day, Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation troops, according to the Interfax news agency, admitted that the crew had bombed without orders and apologized to the family^[1][64]. On 31 March, Russian President Yeltsin, in an address to the citizens of Russia, promised to halt the offensive. On the night of 3 April and on 4 April, Russian pilots bombed Shalazhi, a village south-west of Grozny, and killed three Chechens^[1][24]. Deinekin, the commander of the Russian Air Force, and Tikhomirov called the bombing a provocation^[1]. On 10 April, Deinekin said at a press conference shown by the Vesti program of the RTR television channel: "neither Katyr-Yurt, nor Shalazhi twice, nor any other populated areas were bombed or planned to be bombed by the federal Air Force [the Russian air force] and army aviation". The general added that the bombs in the villages were being set off by fighters of the army of Ichkeria^[1]. Kureysh Khazhgiriyev, a Chechen from Katyr-Yurt whose relatives were killed by the Russian pilot, said on 22 April to the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow: "I cannot bear to hear General Deinekin blasphemously declare that they did not bomb. I have no words! Shame on the general"^[24]. Russian prosecutors suspended the cases on the bombings of Katyr-Yurt and Shalazhi (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators"). In November 1997, the military prosecutor's office of Russia admitted in a letter to Memorial that Katyr-Yurt had been bombed by an aircraft of the Russian troops, and of Shalazhi wrote that Russian aviation had struck the army of Ichkeria there^[1].

Generals of the occupation troops denied the shelling of the town of Urus-Martan in May 1996^[43][1]. A representative of Russian aviation denied the bombing of the Nozhay-Yurt district in the south-east of Ichkeria on 3 June 1996, the third day of the ceasefire agreed by Russia and Ichkeria^[1][65]. In July 1996, Russian soldiers held detained Chechens in pits in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny. That month, Solovyov, the military prosecutor of the Russian troops in the North Caucasus, replied to Yuly Rybakov, a deputy of the Russian parliament, that he had found no unofficial filtration camps. By 5 August, the occupiers had released the detainees^[1].

Commander Tikhomirov recorded as fighters the peaceful Chechens whom Russian pilots killed in the town of Shali in April 1996^[1]. The headquarters of the occupation troops attributed to the army of Ichkeria the shelling of the town of Urus-Martan in May 1996, in which the crews of Russian helicopters killed townspeople^[1][24]. The Russian military repeatedly stated that the army of Ichkeria was defending itself in mosques and cultural monuments. Isa Adayev, director of the National Museum of the Chechen Republic, told the public tribunal of the Glasnost Foundation in Prague in May 1996 that this was untrue^[24]. General Shamanov, who commanded the storming of the village of Makhkety, recorded as fighters of the army of Ichkeria the peaceful Chechens whom Russian troops killed there in July 1996^[1][9].

In August 1996, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had encircled the occupiers in Grozny, the command of the occupation troops and Russian Defense Minister Rodionov declared that they controlled the center of the city^[1][66].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that many reports by Russian newspapers, radio and television about atrocities of the army of Ichkeria, citing official Russian sources, turned out on checking to be lies^[1].

On 21 November 1997, almost a year after the last Russian troops had left Ichkeria, Smirnov, deputy chief military prosecutor of Russia, wrote to Memorial that Roshni-Chu had been bombed by eight attack aircraft whose affiliation the prosecutor's office had not established. The prosecutor denied that in August 1996 soldiers of the 101st Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had taken Chechen men hostage at the "15th Gorodok", their base in Grozny. The brigade released the men when their relatives met its demands (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Throughout the war, Moscow declared the invasion and occupation a blessing for the Chechens.

On 30 November 1994, Russian president Yeltsin signed secret decree No. 2137 "On Measures to Restore Constitutional Legality and Law and Order on the Territory of the Chechen Republic" (that is what the colonizer called the preparation of the attack on Ichkeria)^[1]. On 9 December, by decree No. 2166 the president instructed the Russian government to use all means "to ensure… the rights and freedoms of citizens"^[4].

On 27 January 1995, Yeltsin signed decree No. 79 "On Ensuring the Conditions for the Re-creation of Constitutional Organs of Power in the Chechen Republic" (see: "Installation of a New System of Governance")^[1][67]. On 12 July 1996, the fourth day of the occupation troops' offensive, the president, by decree No. 1028, named as constitutional organs the government that Moscow had installed in Grozny (see: "Puppet Government")^[1][67][50].

On 11 December 1994, the day of the open invasion, Yeltsin addressed the citizens of Russia: "Our goal is to find a political solution to the problems of one of the subjects of the Russian Federation — the Chechen Republic, and to protect its citizens from armed extremism." The president of Russia promised: "I oblige all officials responsible for carrying out the measures to restore constitutional order in the Chechen Republic [that is what Russia called its war against independent Ichkeria] not to use violence against the civilian population and to take it under protection"^[1]. A week later, from 18 December, Russian pilots bombed Grozny, and from 19 December until the storming on 31 December they bombed it every day. Human rights defenders of the Russian organization Memorial write: "The bombs and missiles fell mainly on neighborhoods where residential buildings stood and where there were knowingly no military objects" (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. By the estimate of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations, from December 1994 to March 1995 the occupiers killed 25-29 thousand civilian townspeople in Grozny (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[1].

On 11 January 1996, the Russian government replied to the UN Secretary-General's inquiry about human rights in Ichkeria that an extremely complex situation had forced Moscow to use armed force. The reply says that on 29 August 1995 Yeltsin appointed Lobov, secretary of the Russian Security Council, as his representative in Ichkeria to guarantee human rights and prepare free elections (see: "Sham Expression of Popular Will")^[42].

On 23 April 1996, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, stated at a meeting of the government commission on settling the war: "The UN Charter also contains the concept of 'peace enforcement', and in this case it can be applied"^[1]. Two days later, on 25 April, Russian pilots bombed Shali, a town southeast of Grozny that the occupation troops had surrounded six days earlier (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). The occupiers killed Chechen civilians and, according to the report of the head of the Shali district to the Interfax agency, wounded 29 people^[1]. Eleven days later, on 6 May, Russian troops seized Shali without a fight and found no defenders there (see: "Collective Punishment")^[1].

On 17 July 1996, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, stated at a meeting of the government commission on settling the war that in six months Russia had liquidated the "anti-constitutional regime" (that is what Russia called the government of Ichkeria) that had threatened its territorial integrity^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia did not recognize Ichkeria as an independent state, nor its elected president and government as a party to the war and to negotiations.

On 9 December 1994, two days before the open invasion, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, by Resolution No. 1360 ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense to disarm the "illegal armed formations" (as Russia called the Armed Forces of Ichkeria)^[68]. On 17 December, Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 2200, created a Russian administration for Ichkeria. On 20 December, the Russian government, by Resolution No. 1411, obliged all enterprises, organizations and institutions of the republic to carry out the decisions of this administration (see: "Installation of a New System of Governance")^[1].

Throughout the war, the president, ministers and generals of Russia refused to negotiate with the leadership of Ichkeria or demanded that it first surrender its weapons and disband its army^[1].

On 1 February 1995, Ilyushenko, acting Prosecutor General of Russia, charged Dzhokhar Dudayev, the elected president of Ichkeria, with high treason, calls for terrorism, violation of national and racial equality and violation of the law on referendums^[69]. The Prosecutor General's Office of Russia issued a warrant for the arrest of the Chechen president and put him on the all-Russian wanted list^[1].

On 30 July 1995, Russia signed an agreement with Ichkeria on the cessation of hostilities. The Russian delegation added to its first line that Ichkeria was not recognized by the legislation of Russia^[11][12].

On 12 December 1994, the day after the open invasion, the Russian delegation at the negotiations in Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia, demanded that the representatives of Ichkeria recognize the republic as part of Russia^[1].

On 17 December 1994, Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria, informed Yeltsin by telegram that he had ordered a ceasefire against the Russian troops and proposed to begin negotiations without preconditions, which he would lead himself^[70]. On 18 December, Yeltsin by telegram ordered the president of Ichkeria to appear that same day in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, at the headquarters of the occupation troops and to sign a document on the surrender of weapons and a ceasefire^[70][1]. The press service of the Russian president told the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS that further telegrams from the Chechen president would not be answered^[71]. On 23 December, Dzhokhar Dudayev conveyed through Sergei Kovalyov, the Russian human rights commissioner, to Russian Foreign Minister Kozyrev that he was ready to cease fire immediately and to negotiate on everything, including the disarmament of the army of Ichkeria, but received no answer from Moscow^[1]. On 27 December, Yeltsin, in a televised address to the citizens of Russia, declared: "the regime in Grozny [as the Russian president called the government of Ichkeria] is illegal", and of negotiations he said: "The subject of negotiations is a ceasefire and the surrender of weapons"^[47][1]. On 31 December, the Russian army began the storming of Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria (see: "Military Intervention")^[1].

On 18 January 1995, Russian President Yeltsin said on Russian television that he would not talk to Dzhokhar Dudayev^[1]. From February to June 1995, Russian Defense Minister Grachev and Kulikov, the commander of the occupation troops, replied to the proposals of a ceasefire from Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, that they would talk only about the surrender of weapons and the disbanding of the army of Ichkeria^[72][1][73]. On 19 May 1995, Yeltsin rejected the law by which, on 12 April, Russian deputies had instructed the Russian government to begin direct negotiations with the leadership of Ichkeria immediately and without preconditions^[1][74]. On 5 July 1995, two weeks after negotiations with Ichkeria began in Grozny, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, and the Russian negotiators declared that they would not discuss its status^[1].

On 10 January 1996, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, said: "Chechnya is Russia"^[75]. On 11 January, the Russian government, in a letter to the UN Secretary-General, named the government of Ichkeria as the cause of the war, declaring it illegal and Ichkeria itself part of Russia^[42]. On 7 April, Mikhailov, Russian minister for nationalities, said that the parties to the negotiations should be the commanders of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria. On 17 April, Russian Justice Minister Kovalyov declared that direct negotiations with Dzhokhar Dudayev, "a subject of criminal proceedings", were impossible, and invited him to come to a Russian court. On 21 April, the Russian military killed the president of Ichkeria (see: "Neutralization of the Opposition"). On 25 April, Justice Minister Kovalyov announced that negotiations with the commanders of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria would be conducted by the puppet government in Grozny^[1].

On 27 May 1996, Russian President Yeltsin received in the Kremlin, for negotiations on a ceasefire, a delegation of Ichkeria headed by Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, acting president of Ichkeria. The Russian organizers of the meeting assigned the representatives of Ichkeria seats at the side of the table, while Yeltsin sat at its head. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev demanded to sit opposite the Russian president, as at negotiations between two states, and to Yeltsin's "Sit down" he replied across the negotiating table: "I will not sit down to that tone". The Russian president moved to the middle of the table^[76]. The Russian delegation did not write the names of the parties into the ceasefire agreement, and Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev signed it with their surnames and no titles. Mikhailov, Russian minister for nationalities, explained this to journalists at a press conference at the Russian news agency Interfax: "If we had written 'Ichkeria', that would practically mean recognizing the existence of a republic that does not exist..."^[76]. On 28 May, the Russian organizers of the meeting did not let the delegation of Ichkeria meet with Moscow journalists, and in the evening the delegation flew to Russian-controlled Ingushetia^[1].

On 25 July 1996, General Pulikovsky, acting commander of the occupation troops, told journalists that with the commanders of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria he would discuss only the place and time of the surrender of weapons^[77]. On 28 July, Pulikovsky replied on air on the Russian television channel RTR to Aslan Maskhadov's proposal to discuss ending the war that he did not know where to look for the leadership of Ichkeria^[78][1].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that the president and government of Russia called the war their internal affair^[1].

On 31 August 1996, General Lebed, secretary of the Security Council of Russia, and Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, signed in Khasavyurt, a town in Russian-controlled Dagestan, the agreements on the withdrawal of the occupation troops (see: "Sham Treaties"). Russia and Ichkeria postponed the decision on the independence of Ichkeria for five years, until 31 December 2001^[33][1]. The word "Ichkeria" does not appear in the agreements: the republic is called the Chechen Republic^[33]. In September 1999, the Russian army invaded Ichkeria for the second time since 1994^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers captured the towns and villages of Ichkeria.

On 26 November 1994 the defenders of Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria, routed the Russian tank crews who were storming the city under the banner of the puppet opposition (see: "Staging a Coup")^[79]. By 29 November the Russian army had gathered about 140 combat aircraft for the attack on Ichkeria. On 29 November Russian pilots in six Su-27 aircraft and four helicopters attacked the presidential palace in Grozny^[80]. On 1 December the crews of Russian Su-25 attack aircraft destroyed all of Ichkeria's aircraft on its airfields^[3]. On 9 December Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 2166, ordered the government to use all means of the Russian state, including the army, against the Armed Forces of Ichkeria^[4].

A day before the talks between Russia and Ichkeria scheduled for 12 December, the Russian army and the Internal Troops of the MVD (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) began an offensive in three columns from the neighboring Russian-controlled republics (see: "Negotiations as Cover for an Attack")^[1]. Sources differ: some put the strength of these columns at 14,972 men, others at almost 24,000^[5][6]. The Russian Ministry of Defense estimated the Armed Forces of Ichkeria at 11,000-12,000 fighters, the Russian MVD at up to 15,000, and both ministries counted another 30,000-40,000 Chechen volunteers^[7]. The northern column advanced from Mozdok, and the western column from Vladikavkaz through Ingushetia. The eastern column set out from Kizlyar, a town in Dagestan^[1][68]. On 11 December unarmed Chechens of the Khasavyurt district of Dagestan surrounded the armored personnel carriers of the eastern column and did not let the occupation troops through^[81][1]. On 12 December near the village of Novy Sharoy in the west of Ichkeria, thousands of Chechens stood on the road in front of the western column and held it up for a week at the border with Ingushetia^[1][82]. On that day the army of Ichkeria stopped the northern column near the settlement of Dolinsky, about ten kilometers northwest of Grozny^[1].

Before a storming, Russian troops surrounded towns and villages and shelled them with artillery, while Russian aircraft bombed them (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. The occupiers demanded that the Chechens in the surrounded villages expel the defenders and hand over their weapons (see: "Collective Punishment")^[1]. In the captured towns Russian troops set up commandant's offices and garrisons. In Grozny Russia installed the Russian-controlled "Government of National Revival" (see: "Puppet Government")^[1][9].

From 18 December 1994 Russian aircraft bombed the residential districts of Grozny. On 19 December units of the Russian airborne division from Pskov under the command of General Babichev reached the western outskirts of the city^[1]. On 31 December the Russian army stormed Grozny from four sides. The defenders of the city routed the occupiers' columns and took more than a hundred Russian servicemen prisoner. The human rights defenders of Memorial write about the troops of General Pulikovsky, who were advancing from the northwest: "The 131st (Maikop) Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade and the 81st (Samara) Motorized Rifle Regiment were almost completely routed"^[1].

On 7-9 January 1995 the occupiers stormed Grozny again, from the north and west. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the vice president of Ichkeria, who together with Aslan Maskhadov led the defense of the presidential palace, wrote in his memoirs about the evening of 18 January: "We were deciding one question: to stay and die, which was tantamount to the destruction of the Main Staff, or to leave the Presidential Palace and set up a new headquarters on the other side of the Sunzha [the river in the center of Grozny]"^[56]. On the night of 19 January Russian pilots dropped concrete-piercing bombs on the palace, and the defenders were forced to leave. On 19 January Russian soldiers captured the ruins of the palace. The occupiers stormed the remaining districts of Grozny for another month and a half. By early February 1995 Russia had brought the number of its troops in Ichkeria up to 70,000 men^[7]. The defenders fought longest in Chernorechye in the south of the city, and on 6 March 1995 the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD captured this district^[1].

On 23 March 1995 the occupiers captured Argun, a town to the east of Grozny^[1]. On 24 March Russian troops broke into Achkhoy-Martan, a district center in the west of Ichkeria, but fighters of the army of Ichkeria liberated the village with a counterattack^[9]. On 28 and 29 March the Russian army surrounded Gudermes, the second-largest town of Ichkeria, and Shali, a town to the southeast of Grozny. Russian commanders demanded that the townspeople persuade the defenders to leave, and on 30-31 March, when the fighters of the army of Ichkeria were forced to leave both towns, the occupiers captured them without a fight^[1]. On 12 May the Russian army began an offensive into the mountains in the south of Ichkeria. On 3 June the occupiers captured Vedeno, a district center to the southeast of Grozny, and on 12 June Shatoy to the south of the capital and Nozhai-Yurt in the southeast^[9][1]. On 18 June 1995 Chernomyrdin, the chairman of the Russian government, agreed on a cessation of fighting with Shamil Basayev, the commander of the fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria who had taken hostages in Budyonnovsk, a Russian-controlled town to the northwest of the republic. That evening the occupation troops halted their offensive (see: "Sham Treaties")^[1]. At the end of July, Grozny, Argun, Gudermes, Shali and the mountain district centers were under occupation by the Russian army, while in most villages there were no Russian troops^[1][9]. On 14 December 1995 the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Gudermes to disrupt the "vote" for the head of the puppet government. On 19-20 December, after six days of shelling and bombing of residential districts, the occupiers captured the town again^[1][34].

On 17-20 February 1996 the Russian army shelled and captured by storm Novogroznensky, a settlement to the east of Gudermes^[1]. On 3 March Russian troops broke into Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, on the day their commanders had set for signing a peace with the leaders of the village, and the defenders drove the attackers out. By 9 March, after six days of shelling, the defenders of Sernovodsk were forced to leave, and the occupiers captured the village^[1]. On 6 March the Armed Forces of Ichkeria under the command of Ruslan Gelayev attacked the occupiers in Grozny and liberated most of the city. The army of Ichkeria did not try to hold the city and left it on 8 March^[1][9]. On the night of 14 March Russian troops surrounded Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and on 15 March began a storming with tanks, artillery, helicopters and aircraft. On 19 March the fighters of the army of Ichkeria under the command of Khizir Khachukayev ran out of ammunition and were forced to leave^[1]. On 4 April, after six days of bombing, Russian soldiers broke into Goyskoye, a village to the southwest of Grozny, but the defenders under the command of Akhmed Zakayev repelled the storming. On 7 May the occupiers under the command of General Shamanov captured Goyskoye^[1]. On 24 May, after three months of stormings, shelling and bombing, the Russian army captured Bamut, a village in the west of Ichkeria at the border with Russian-controlled Ingushetia, while the defenders under the command of Ruslan Khaikhoroyev broke out of the encirclement^[1].

On 9 July 1996, six days after the Russian presidential election, the occupiers violated the ceasefire agreement signed with Ichkeria on 27 May and launched a new offensive (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[1]. On that day Russian units under the command of General Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation troops, surrounded and shelled Gekhi, a village to the southwest of Grozny, where a unit of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria was stationed. By 12 July the occupiers had killed the unit's commander Doku Makhayev and destroyed more than a third of the village^[83]. On 15 July the occupiers captured Makhkety, a mountain village of the Vedeno district in the southeast of Ichkeria, which they had surrounded five days earlier^[1][9].

The Russian human rights defenders of Memorial write that the Russian army with aircraft, heavy artillery and tanks fought against Ichkeria, although the president and government of Russia passed the war off as a police disarmament^[1]. On 19 January 1995 the European Parliament in a resolution condemned Russia's use of the army against Ichkeria^[28]. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in a declaration of 8 July 1995 condemned Russia's war in Ichkeria as a gross violation of international law^[29].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers. In three days of fighting the army of Ichkeria retook the center and about 80 percent of the city^[9]. The defenders forced Russia to the negotiating table. On 22 August 1996 in the village of Novye Atagi in the south of the republic, Russia and Ichkeria signed an agreement on the withdrawal of Russian troops from Grozny and joint control over certain districts of the city^[1][84]. On 31 August 1996 General Lebed, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, and Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, signed a joint statement in Khasavyurt, a town in Russian-controlled Dagestan. In it Russia acknowledged that resolving disputed issues by force or the threat of force was inadmissible (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33].

By 31 August 1996 the occupation troops had left Grozny for their main bases in Khankala on the eastern outskirts of the city and at the Severny airport to the north of it. Russian police officers and soldiers of the Internal Troops of the MVD remained in the city. Russia withdrew its troops from Vedeno, Shatoy, Nozhai-Yurt and Kurchaloy, villages in the south and east of Ichkeria. Russian units still stood in Shali, near Bamut and in the Naur and Shelkovskaya districts in the north of Ichkeria^[9]. In these two districts beyond the Terek river there was no fighting during the whole war. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russian special services and the army gave the puppet opposition money, weapons, instructors, tank crewmen and pilots in order to overthrow Dzhokhar Dudayev, the elected president of the Chechen Republic.

In the summer of 1994, Russia's Ministry for Nationalities Affairs and the FSK (a predecessor of today's FSB) helped the puppet opposition recruit armed fighters in Znamenskoye, a village in the northwest of Ichkeria, and in Urus-Martan, a town southwest of Grozny^[1]. Russia allocated more than 150 billion rubles to the Provisional Council, the leadership of the puppet opposition, which it had confirmed at a congress on 3 June. In an analytical memorandum, the FSK named the head of the Provisional Council the most suitable candidate for support^[1].

On 3 September 1994, the Russian government, in an address to the Chechen people, proposed that Dzhokhar Dudayev resign^[1].

On 5 September 1994, the General Staff of the Russian army ordered that 10 armored personnel carriers and 6 combat helicopters with crews be handed over to the Provisional Council^[1]. From these helicopters, Russian pilots fired rockets at residential houses in Ichkeria (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). In November, the Russian army handed tanks over to the council^[1][85].

In September and October 1994, Russian officers trained more than a hundred fighters of the Provisional Council to drive T-62 tanks and fire army mortars at the "Prudboy" training ground near Volgograd, a city in the south of Russia^[86][1].

In October 1994, Savostyanov, the head of the Moscow directorate of the FSK, ordered that Russian soldiers and officers who knew how to maintain armored vehicles and fight in them be found for the Provisional Council. The military counterintelligence of the FSK selected the candidates^[87]. From 3 to 9 November, FSK officers travelled around military units near Moscow and signed contracts with tank crewmen^[1][87].

In November 1994, Kolesnikov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian army, authorized sending the recruits to the Caucasus. Kotenkov, Russia's deputy minister for nationalities affairs, directed the dispatch, and by 16 November the recruits had been brought to Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia near the border of the Chechen Republic^[1]. Russia denied that it was sending its servicemen to fight for the Provisional Council (see: "Lies about Its Own Actions").

In the autumn of 1994, FSK officers fought on the side of the puppet opposition^[1].

From September 1994 until the assault on Grozny on 26 November, fighters of the Provisional Council and Russian crews attacked Ichkeria. On 2 September, fighters of the council and a column of twelve tanks with Russian crews attacked Grozny. The Armed Forces of Ichkeria stopped them at the settlement of Dolinsky, northwest of Grozny, knocked out a tank and took eight men prisoner, among them, according to initial reports, Russian servicemen^{[88][55][82][1][89][90]}. On 30 September, Russian pilots in four helicopters of the Provisional Council fired rockets at the "Severny" airport in Grozny and destroyed five civilian aircraft and two aircraft of the army of Ichkeria, and fighters of the puppet opposition blocked the entrances to the city^[1][2][91]. Dzhokhar Dudayev rejected the Provisional Council's ultimatum to surrender within six hours, and the council's fighters dispersed without attacking Grozny^[2][92]. On 15 October, fighters of the Provisional Council stormed Grozny from the south and from the north, and the Armed Forces of Ichkeria repelled the assault. The defenders took several dozen attackers prisoner, among them, according to various reports, 12 to 15 Russian officers^[92], and on 16 October the council's fighters retreated to their bases in Znamenskoye and in Gekhi, a village southwest of Grozny^[1].

On 17 November 1994, nine days before the assault on Grozny, a group of Russian officers headed by Kolesnikov, the Chief of the General Staff, flew from Moscow to Mozdok^[1]. Valery Yakov, special correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Izvestia, wrote about the preparation of the assault in November 1996: "There, in Mozdok, at the 'Arsenal' base, the contract soldiers [recruited Russian servicemen]… trained the Chechen crews [of the Provisional Council]… In all, the contract soldiers received 40 brand-new tanks, 16 of which had 'Russian' crews"^[93][87]. On 26 November, fighters of the Provisional Council and Russian tank crewmen under the command of Zhukov, the deputy commander of a Russian army corps from Volgograd, stormed Grozny^[1][87]. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the vice president of the Chechen Republic, wrote in his memoirs that in the morning he saw the start of the assault from the window of his office in the presidential palace: "on the northeastern outskirts of the city, from the direction of Tolstoy-Yurt [a village north of Grozny where the fighters of the Provisional Council were stationed], tank and artillery fire began to thunder"^[56]. The tanks reached the center of Grozny, where fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria shot them up with grenade launchers^[1]. The defenders routed the attackers and, according to the government of the Chechen Republic, took 68 Russian servicemen prisoner^[94]. Among the prisoners were soldiers and officers of the Russian Kantemirovskaya Tank Division from near Moscow^[57].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that without Russia's military help the puppet opposition could not have overthrown Dzhokhar Dudayev^[1].

After the defeat of 26 November, the Provisional Council withdrew its fighters to its bases^[9][1]. Fifteen days later, on 11 December 1994, the Russian army openly invaded the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (see: "Military Intervention")^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia killed the leaders of Ichkeria, put them on wanted lists and arrested the republic's representatives in Moscow.

Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 1226 of 14 June 1994, allowed anyone suspected of ties to criminal groups to be held without charge for up to 30 days^[95]. Under this decree, the FSB and the Russian police detained representatives of Ichkeria in Moscow^[96][68].

On 1 February 1995, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia put Dzhokhar Dudayev, the elected president of Ichkeria, on the wanted list in order to arrest and try him (see: "Manufacturing Criminals")^[1].

On 17 June 1995, officers of the FSB and the Moscow police arrested Khamad Kurbanov, the representative of the president of Ichkeria in Russia, and two days later Ramzan Muzaev, secretary of the Chechen news agency Chechen-Press^[96]. The FSB and police officers held both without charge, released the agency's secretary by 26 July, and the president's representative a month after his arrest^[95][97][24]. On 8 October 1995, during the "ceasefire", Russian pilots bombed Roshni-Chu, a village southwest of Grozny, and killed 28 people, among them Magomed Khachuev, head of security of the delegation of Ichkeria at the talks. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that the target of the strike was Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria, who at times lived in the village and was unharmed^[1].

On 21 April 1996, Dzhokhar Dudayev, with his wife Alla Dudayeva, his associates and his guards, drove out of Gekhi-Chu, a village southwest of Grozny, to a clearing in the mountains. The president put a satellite phone on the hood of the car and called Konstantin Borovoy, a deputy of the Russian parliament and a mediator in the peace talks. Russian servicemen struck the clearing with missiles^[98]. The occupiers killed the president of Ichkeria, Prosecutor General Magomet Zhaniev and Khamad Kurbanov, the republic's former representative in Moscow. Alla Dudayeva was standing twenty meters from the car. In her memoirs, the president's wife wrote: "Suddenly, from the left, came the sharp whistle of an incoming missile. The explosion behind my back and the yellow flame that flared up made me jump down into the ravine... but suddenly the whistle came again"^[15].

On 21 and 22 April 1996, Russian troops struck six or seven headquarters of the leadership of Ichkeria in the mountains with missiles and bombs^[1]. Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer, wrote in 2002 that the killing of the president had been prepared by an FSB group under the command of Khokholkov, created "to eliminate Dudayev", in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny. According to him, aircraft of Russian military intelligence guided the missile to a beacon in the president's substituted phone^[52].

On 7 May 1996, Russian police officers secretly detained Vagap Tutakov, Ichkeria's representative in Moscow, as he was leaving Kaluga, a city southwest of Moscow^[1]. The police officers claimed that they had found weapons in his car^[99], and on 8 June they released Ichkeria's representative from custody^[1]. On 10 July 1996, Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation troops, ordered a search for and the detention of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president of Ichkeria^[1][9]. That same day, Russian pilots and artillerymen struck Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev's headquarters in Makhkety, a mountain village in the southeast of Ichkeria^[1]. On 15 July, the occupiers captured Makhkety but did not find the acting president there^[9]. That day, the crews of seven Russian helicopters destroyed his mother's house in Starye Atagi, a village south of Grozny, with missiles; the mother and the neighbors survived (see: "Collective Punishment")^[9][83].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers unlawfully detained Chechens and held them without charges in filtration camps and in pits at military units.

On 12 December 1994, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs created filtration camps by directive No. 247. The ministry set them up in prison railcars in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, in the prisons of Stavropol and Pyatigorsk, cities in the south of Russia, and in the building of a motor depot in Grozny^[1][100].

Russian servicemen together with police officers detained Chechens at checkpoints and during "zachistki" ("sweeps", as Russians called house searches and detentions of Chechens). In its detention orders, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs most often referred to the decree of the president of Russia of 2 November 1993 No. 1815 "On Measures to Prevent Vagrancy and Begging"^[101]. The decree concerned vagrants, while most of the detained Chechens had their documents on them^[1].

Before sending them to the camps, the occupiers held Chechens for several days in pits and prison vans at checkpoints and at their bases, in places with no official status^[1]. There were such pits in the 503rd and 506th regiments of the Russian army near Shali, a town southeast of Grozny^[24][1]. From February 1995, the occupiers brought Chechens to Assinovskaya, a stanitsa in the west of Ichkeria, and from there sent them to Mozdok^[1].

In the camps, Russian guards beat and tortured detained Chechens during interrogations, including with electric current (see: "Torture and Abuse"). The guards did not treat the wounded^[100]. The occupiers did not let detained Chechens tell their relatives where they were. For their families, the people went missing (see: "Abduction of People")^[1].

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs released most of the detained Chechens from the camps as innocent. From each of them the ministry took a signature saying they had no complaints^[1].

According to a certificate by Zlydenko, deputy head of Russia's prison service, from 11 December 1994 to 22 July 1995, 1,325 people passed through the camps in Mozdok and Grozny. The Ministry of Internal Affairs handed a hundred of them over to investigators (see: "Manufacturing Criminals"). The ministry gave another 141 people up for exchange for captured Russian servicemen (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[1].

During the storming of Grozny in early January 1995, the Russian troops of General Rokhlin detained men in the bomb shelters near the cannery, where they were hiding from the shelling, and took them to Mozdok^[100]. On 3 January, the guards carried more than 60 of them in the back of a single truck and killed at least eight on the way (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees")^[1]. On 10 January, the Chechen Umar Kasayev died in the Pyatigorsk prison: the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not give him the medical care he needed^[100].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. Officers of the FSK (the predecessor of today's FSB) flew in to the Russian checkpoint near the village with lists of Chechens "subject to filtration"^[48][8]. On 8 April, soldiers of the Internal Troops and of police special units from Orenburg and Moscow searched the houses of Samashki. By 10 April, the occupiers had unlawfully detained and taken out of the village more than 200 Chechen men aged 15 to 70, and the escort shot three of them dead on the way (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees")^[48][1]. Azman Ansarova from Samashki told the "Memorial" observers that when one of the detained men showed a soldier his passport, "he took the document and tore it to shreds. 'I don't need your documents,' he says. 'You are Chechens — we are going to kill you'… Then they took our sons and drove them away"^[8]. The occupiers sent some of the men by helicopter to Mozdok and held others in pits and prison vans near Assinovskaya. On 5 August 1995, Khasan Rasuyev from Samashki told "Memorial" how the guards loaded the detainees into the back of a truck: "And in stacks — into the back. In four layers, I think, one on top of another"^[1][8]. Near Assinovskaya, the Russian military released most of the men without certificates of detention, and from Mozdok, by 18 April, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had released 65 Chechens from Samashki as innocent and given 12 up for exchange^[1][8].

In April 1995, Russian servicemen took the brother of the Chechen woman Khaza Arsanukayeva from his home in Grozny at night, citing his residence registration in Kalmykia, a Russian-controlled republic by the Caspian Sea. The soldiers beat him at the headquarters of the occupation troops and took him to the filtration camp on the northeastern outskirts of the city, and a week later the guards released him: he could not walk^[23].

On 15 March 1996, at the checkpoint near Samashki, the occupiers picked out 91 Chechens from among those leaving the village before the assault and took them to the prisons of Pyatigorsk and Stavropol. Five weeks later, the Ministry of Internal Affairs released them without charges^[1]. In March 1996, soldiers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs detained three Chechens at the checkpoint between Goity and Starye Atagi, villages south of Grozny, and on 7 April Russian servicemen took the Chechen Saidash Shamakhurov from Gikalovo, a village near Grozny. The Russians held all four in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, and exchanged them for their own captured soldiers (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[31].

In its 1995 comments, the UN Human Rights Committee expressed concern at reports of torture, ill-treatment and arbitrary detention in filtration camps^[102]. In early 1997, the human rights defenders of "Memorial" wrote that Russian agencies "are not making substantial efforts to search for Chechens who were detained and went missing"^[103]. "Memorial" published the accounts of detainees and lists of Chechens whom the Ministry of Internal Affairs held in the prisons of Pyatigorsk and Stavropol from January to February 1995^[100].

On 10 June 1996, in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, Russia undertook before Ichkeria to close the filtration camps and the other places where it unlawfully held Chechens^[104]. In June, the Ministry of Internal Affairs closed the last camps^[1]. Russian courts convicted no one for creating the camps and for the unlawful detentions (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers bombed Chechen television, jammed journalists' satellite links and kept them away from the sites of their strikes.

Commanders of the occupation forces ordered that journalists not be let into the sites of assaults and bombings. The Russian military and police at checkpoints did not let journalists, including those with accreditation from the Russian government, into the villages and towns that Russian troops were striking (see: "Censorship")^[1][24]. Human rights defenders of the American Committee to Protect Journalists write that Russian troops in Ichkeria jammed journalists' satellite transmissions, exposed their film and destroyed their equipment^[105].

On 29 November 1994, Russia announced that at 2 p.m. it would cut off all communications with Ichkeria^[35]. From 21 to 24 December, Russian pilots struck the television center in Grozny. Deinekin, commander of Russian military aviation, named the aim of these strikes: "to stop the rabid anti-Russian propaganda"^[1].

On 3 January 1995, Russian pilots bombed Shali, a town southeast of Grozny. Human rights defenders of Human Rights Watch write that the pilots were apparently trying to hit a radio communication tower, but killed several townspeople at the market and in the hospital (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[72]. On 7 and 8 April, the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and killed 103 Chechen civilians there (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8]. On 11 April, the occupiers at the post near the village did not let journalists in and admitted them only on 13 April^[48][8]. On 8 October, Russian pilots bombed Roshni-Chu, a village southwest of Grozny (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). The occupiers blocked all the roads to the village, and men of the police special forces from the Russian city of Irkutsk at the post did not let journalists in, citing an order^[1][106]. From 11 December, before the "elections" of the head of the puppet government on 14-17 December, Russian soldiers at checkpoints did not let journalists without special passes into Grozny (see: "Sham Expression of Popular Will")^[1]. From 14 to 20 December, after the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had liberated Gudermes, the second-largest city of the republic, the occupiers shelled and bombed the city, and until 25 December did not let the press in (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[34].

In January 1996, the command of the occupation forces closed Grozny and the east of Ichkeria to the press^[34]. From February until the first days of March, the occupiers shelled with artillery the encircled settlement of Novogroznensky in the east of Ichkeria and the villages of Alleroy, Tsentoroy, Bachi-Yurt and Suvorov-Yurt (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). The Russian military did not let journalists in there^[1]. From 3 to 9 March, Russian troops shelled Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, with artillery and fired on it from helicopters (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. From 6 to 9 March, while the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were attacking the occupiers in Grozny, Russian officials did not let journalists into the city^[105]. On 10 March, the Russian military commandant of Sernovodsk forbade letting journalists, human rights defenders and any foreigners into the village (see: "Expulsion of Foreign Missions")^[1].

On 15 March 1996, the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Russian 58th Army began the assault on Samashki (see: "Military Intervention")^[1]. Sources differ on the number of Chechen civilians the occupiers killed in the village during the assault: 35 according to the villagers' list^[1] or about 600 according to a doctor who treated people there (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[9][24]. On 17 and 18 March, the occupiers did not let independent journalists from Moscow through to the village. Maria Eismont, a correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Segodnya, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow on 22 April that on 26 and 27 March the Russian military stopped her on the roads to Samashki, and that she got into the village five days later. In Sernovodsk, Russian soldiers who had taken part in the assault turned the journalists back with the words: "There's no need to go there, there's nothing for you to do there, all the more so since there is nothing at all left to look at." Alexander Trushin, a correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Obshchaya Gazeta, told the Glasnost tribunal on 21 April that in early April the chief of the Russian checkpoint near the village phoned a general and did not let the journalists through: "I asked the captain: 'Did you report why we are going, for what purpose?' He answered: 'Yes, the general knows, and nevertheless the order is not to let you through'"^[24]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that reports of this assault did not reach television and radio^[1].

On 21 April 1996, the occupiers killed Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria, during his conversation on a satellite phone with a mediator in the peace talks; according to the version that human rights defenders of Memorial consider likely, the Russian military located the signal of this phone (see: "Neutralization of the Opposition")^[98][1]. On 8 August 1996, while the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were liberating Grozny, Russian soldiers did not let four journalists of foreign media into the city through either of its two entrances^[105].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that in the second year of the war Russian troops cut off from the press the areas they deemed undesirable far more tightly and successfully than in the first year^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia expelled human rights defenders from Ichkeria and squeezed out of the republic the international missions that were recording the crimes of the occupiers.

On 9 December 1994, two days before the open invasion, Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin, by resolution No. 1360, ordered officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and of the FSK (the predecessor of today's FSB) to expel from Ichkeria visitors whom they deemed a threat to security^[68]. Under this resolution, the occupiers expelled human rights defenders from the republic more than once^[1].

The Russian military at checkpoints did not let human rights defenders, deputies of the Russian parliament or the Red Cross into the villages they were storming. When deputies and human rights defenders came to inspect the filtration camps, officers of the occupation forces did not let them talk to the detained Chechens^[8][1].

Russian politicians and commanders demanded many times the recall of Tim Guldimann, head of the mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which had been working in Grozny since 24 April 1995^[14][107].

On 27 January 1995, the Russian Ministry of Defense did not allow Sergei Kovalyov, then Russia's human rights commissioner, to travel with an OSCE delegation to the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia. The members of the delegation saw Chechens there with marks of beatings (see: "Torture and Abuse")^{[1][108][109]}. On 26 March 1995, men of the Russian police special forces detained near Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, participants of the anti-war "Peace March" from Russian civic and religious organizations, took them to Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, to Assinovskaya, a stanitsa in the west of Ichkeria, and some to Moscow. On 11 April, the Russian military at the checkpoint did not let the marchers into Samashki^[8][48].

On 7 and 8 April 1995, the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki and killed 103 Chechen civilians (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8]. From 8 April, the Russian military at the checkpoint near the village did not let into Samashki the observers of the human rights mission of Sergei Kovalyov, Russia's former human rights commissioner^[48][1]. On 11 April, Boris Titenko and Anatoly Shabad, deputies of the Russian parliament, spent an hour persuading the commanders of the post to let them through. Andrei Blinushov, an observer of Memorial, recorded the answer in his diary: "entry into Samashki requires the written permission of the commander of the grouping of MVD troops, Colonel General Kulikov"^[48]. On 12 April, the Russian military let the observers with the deputies into the village. On 13 April, Kulikov, commander of the occupation forces in Ichkeria, forbade letting into Samashki anyone not registered as a resident of the village, including human rights defenders^[8][1].

The occupiers took the Chechen men detained in Samashki to the filtration camp in Mozdok (see: "Filtration Camp System"). On 19 April 1995, Andrei Blinushov and Yuly Rybakov, a deputy of the Russian parliament, came there for an inspection. The report of the human rights defenders' mission says: "all the main documentation was unexpectedly removed from the point [the filtration camp] and the individual questioning of the detainees was cut short". General Yegorov, who in April had replaced Kulikov at the head of the occupation forces, announced to both of them that the inspection was over^[8].

On 19-20 April 1995, Lebedev and Kharchenko, colonels of the occupation forces, denied that there were pits near Assinovskaya where people were being put, and did not let Valery Borshchev, a deputy of the Russian parliament, Sergei Kovalyov, head of the human rights mission, or Memorial staff see the Chechens detained there (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[8][48][1]. On 26 May 1995, the occupiers, under resolution No. 1360, forcibly took two observers of the human rights mission, Alexander Lavut and Boris Smushkevich, from near Assinovskaya to Mozdok. In June, both observers were working in Grozny again^[1]. On 2 June, Kulikov, by this time again in command of the occupation forces, ordered Médecins Sans Frontières to withdraw its teams from Shatoy and Makhkety, villages in the south of Ichkeria, by six in the evening, and announced that for two months no charitable organization could appear in the south of the republic. The same day, both teams left these villages^[110][1].

On 7 October 1995, unknown persons fired rockets at the building of the OSCE mission in Grozny, and the mayor of the city appointed by Russia demanded that the mission leave. The puppet government overturned the mayor's decision, but on 12 October the OSCE, because of the threat to its staff, temporarily reduced the mission from six people to two^{[111][112][1]}. In late October 1995, the occupiers at a checkpoint did not let two members of a British Christian community that opposes wars into Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria. The members of the community drove into the village across a field^[24].

From 3 to 9 March 1996, while the occupiers were storming Sernovodsk, Russian soldiers at the checkpoints did not let Alexander Guryanov, an observer of Memorial, come closer than 400 meters to the village^[24]. On 8 March, the Russian military at the checkpoint at the entrance to Sernovodsk fired on two deputies of the Russian parliament, and the commander of the checkpoint threatened to shoot them next time^[24]. On 10 March, the Russian military commandant of Sernovodsk forbade letting journalists, human rights defenders, foreigners and the Red Cross into the village, and the occupiers threatened to fire on the vehicles of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations if they were not moved away from the village^[1]. From 4 to 9 April, the occupiers did not let a delegation of the British Christian community into Sernovodsk and Samashki, although on 5 April Russian president Yeltsin had announced that international observers could travel freely around the republic^[24].

On 9 June 1996, the puppet government declared that Tim Guldimann had exceeded his authority when he held direct negotiations with the delegation of Ichkeria, and called the presence of the OSCE mission in the republic undesirable^[113][1]. On 24 June, Tikhomirov, commander of the occupation forces, accused the head of the mission at a press conference of taking the side of Ichkeria and of being capable of wrecking the ceasefire negotiations^[114]. In early August 1996, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria attacked the occupiers in Grozny, Russian pilots hit the mission building with two rockets from helicopters. Four of its staff hid in the cellar for eight days and were unharmed^[14].

A Human Rights Watch report of January 1997 says that Russian agencies repeatedly obstructed the International Committee of the Red Cross from visiting people detained on criminal charges in connection with the war, and demanded that the committee first obtain a judge's permission^[31].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. On the seized land of Ichkeria, the occupiers installed their own organs of governance in place of the elected leadership of the republic.

On 30 November 1994, eleven days before the open invasion, Russian President Yeltsin, by secret Decree No. 2137, ordered the creation of a special administration for Ichkeria under the command of the Russian military. At the head of this administration stood the "leadership group" of Russian Defense Minister Grachev. Grachev received the right to direct the work of all Russian agencies, troops and special services in Ichkeria and to remove their officials^[46][1].

In the seized towns and villages, the command of the occupation troops set up military commandant's offices with broad powers over Chechens^[1].

On 17 December 1994, Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 2200, ordered the Russian government to create within five days in Ichkeria an occupation civil administration made up of local branches of Russian ministries and agencies^[115]. At the head of the administration Yeltsin placed his plenipotentiary representative in Ichkeria, Minister for Nationalities Yegorov. On 20 December, the Russian government, by Resolution No. 1411, obliged all enterprises, organizations and institutions of Ichkeria to carry out Yegorov's decisions until the Constitution and laws of Russia were in full operation in the republic^[1].

The prosecutor's office and police of the puppet government were part of the Russian prosecutor's office and Ministry of Internal Affairs (see: "Puppet Government")^[1].

In January 1995, Russia replaced Yegorov at the head of the occupation administration with Semyonov, one of the leaders of Chechen-Ingushetia under Soviet rule. Semyonov's deputies were three appointees from the puppet opposition^[1]. On 29 December 1995, Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 1430, gave Russian Interior Minister Kulikov charge in Ichkeria of maintaining order, fighting crime and disarming the army of the republic^[1].

On 19 February 1996, the Russian president, by Decree No. 214, repealed Decree No. 2200, by which he had created the occupation administration^[115]. In March 1996, Semyonov, head of the administration, left his post^[1]. On 5 June 1996, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs created in Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria, a Coordination Center headed by Golubets, first deputy interior minister of Russia^[1].

On 29 March 1995, István Gyarmati, personal representative of the Chairman of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), reported to the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna on his trip to Ichkeria. The OSCE press release on the report says: "The report expressed worry that the newly established local authorities in the Chechen Republic are viewed by many Chechens as alien to them and that Chechen politicians who support the federal [Russian] authorities are not supported by the population"^[116].

On 23 November 1996, Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 1590, ordered the withdrawal from the Chechen Republic of the 101st Brigade of the Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) and the 205th Brigade of the Russian army, and allowed the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs to guard people and important facilities only in agreement with the leadership of the Chechen Republic^[117][9].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1]. On 27 January 1997, the citizens of Ichkeria elected a parliament and a president - Aslan Maskhadov^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia installed governments under its control in Ichkeria.

On 23 November 1994 the Provisional Council, a puppet opposition, announced the creation of a "Government of National Revival" headed by Khadzhiyev^[1]. The Russian army handed the Provisional Council armored vehicles and helicopters with crews for the storming of Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria, but on 26 November the Armed Forces of Ichkeria routed the attackers' troops (see: "Staging a Coup")^[1].

On 17 December 1994, six days after the open invasion, Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 2200, created an occupation administration in Ichkeria headed by Yegorov, the Russian minister for nationalities (see: "Installation of a New System of Governance")^[1][115]. On 26 December the puppet opposition announced Khadzhiyev's "government" for the second time. The "government" declared that it was ready for talks with Russia and did not demand the withdrawal of Russian troops^[1].

On 24 October 1995, two weeks after Moscow halted the talks with the leadership of Ichkeria, Russia replaced Khadzhiyev as head of the puppet government with Zavgayev, the last leader of the Soviet regime in Chechen-Ingushetia. On 14-17 December Russia held a "vote" under occupation and declared its protégé the "elected" head of the republic (see: "Sham Expression of Popular Will")^[1].

At the end of January 1996 Chernomyrdin, the chairman of the Russian government, wrote to the deputies of the Russian parliament that the results of the "vote" showed support for Zavgayev in the republic, and proposed to resolve the war as a dispute among Chechens themselves^[1].

On 27 May 1996 Russian President Yeltsin received in the Kremlin a delegation of Ichkeria headed by Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president. Russia included Zavgayev in its delegation. The Chechen negotiators demanded that Moscow's protégé leave the table, but the Russian side refused. Russia insisted that the head of the puppet government sign the ceasefire agreement, and the delegation of Ichkeria objected again. All members of the Russian delegation, including Zavgayev, signed the document, as did the representatives of Ichkeria. A report by the NTV correspondents Cherkasov, Rebrov and Melikhov for the program "Itogi" says that the Russian protégé did not want to sign any agreements with Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev: "However, the center [Moscow] gave the order and the region [the puppet government] answered 'yes, sir'"^[76].

On 14 July 1996 Russian President Yeltsin, by the decree "On Measures to Stabilize the Activities of the Bodies of State Power of the Chechen Republic", declared that the puppet Committee of National Accord and the "Government of National Revival" were no longer needed^[50][1]. In their place Moscow recognized the "elected" Zavgayev, his government, the puppet parliament and the heads of districts as the leadership of the republic^[1][50].

The human rights defenders of Memorial write that the Russian occupation administration in fact controlled the puppet government^[1]. They write about Decree No. 435, by which Russian President Yeltsin on 31 March 1996 promised to halt the offensive, begin talks with Ichkeria and declare an amnesty: "all these measures were regarded as auxiliary in the process of legitimizing [recognizing as lawful] the puppet regime"^[1]. Tim Guldimann, the head of the mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Grozny from January 1996, wrote in 1998 that Moscow pushed the Armed Forces of Ichkeria southward with its troops and used Zavgayev's government to strengthen Russia's influence in the Chechen Republic^[14].

On 31 July 1996, at a meeting with Chechens living in Moscow, Zavgayev, the head of the puppet government, said that the Armed Forces of Ichkeria did not control most of the districts of the republic^[118]. On 6 August the army of Ichkeria attacked the occupiers in Grozny^[1]. On 7 August Zavgayev fled to the base of the occupation troops in Khankala, on the eastern outskirts of the city^[9], and then left the Chechen Republic^[119]. At the end of August the police officers of the puppet government moved from their buildings to the Russian military at the Severny airport to the north of the capital^[9]. The defenders liberated Grozny from the occupiers and forced Russia to the negotiating table. On 31 August 1996 Moscow signed peace agreements with the leadership of Ichkeria in Khasavyurt, a town in Russian-controlled Dagestan (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. Until November 1996 the colonizer called the departed Zavgayev the "head of the republic"^[1][120]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left Ichkeria. On 27 January 1997 the Chechens elected Aslan Maskhadov president of Ichkeria^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers destroyed mosques, shelled cemeteries and razed ancient burial mounds south of Grozny to the ground.

Russian artillerymen, pilots and helicopter crews shelled mosques in the villages and towns of Ichkeria^[23][1]. Approaching a village, the occupiers first of all fired at the top of the mosque, the tallest building, and snipers fired at mosques for no reason^[24]. By the estimate of Isa Adayev, director of the National Museum of Ichkeria, by May 1996 Russian troops had destroyed or damaged 70 percent of the republic's mosques^[24]. Russian helicopter crews bombed village cemeteries, and snipers fired at them^[72][121].

In February-March 1995, a Russian regiment stood for two months and seven days beside three ancient burial mounds, earthen hills over graves, between the villages of Starye Atagi and Chechen-Aul south of Grozny. The Grozny city council had set aside 26 hectares around the mounds for a museum of archaeology, and a fence, signs warning that these were monuments, and building materials had been brought there. Soldiers dug up the middle of the mounds with a special vehicle that accompanies tank regiments, and then razed them to the ground. The occupiers knocked down the fence and the signs with tanks. Soldiers dug trenches between the mounds and used the museum's building materials for dugouts and checkpoints. In May 1996, Isa Adayev told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Prague: "These were deliberate actions. One or two random hits could not have done what was done"^[24].

In early February 1995, Russian snipers fired from the hills above Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, at the village cemetery and damaged graves. Because of the shooting, families postponed for a day the funerals of Chechens whom the occupiers had killed with mortar fire on 2 February^[72]. In April 1995, Russian helicopter crews bombed Koshkeldy, a village in the east of Ichkeria, and the village cemetery^[121]. From 14 to 20 December 1995, artillerymen of the occupation troops shelled the mosque in Gudermes, the second-largest town of Ichkeria, and killed more than 30 townspeople beside it (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1].

By February 1996, Russian troops had destroyed the mosques and minarets, the towers beside mosques, in Bamut, a village in the west of Ichkeria^[23].

From 3 to 9 March 1996, Russian troops stormed Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria. Russian soldiers burned the village mosque together with the bodies of Chechens whom the villagers had brought there for burial (see: "Desecration of the Dead")^[122][24]. In May 1996, Sadyt Gisatova, a Chechen woman from Sernovodsk, told the Glasnost tribunal in Prague: "When we came to the mosque to bury the bodies lying there, we saw that the mosque had burned down. All the bodies had burned too. In what countries do they destroy churches and mosques? It is the holy of holies"^[24].

By May 1996, the occupation troops, while bombing Grozny, had destroyed the memorial to the victims of the deportation of the Chechens to Central Asia in 1944, and had shot the inscription off the stone. Chechens had built the memorial in 1992 from gravestones that, after the deportation, the colonizers had used to build buildings, roads and pig farms^[123][24].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers burned the archives, libraries, books and manuscripts of the Chechens.

Russian artillerymen shelled, and pilots bombed, the buildings of the archive, libraries and research institutes in Grozny. The documents, books and manuscripts in these buildings burned^[1][24]. Russian commanders, with the help of soldiers, carried ancient books away on trucks toward Mozdok, a town in North Ossetia, and toward Ingushetia, both Russian-controlled (see: "Theft of Cultural Property")^[24].

From 31 December 1994, the occupation troops stormed the center of Grozny, where the Central State Archive of the Chechen Republic kept about 656 thousand files on the history of the Chechen and Ingush peoples over more than two centuries. One building of the archive stood on Ordzhonikidze Street, a hundred meters from the palace of the president of Ichkeria^[1]. Oleg Orlov, a human rights defender of Memorial, who at the start of the storming was in the basement of the palace together with the group of Sergei Kovalyov, Russia's human rights commissioner, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow in February 1996 that on the night of 4 January 1995 he came out of the basement: "We saw that the whole center of the city was already destroyed, practically all the residential buildings had either burned down or were still burning. … We saw that archive – it had burned down completely"^[23]. In February 1995, Yeremchenko, deputy head of the Russian archival agency, came to Grozny and established that in the archive buildings on Ordzhonikidze and Chekhov streets the occupiers had destroyed all the documents together with the backup copies on film. The third building of the archive, on Karagandinskaya Street, survived. It kept about 90 thousand files on the Chechens and Ingush whom the USSR had deported to Kazakhstan in 1944. On 21 September 1995, Yeremchenko, deputy head of the agency, wrote in reply to an inquiry that the occupiers had destroyed 87 percent of the 795 thousand files in all the state archives of the Chechen Republic^[1].

In early 1995, Russian troops burned down the entire Chekhov Republican Scientific Library in Grozny with shelling^[1]. On 24 April 1996, the ethnographer Yan Chesnov, who studied the Chechens and saw the ruins of the library, told the public tribunal of the Glasnost Foundation in Moscow: "The archive and the republican library have been burned. … The entire book collection has been burned. Books in the Chechen language published in the 1930s in Latin script [in Latin letters], ancient Arabic books. A unique library has perished"^[24].

In January 1995, the occupiers destroyed the Chechen National Museum in Grozny with shelling, together with its department of ancient books and manuscripts (see: "Destruction of Historical Memory")^[24]. In early 1995, Russian troops destroyed in Grozny the library of the Research Institute of the Humanities of the Chechen Republic. The library kept the works of all the known researchers of the Caucasus, the records of expeditions on the languages of the Chechens and Ingush, and the originals of medieval books and manuscripts^[1].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that in Grozny the scientific and technical library, three university libraries, the libraries of all the research institutes, the republican children's library and the archives of the unions of writers, artists, composers and theater workers burned down. According to Memorial, the occupiers destroyed or irreparably damaged the folklore center with its archive^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers destroyed the museums, research institutes and ancient monuments of the Chechens.

During the storming of Grozny, Russian artillerymen shelled, and pilots bombed, the center of the city, where the museums and research institutes of Ichkeria stood^[1][24]. Russian pilots fired rockets at ancient towers and settlements in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria^[24]. The occupiers occupied the ruins of museums and looted what had survived (see: "Theft of Cultural Property")^[24]. Russian troops burned almost the entire Central State Archive of the Chechen Republic and the republican libraries in Grozny (see: "Burning of Books and Archives")^[1]. Soldiers of the occupation troops destroyed mosques and leveled ancient burial mounds (see: "Destruction of Shrines and Necropolises")^[24].

In January 1995, Russian troops destroyed the Chechen National Museum in Grozny. The museum held about 320 thousand exhibits, among them archaeological finds of the ancient and medieval Caucasus, traditional Chechen clothing and old manuscripts^[1][24]. The museum's director Isa Adayev told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Prague in May 1996: "From 1 to 4 January 1995, the museum building was shelled quite deliberately from several directions". When the director got to the museum on 7 January, "it was no longer a museum — nothing was left of it — only ruins". On 18 January, Russian special forces seized the ruins^[24]. Khotin, deputy director of the museum center of the Russian Ministry of Culture, who inspected the ruins of the museum in late March 1995, told the public tribunal of the Glasnost Foundation in Moscow in February 1996: "The nature of the destruction shows that barrage fire was used there. Next to the museum there is a small park of about 50 fairly old trees. Well, all those trees are cut in half. All of them!"^[23].

In early 1995, the occupiers destroyed in Grozny the Research Institute of the Humanities of the Chechen Republic, founded in 1907^[1]. In 1995, Russian pilots fired rockets at and bombed Kogo-Maista, an old settlement in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria, far from the fighting. In the strikes, the occupiers destroyed six towers that had stood for thirteen centuries, killed the Chechen boy Deni Murtazov and wounded a woman of his family so badly that she became disabled^[24].

The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that Russian troops destroyed or irreparably damaged in Grozny the university, the pedagogical and petroleum institutes, and the geological museum. In "Memorial's" assessment, Russian troops did not take the rescue of cultural property into account and inflicted irreparable damage on the culture of the Chechen people^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers abducted Chechens and concealed information about their fate, whereabouts or condition from their relatives.

Russian servicemen, fighters of OMON (police special forces) and of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) detained Chechens at checkpoints and led them away from their homes, sometimes at night^[100][1][23]. Russian soldiers checked passports against arrest lists, which they received from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, detained Chechens by them even with documents and passes, and then handed them over to the headquarters of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ichkeria. Women and old people also ended up on these lists^[24].

Russian servicemen and police officers did not let detained Chechens inform their families about themselves, and their relatives considered them missing. The occupiers put the abducted in pits at military units and did not register the arrest (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[1][23].

The Russian military transported detained Chechens from commandant's offices to filtration camps, and on the way people often disappeared without a trace. When relatives found out where a person was being held, the Russian guards immediately moved him elsewhere^[24].

To inquiries about missing people who appeared on the lists of the filtration camps, Russian agencies replied that these people had been released^[1]. The Chechen society "Victims of War" searched for Chechens whom the occupiers had detained in Grozny and at checkpoints from 11 December 1994 to May 1995, and did not find a single one of them on the Russian list of 252 released. At the addresses from the Russian lists, the women of the society found no people with such surnames^[24].

Relatives of the missing filed statements with the society "Victims of War". As of 8 August 1995, 1308 peaceful citizens of Ichkeria were listed as missing^[1]. By mid-October 1996, the society's list held 1432 missing Chechens^[31]. In the spring of 1997, Ichkeria handed Russia a list of 1563 missing^[1].

The Russian military tortured and killed some of the abducted, and relatives later found their bodies where Russian units had been stationed (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees")^[1].

On 9 January 1995, the occupiers detained Shamsa Magomadov in Grozny, and the guards of the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, recorded that they had released him on 2 February^[24]. Shamsa Magomadov did not return home, and in the winter of 1995-1996 the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs promised his sister to exchange her brother for a captured Russian soldier (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[24][1]. On 21 May 1995, at checkpoint No. 13 near Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, the Russian military detained Ruslan Parshoev from that village, and the Russian major Morozov took him to his unit near Assinovskaya, a stanitsa in the west of Ichkeria. The next day, Lvov, the chief of staff of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ichkeria, ordered the detainee sent to Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, where he was taken by fighters of the "Rus" special forces unit, and Ruslan Parshoev went missing^[1]. In the summer of 1995, the occupiers abducted at a checkpoint on the road to Grozny Khamad Kurbanov, the representative of the president of Ichkeria in Russia, who had just been released after a month without charge in a Moscow prison^[95]. Russian guards held Khamad Kurbanov in a pit near Assinovskaya and in the filtration camp in Grozny until a commission under the international OSCE mission secured his release at the negotiations between Russia and Ichkeria^[24]. On 23 December 1995, the Russian military, working from lists, took Ruslan Soslambekov, chairman of the movement "People's Diplomacy for Peace and Unity", at a checkpoint at the entrance to Grozny, kept him for 28 days in the filtration camp on the outskirts of the city, then released him^[23].

In February 1996, the Russian military stopped at checkpoints 26 acquaintances of Madina Magomadova from the society "Victims of War", and all of them disappeared^[24].

At dawn on 1 August 1996, OMON fighters of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in helicopters, jeeps and armored personnel carriers attacked the settlement of Dolinsky north-west of Grozny^[124]. Movla Idrisov from Dolinsky told a Reuters correspondent on the day of the raid that the OMON men went into the first and second floors, led away all the men they found, and left one: a 65-year-old with one leg, on crutches^[125]. The urgent action of Amnesty International of 6 August 1996 says that the OMON men led away 18 Chechens, among them Aslanbek Gassayev and Umakh Mogamedov: "The men were led with sacks over their heads to a waiting bus and driven away. They have not been seen since"^[124]. In 1996, the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances requested from Russia information on the fate of two of them, and in 1997 Russia replied that their cases were being investigated by the Prosecutor General's Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB^[126][18].

On 24 August 1996, eight Russian soldiers led away from a yard in Grozny Aleksei Karmayev, a 67-year-old disabled man who had complained to the headquarters of the 276th Regiment of the Russian army about looting, after which the disabled man went missing^[31][107].

By the end of October 1996, the prison department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs replied to a list of more than 1300 missing, handed over after the ceasefire in June 1996, that forty people from the list had been held in custody and released, but all forty had been released before 1993, before the war. About the rest the department said nothing. On 22 January 1997, Izmailov, an officer of the Russian search group, said on air on the ORT television channel that the missing Chechens were most likely no longer alive, and did not specify whether the Russian military had killed them in battle or shot them on detention, or whether they had died in custody^[31]. In January 1998, the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances reported that Russia had not clarified the fate of a single missing person about whom it had been asked^[18].

On 10 June 1996, the working groups of Russia and Ichkeria on the search for the missing agreed to stop detentions based on lists and other papers without legal force^[104].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia signed agreements with Ichkeria and its villages under which the defenders handed over their weapons while Russian troops stayed in the republic, and violated these agreements.

Russian delegations wrote into the agreements that Russian units would leave the republic as the Armed Forces of Ichkeria handed over their weapons^[1][9]. While the talks were going on, Russian president Yeltsin kept troops in the republic on a permanent basis by decree^[10][127].

On 14 June 1995, fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria took hostages in Budyonnovsk, a Russian-controlled town northwest of the republic, and demanded an end to the war. On 19 June, Russia began talks with Ichkeria in Grozny^[1]. On 20 and 21 June, the delegations signed protocols under which Russian troops would leave the republic district by district^[128][129]. On 3 July, Russian president Yeltsin signed decree No. 663: "To permit the stationing [placing] on a permanent basis on the territory of the Chechen Republic… of military units… of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation"^[10]. On 27 July, the head of the Russian delegation, Minister for Nationalities Mikhailov, stated at the talks in Grozny that Russia "no longer links the signing of the agreement on military questions to a political agreement and the status of Chechnya"^[1]. On 30 July, the delegations signed an agreement on the cessation of hostilities. In it, the army of Ichkeria was called "illegal armed formations", and it was written that first the army would hand over its weapons, then the Chechens who guarded their villages with arms, then everyone else^[11][12]. Under the agreement, Russian troops would leave "simultaneously with disarmament", while a brigade of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) and a brigade of the Russian army would stay in the republic. The Russian delegation added a note to the text that the legislation of Russia does not recognize Ichkeria (see: "Deprivation of Agency")^[11][12].

After the agreement, fighters of the army of Ichkeria began handing over their weapons and returned to their villages, while the Russian units did not leave the republic^[1][9]. On 9 October 1995, ten weeks after the agreement, Russia blamed supporters of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria, for an attempt on the life of Romanov, the commander of the occupation troops, suspended the talks and ordered the troops to resume the offensive (see: "Aggressor Claiming Victim Status")^[1].

In the spring of 1996, the command of the occupation troops and the puppet government in Grozny signed "Protocols on Peace and Accord" with the villages of Ichkeria, under which a village undertook not to let fighters of the army of Ichkeria in, and Russia promised to spare it from fighting^[1][14]. By 28 March 1996, according to the French news agency AFP, more than 120 villages had signed such protocols^[130]. Before the signing, Russian troops surrounded the village and shelled it (see: "Collective Punishment")^[24]. Russian pilots bombed villages that had signed the protocols (see: "False Guarantees of Safety")^[1].

On 27 May 1996, Chernomyrdin, the chairman of the Russian government, and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president of Ichkeria, signed a ceasefire agreement in Moscow^[1]. On 10 June, in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, the delegations of Russia and Ichkeria supplemented it with a protocol in which Russia undertook to withdraw its troops from the republic by the end of August 1996^[16]. On 25 June, Russian president Yeltsin, by decree No. 985, ordered that only the units of four military districts be withdrawn by 1 September, while the formations stationed in the republic permanently were to be provided with facilities^[127]. On 9 July, six days after Yeltsin won the Russian presidential election, the occupiers began a new offensive (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[1]. On 22 August, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had surrounded the occupiers in Grozny, General Lebed, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, and Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, signed a ceasefire agreement in Novye Atagi, a village south of Grozny. In it, Russia undertook to withdraw its troops from Grozny by 26 August and from the whole republic by the end of August, but began leaving the city on 28 August^{[131][132][9]}.

The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that Russia did not take the talks with Ichkeria seriously^[1].

On 31 August 1996, after the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had liberated Grozny from the occupiers^[9], General Lebed and Aslan Maskhadov signed the peace agreements in Khasavyurt, a town in Russian-controlled Dagestan. In them, Russia and Ichkeria wrote down the renunciation of force and the threat of force in resolving disputed questions. The sides agreed to conclude an agreement on the foundations of their relations by 31 December 2001^[33]. The last Russian troops left the republic on 31 December 1996, four months after the deadline in the agreement of Novye Atagi^[1]. Three years after the agreements in Khasavyurt, Russia attacked Ichkeria again. On 21 September 1999, Russian pilots began bombing Grozny, and on 29 September the Russian army invaded the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers took peaceful Chechens hostage and released them in exchange for captured and killed Russian servicemen, weapons or money.

Russian servicemen drew up lists of detained Chechens for exchange and put on them people who by their age could not have carried weapons^[24]. According to a certificate by the prison service of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, from 11 December 1994 to 22 July 1995 the ministry handed over 141 prisoners of the filtration camps for exchange for captured Russian servicemen (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[1].

Russian police officers and soldiers promised to release a detained Chechen if his relatives brought money, a Russian soldier out of captivity or the body of a dead one^[1][24]. The occupiers used the hostages' relatives to find out where the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were holding captured Russians: the relatives searched for captives to rescue their own, while the Russian FSB collected information from them and on 29 July 1995 drew up a certificate on the places where Russian soldiers were being held^[1][103].

On 9 January 1995, Russian servicemen detained Shamsu Magomadov in Grozny (see: "Abduction of People"). In the winter of 1995-1996, his sister Madina Magomadova sought her brother's exchange from Colonel Pilyugin of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. She told "Memorial": "They told me: 'Yes, your brother is alive, we will exchange him — find a soldier [a captured Russian soldier]'. I found a soldier — I went through all those mountains, villages, there is a war on, under fire I searched for a soldier — I found one, brought a photograph. They tell me: 'The soldier is a deserter, he is not subject to exchange…' … 'Go find an officer'. … I found an officer, brought a photograph of the officer... They tell me: sorry, Comrade Magomadova, your brother has been taken away from here, and where he is supposed to be, he has not been brought yet. We cannot find him". The occupiers never released Shamsu Magomadov, and nothing is known of his fate^[1].

Russian servicemen and security services put up for exchange the captured relatives and guards of the president of Ichkeria. On 19 February 1995, the occupiers detained in Grozny Makharbi Dudayev, the president's younger brother, and on 6 April the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs put him up for exchange in Malye Atagi, a village south of Grozny, together with 16 prisoners of the filtration camps. The ministry exchanged the prisoners for a captured Russian major and released the president's brother separately^[1][81][48]. On the night of 28 May 1996, Russian border guards detained the widow of the president of Ichkeria with her bodyguard at the airport of Nalchik, the capital of Russian-controlled Kabardino-Balkaria, and the Russian FSB released the widow but exchanged the bodyguard for a captured Russian priest^[15][133].

Russian soldiers and filtration camp guards demanded ransom for detained Chechens. In late March 1995, the guards of the military unit near Assinovskaya, a stanitsa in the west of Ichkeria, asked detained Chechens who would pay more to get out^[1]. In April 1995, the guards of the filtration camp on the northeastern outskirts of Grozny received five million rubles for the release of a detained Chechen^[23]. On 15 May 1995, Russian soldiers put a detained Chechen from Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, into a pit at their unit, offered to let him out for money and released him after 18 hours^[100]. In December 1995, Russian servicemen detained five elderly Chechens at a checkpoint, and their relatives ransomed them from a filtration camp for ten million rubles^[23]. On 17 April 1996, Russian soldiers detained a Chechen woman with her two brothers at the entrance to Grozny and demanded three million rubles for them, and in the evening released all three, and the brother gave them the money^[24]. On 18 April, Russian servicemen took six Chechens from their homes in Novye Aldy, a settlement on the southwestern outskirts of Grozny, and their relatives ransomed them from the filtration camp at the city motor depot^[24].

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the command of the occupation troops demanded captured Russian servicemen, their bodies and weapons for detained Chechens. In March 1996, officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs demanded that the female relatives of a Chechen, held since January in the filtration camp in Grozny, dig up and bring the bodies of three officers of a Russian police special unit, and in late March, having received the bodies, released him^[1]. In March 1996, soldiers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs detained three Chechens at the checkpoint between Goity and Starye Atagi, villages south of Grozny, and on 28 March the occupiers exchanged them for five Russian soldiers^[31]. On 7 April 1996, Russian servicemen took Saidash Shamakhurov from Gikalovo, a village south of Grozny, to Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, where investigators demanded that he record on tape his request to be exchanged for 15 captured Russian soldiers and 48 construction workers. On 27 April, the occupiers exchanged him for a Russian soldier^[31]. In May 1996, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) detained in the center of Grozny 17 to 20 Chechens who were repairing heating pipes and demanded during interrogation that their relatives bring weapons or captured Russian servicemen for them. The next evening the guards let them go^[31].

Russian soldiers took hostages during assaults and when encircled. On 7 April 1995, during the storming of Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, the occupiers took four Chechen men hostage, drove them into a pit in a garage and fired at them with assault rifles. One the occupiers killed on the spot, the wounded second one the next day; two survived (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[1]. On 10-12 August 1996, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, encircled by the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, held about 500 patients, their relatives and medics hostage in City Hospital No. 9 in Grozny. On 12 August, the occupiers left the hospital, taking a hundred hostages as a human shield, and released them near the former driving school where Russian units were stationed, once the defenders had handed over four captured Russian soldiers (see: "Use of People as "Human Shields"")^[81][1].

On 11 and 12 August 1996, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were liberating Grozny from the occupiers, soldiers of the 101st Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs took Chechen men from the blocks around the "15th Gorodok", their base on Lenin Street, and held them there as hostages. On 14 October 1996, Magomed Taramov told "Memorial" how on 12 August Russian servicemen took him from his home together with his son Alimkhan: "We are no 'boyeviki' [as Russians called the Armed Forces of Ichkeria], we took no part in the armed actions. They led us out into the street, and there by the wall stood another nine or so people... In all, about twenty-four of us were gathered". For the release of the hostages, the brigade's officers demanded that relatives bring wounded soldiers from the encircled Russian checkpoints and the bodies of the dead, or get the army of Ichkeria to let food through to those posts. Garib Asiyalov, whom the hostages' female relatives called to the talks at the "15th Gorodok", in October told "Memorial" the words of a Russian officer: "…I answer to Kulikov [the head of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs]. We will trade head for head — our wounded or dead one for your living one". According to him, for the wounded and dead soldiers whom the relatives brought by truck, the brigade released 32 hostages^[81]. On 16 August, when relatives brought the bodies of eight Russian servicemen to the base, the occupiers released Magomed and Alimkhan Taramov^[1].

On 17 August 1996, soldiers of the 101st Brigade searched the blocks near the "15th Gorodok" and took Chechen men from there to the base as hostages. The brigade's officers promised to release them for the bodies of Russian soldiers buried near the bus station and the chemical plant, and on 19 August, when Russian soldiers brought 28 bodies out through the positions of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, they released the hostages. The human rights defenders of "Memorial" published the names of twelve of them^[81] and write that at the "15th Gorodok" and in City Hospital No. 9 in Grozny the soldiers of the Internal Troops took hostages on the direct orders of the commanders of their units^[1].

In his report of 26 March 1996, the UN Secretary-General cited reports by human rights organizations: Russian troops often detained any Chechen man, whether there was evidence against him or not, in order to exchange him for captured Russian soldiers^[42]. The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that Russian agencies repeatedly used civilian prisoners of the filtration camps as hostages and in most cases offered Ichkeria in exchange Chechens who had not taken part in the fighting. In "Memorial's" conclusion, hostage-taking became a regular practice for the Russian military^[1].

Russian prosecutors put none of the occupiers who took hostages in Hospital No. 9 and at the "15th Gorodok" in Grozny on trial (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[31][1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia decided which journalists could work in Ichkeria, confiscated their footage and persecuted them for reporting on the war.

On 1 December 1994, ten days before the open invasion, Chernomyrdin, chairman of the Russian government, by directive No. 1886-r created the Temporary Information Center^[54][1]. On 9 December, by resolution No. 1360, the Russian government instructed the center to issue journalists accreditation, the permit to work in Ichkeria, and to withdraw it immediately for information the center deemed false. The government gave the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD) and the FSK (predecessor of today's FSB) the right to expel from Ichkeria any outsiders they deemed dangerous^[68].

On 29 December 1994, the Russian MVD announced that the Temporary Information Center's accreditation gave no right to travel where the Russian Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) were stationed^[1].

At the end of January 1995, the Russian government created the Mobile Information Center in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia where the occupiers' headquarters stood. Only this center's accreditation gave journalists the right to be in the "combat zone", and there only under the supervision of servicemen or officials. The occupiers usually counted all of Ichkeria as this zone^[1].

The Russian military expelled journalists without accreditation from the republic, and detained journalists with accreditation and confiscated their tapes and equipment, explaining that accreditation from the Ministry of Defense or the MVD was also needed^[1].

On 15 December 1994, Soskovets, deputy chairman of the Russian government, announced that the government could strip the NTV television channel of its broadcasting license for its reports on the victims of the war in Ichkeria. After public protest, the government dropped this threat^[134].

At the end of May 1995, officers of the Russian FSB arrested NTV journalists near the stanitsa of Assinovskaya in the west of Ichkeria for filming Russian troop positions, although the commander of the Russian division had allowed it. The FSB held the journalists for six hours in a filtration camp and released them (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[24]. On 3 June 1995, the Russian military arrested three foreign journalists on the border between Ichkeria and Russian-controlled Dagestan and reprimanded them for not having the proper accreditation. Four days later, on 7 June, the occupiers let the journalists go to Moscow but confiscated their tapes and film^[134].

On 25 June 1995, Yelena Masyuk, a journalist of the Russian television channel NTV, recorded an interview with Shamil Basayev, a commander of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, in the Nozhai-Yurt district in the southeast of the republic^[134]. In April 1996, the journalist told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow: "To get accreditation to work in Chechnya, you had to get to the military airfield in Mozdok, where the accreditations were issued — but to drive onto the airfield, you already had to have that accreditation." About the road to Shamil Basayev she told the tribunal: "To get to the Chechen village where, by my guess, Basayev was at the time, I had to walk 12 kilometers on foot around the Russian checkpoints"^[24]. On 13 July 1995, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia opened a criminal case against Yelena Masyuk for not telling the investigators where she had taken the interview. At the end of August, the prosecutor's office closed the case without charges and asked the Russian government's press agency to make sure such interviews did not happen again^[134].

From 6 to 9 March 1996, while the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were attacking the occupiers in Grozny, Russian officials forbade television crews in the city to film^[105]. On 8 August 1996, a Russian soldier at a checkpoint near Grozny told four journalists of foreign media to turn back and threatened to destroy their equipment, and when they turned around, the occupiers fired a grenade launcher at their car and missed. Two hours later, Russian pilots fired on the journalists from helicopters at another entrance to the city but wounded no one^[105].

In its report for 1996, the international organization Committee to Protect Journalists wrote that throughout the war Russian troops refused to recognize journalists' accreditation, spoiled their film, destroyed their equipment and fired on their cars from checkpoints and combat helicopters^[105].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers killed unarmed Chechens on the roads, in houses and in cellars.

In the captured villages and towns Russian soldiers together with police officers went from house to house during "zachistkas" ("sweeps", as the Russians called the house searches and detentions of Chechens). The occupiers threw grenades into cellars where families were hiding from the shelling. Russian soldiers set houses on fire together with the people inside. Against the walls of houses the occupiers shot unarmed Chechens, among them women and old people^[1]. Russian snipers fired at those who came out of houses and cellars. Under sniper fire Chechen families could not collect the bodies of their relatives from the streets and bury them for several days^[34][135].

On 17 December 1994 the Russian military fired from armored personnel carriers at a column of refugees from Grozny at the border with Russian-controlled Ingushetia and killed ten people on the spot^[1]. On 22 December 1994 a Russian pilot bombed the cars that had gathered at a crossroads in Grozny, and then fired two more rockets at those who ran to help the wounded. In all, the occupiers killed up to twenty people at the crossroads^[1][23].

In early January 1995 special forces of the 67th Brigade of Russian military intelligence blocked a mountain road along which Chechen civilians were leaving Grozny to escape the shelling. The intelligence troops called in attack aircraft, and Russian pilots bombed the refugees' cars that had gathered at the roadblock^[1]. In Shali, a town to the southeast of Grozny, on 3 January 1995 Russian pilots dropped cluster bombs on the car market and bombed a second time those who ran to help the wounded (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1][23]. Russian servicemen who were searching yards in the settlement of Butenko on the outskirts of Grozny shot four people with assault rifles on 29 January and 3 February 1995, among them three members of the Gagayev family^[23][1]. OMON officers, SOBR fighters (police special forces) and soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) searched houses in Petropavlovskaya, a stanitsa to the northeast of Grozny, on 3 February and killed five Chechens^[24].

In early March 1995 the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, at the insistence of the villagers, were forced to leave Samashki, a village in the west of the Chechen Republic. On 7 April, after shelling, about 250 soldiers of the Sofrino Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD, OMON officers and SOBR fighters from Moscow, the Moscow region and Orenburg stormed the village. The occupiers captured Samashki after a short fight with a small group of armed Chechens from the village^[8][1]. In the evening Russian soldiers drove four men who were hiding in a storeroom into a car-repair pit in a garage and shot them with assault rifles. The occupiers killed 71-year-old Musait Isayev and wounded Nasruddin Bazuyev and Salavdi Umakhanov, while Abdurakhman Chindigayev survived. Salavdi Umakhanov told Oleg Orlov of Memorial on 4 August 1995: "Musa [Musait Isayev] says: 'Guys, don't shoot. The cattle have to be fed... Don't shoot'… In an instant they gave him a burst of automatic fire from there." The next day the Russian military killed the wounded Nasruddin Bazuyev and his daughter Raisa Masayeva^[1].

On 8 April, when no one in the village was resisting any longer, soldiers, OMON officers and SOBR fighters searched the houses. Sadulla Yusupov, an elderly Chechen from Samashki, told Oleg Orlov of Memorial on 13 April: "At ten in the morning soldiers came running here… They were screaming in inhuman voices, swearing, cursing, shouting: 'Come out, you bitches!' and they went up to every house and fired." A Russian soldier fired an assault rifle into the earthen cellar where he had hidden, and a second occupier threw a grenade in and wounded him. When he climbed out, Sadulla Yusupov saw the bodies of six neighbors on the street, among them two old men and a woman^[1]. The Russian military shot Lechi Arsayev dead from twenty meters, without trying to detain him, as he was hanging a white flag on the fence of his house. On Sharipov Street Russian soldiers set fire to a house where Chechens were hiding. The occupiers immediately shot Abi Akhmetova, who came out of the fire with her hands raised. The report of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations says that Yuki Gaitukayeva, Madu Rasuyev and Kesirt Rasuyeva could not get out of the burning house and apparently burned alive^[8]. The mission published a list by name of 103 people whom the occupiers killed in Samashki on 7 and 8 April^[8]. The human rights defenders of Memorial write that at least half of them the Russian military killed deliberately^[1].

On 23 April 1995 drunken Russian servicemen opened fire near a shop in the center of Gudermes, the second-largest town of Ichkeria, and soldiers of other Russian units took it for an attack and fired in the town for three and a half hours. By the count of the prosecutor's office that Russia had installed in Grozny, the occupiers killed ten unarmed people that day and wounded eight^[1]. On 7 July 1995, during the talks between Russia and Ichkeria, the Russian military killed seven Chechens of the Chapanov family, among them children and old people, in Prigorodnoye, a village near Grozny^[1]. From 15 December 1995 the crews of Russian helicopters fired at Chechens who were leaving Gudermes to escape the shelling. On the road to the east of the town the pilots killed or wounded about fifteen people^[1][34]. On 19-20 December 1995, having again captured Gudermes, which the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had liberated five days earlier, Russian soldiers went around the houses and threw grenades into cellars where old, sick and wounded people were hiding. Shkirko, the commander of the occupation troops, named 267 civilians killed in Gudermes (see: "Lies about Its Own Actions")^[1].

On 3 March 1996 Russian soldiers who broke into Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, fired from an armored personnel carrier at three men in a car, killing them and wounding a fourth^[1]. On 17 March, during the second storming of Samashki, Russian soldiers led about 40 Chechens, among them 10-15 children, out of a cellar in a yard on Kalinin Street and stood them against a wall. After going out of the gate, the occupiers threw three grenades into the yard and wounded 17 people, two women among them dying of their wounds^[1][24]. On 19 March Russian soldiers led the Chechens hiding in the cellars of one of the yards of Samashki out and lined them up against a wall. With a burst of automatic fire the occupiers killed Zakhud Zhadiyeva, a Chechen woman who did not understand the order "stand against the wall" in Russian^[24]. On 25 April 1996 soldiers from a Russian checkpoint fired at buses in which women and children were being taken out of the surrounded Shali. The occupiers wounded nine people, one woman among them dying of her wounds^[1][136]. On the night of 15 July 1996 in the northwestern suburb of Grozny, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD fired from two armored personnel carriers at unarmed people in cars and killed 12 or 13 people. The occupiers set the cars on fire and cut off the ears of some of the bodies (see: "Desecration of the Dead")^[83][1]. On 1 August OMON officers of the Russian MVD attacked the settlement of Dolinsky to the northwest of Grozny and shot dead two young men who were sleeping in a car near the houses (see: "Abduction of People")^[124]. On 10 August Russian soldiers who were capturing the area of Abakanskaya Street in Grozny fired flamethrowers into the cellars of houses without checking whether there were people inside. In the cellar of house No. 40 the occupiers burned 12 Chechens from two families, among them two children aged three and four and an 85-year-old woman^[1]. On 19 August 1996 the command of the occupation troops demanded that everyone who remained in Grozny leave the city within 48 hours (see: "Collective Punishment"). The next day near the village of Goity to the south of Grozny the crew of a Russian helicopter fired at refugees who were leaving the capital in buses and cars, and killed from ten to twelve people^[1][27].

Memorial concluded that Russian troops deliberately attacked civilians throughout the war and killed the most of them by bombing and shelling^[1]. Tim Guldimann, the head of the mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Grozny, wrote that in March 1996 his staff, in a report to the organization's leadership, called Russia's actions a war against the civilian population without military necessity^[14].

The human rights defenders of Memorial write that Russia kept no count of the unarmed Chechens it killed^[1]. The Observer Mission questioned 265 refugee families from Grozny and, based on their accounts, estimated that from December 1994 to March 1995 the occupiers killed 25,000-29,000 people in the city^[1]. In March 1996 the UN Secretary-General, in a report to the UN Commission on Human Rights, cited the calculation of Russian human rights organizations: from 25 November 1994 to 15 April 1995, 26,550 civilians died in Ichkeria from Russia's war, among them 2,300 children under 15 and 5,050 women^[42]. In its annual report for 1996 Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in Ichkeria since December 1994 at 18,500 to 80,000^[27].

Over the whole war Russian military courts convicted seven servicemen for the killing of civilians (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers destroyed the towns and villages of Ichkeria together with their housing, hospitals and schools^[1].

Russian pilots and artillerymen destroyed residential neighborhoods with bombing and shelling (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. In captured villages and towns, Russian soldiers and police officers looted houses (see: "Pillage") and then set them on fire with gasoline, hay or flamethrowers^[8][121][24]. After the war of 1994-1996, 60,000 families of Grozny were left without housing^[137].

The occupiers destroyed substations, tore down power lines and blew up gas pipelines^[23][24].

In December 1994, Russian aviation bombed Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria. On 9 January 1995, Irina from the Third Microdistrict on the outskirts of Grozny told Human Rights Watch in Russian-controlled Ingushetia: "Our region was the first to suffer… either December 17th or 18th, three nine-story apartment buildings of the institute 'Promavtomatika' were bombed out. People all become homeless"^[138]. On the night of 20 December, Russian pilots dropped two bombs on a block of one-story houses at the intersection of Moskovskaya Street and Noya Buachidze Street and completely or partially destroyed 18 houses^[1]. Russian aviation bombed a substation, and Grozny was left without electricity^[23]. On 31 December 1994, the occupiers began the assault on the city. After 20 February 1995, Russian special forces set fire to and blew up houses in Grozny and destroyed pipes and power lines^[24]. More than two months after the start of the assault, by 6 March 1995, Russian troops had captured Grozny. On 1 May 1995, the Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats, who had been in the city in January, said at a hearing of a commission of the US Congress: "There is no such city any more. There isn't a single house in Grozny that hasn't been destroyed one way or another by the war"^[38].

On 3 February 1995, soldiers of the Russian OMON (police special forces) and of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) searched houses in Petropavlovskaya, a stanitsa northeast of Grozny, and burned 14 houses. In all, the occupiers destroyed 86 houses in the stanitsa^[24]. In February 1995, Russian pilots bombed two schools, a sports school, a hospital and a kindergarten in Argun, a town east of Grozny^[72]. At the end of March 1995, Russian troops captured Gudermes, the second-largest city of Ichkeria, without a fight, and on 29 and 30 March soldiers burned houses in it with flamethrowers; on Parkhomenko Street two houses were left intact^[1][121]. In April 1995, Russian troops shelled for a month Alleroy, a village in the east of Ichkeria with 4,500-5,000 inhabitants. The occupiers completely destroyed a fifth of the houses of Alleroy with rockets^[1].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and the OMON stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. Chechens in Samashki told observers of the Russian human rights organization "Memorial" that the soldiers and OMON men burned houses on 8 April, when they were searching the village. Russian servicemen spent the night in the school on Kooperativnaya Street, and in the morning set it on fire, and the school burned out from the inside^[8]. On 10 April, a Chechen woman named Karnukayeva from Rabochaya Street told the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations: "The houses are burned. I have nowhere to go now. I am left on the street hungry and cold with 4 children"^[8]. Viktor Lozinsky of "Memorial" examined the burned houses of Samashki from 18 April to 1 May 1995. In February 1996, he told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation: "The village was being burned out systematically. The houses were set on fire like this: a window was broken with a rifle butt, and wiping cloth [rags] soaked in some diesel fuel was simply put on the windowsill and set alight"^[23]. The Observer Mission published a list drawn up by the administration of Samashki of 198 yards where the occupiers had completely destroyed at least one house, and in 155 of them almost all the houses had burned down^[8]. The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that the Russian military and officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs burned most of the houses in the village deliberately^[1].

From 30 September 1995 to March 1996, Russian Internal Troops and police kept Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, encircled, tore down the power lines near the village and blew up the gas pipeline several times (see: "Transport Blockade")^[24]. In December 1995, after the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had liberated Gudermes, Russian troops shelled and bombed the city. According to refugees and journalists' estimates, the occupiers destroyed or damaged about 40 percent of the buildings of Gudermes^[34].

From 3 to 9 March 1996, Russian troops stormed Sernovodsk, burned or destroyed 30 percent of the houses of the village, and Russian soldiers set fire to the apartments of refugees on the northern outskirts of the village with hand-held flamethrowers^[24]. On 15 March 1996, 11 months after the first assault, Russian troops stormed Samashki again and razed to the ground the House of Culture and the school, which the Chechens had rebuilt. Journalists who came after the assault saw only three surviving houses in the whole village^[24]. On 3 and 4 April 1996, Russian pilots bombed Shalazhi, a village in the southwest of Ichkeria, and destroyed dozens of houses, the whole upper part of the village^[1][24]. On 6 April 1996, Russian troops captured Zhani-Vedeno, a mountain village of 38 yards in the southeast of Ichkeria, from which the Chechens had fled the shelling, and for a month let no one near it. When the Russian servicemen left, one intact house remained in the village, and in place of most of the houses an observer of "Memorial" found ashes with no traces of shells or bombs^[1]. From 9 to 11 July 1996, Russian artillery shelled and aviation bombed Gekhi, a village southwest of Grozny. A correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Izvestia wrote that the occupiers had destroyed more than a third of the village^[1][83]. On the night of 11 July, Russian artillerymen shelled Makhkety, a mountain village in the southeast of Ichkeria, with the Grad and Uragan multiple rocket launchers, which cannot fire with precision, and destroyed 150 houses^[1][83]. From 6 to 22 August 1996, Russian troops shelled Grozny with heavy artillery and bombed it, and on 21 August Russian pilots dropped incendiary bombs on the blocks of five-story buildings on Saikhanov and Ulyanov Streets, from which the buildings burned out from the inside^[1]. The bulletin of the International Committee of the Red Cross of 2 September 1996 says that after the August strikes all 80,000 people in Grozny were left without electricity and medical care: all the hospitals of the city were destroyed or badly damaged^[139].

On 26 July 1995, the UN Human Rights Committee, in its comments on Russia, expressed regret that the Russian armed forces had destroyed schools, hospitals and other civilian buildings^[102].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers surrounded the villages of Ichkeria with a ring of checkpoints and did not let people or vehicles through.

On 9 December 1994, two days before the open invasion, Chernomyrdin, the chairman of the Russian government, by resolution No. 1360 ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to close the borders of the Chechen Republic and the Ministry of Defense to ban flights over it for the time being^[68]. On 1 February 1995, the occupiers blocked the border of Ichkeria with Russian-controlled Ingushetia with checkpoints^[1].

From the end of February 1995, units of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs set up checkpoints on the roads between villages in the west of Ichkeria^[8]. By the end of March 1996, there were checkpoints on these roads almost every kilometer^[24].

Russian servicemen at the checkpoints let into villages and towns only those who were registered as residents there^[1][140]. At the posts, Russian soldiers unlawfully detained Chechen men who were leaving the surrounded villages and took them to the filtration camps in Grozny and in Mozdok, Pyatigorsk and Stavropol, Russian-controlled cities northwest of Ichkeria (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[1].

In February 1995, Russian servicemen at the checkpoints near Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, fired at dusk on any vehicles, including ambulances^[24]. In the second half of February, the soldiers at checkpoint No. 13 near the village stopped letting trucks in^[8]. From 13 March 1995, Russian servicemen blocked all the roads into Samashki and for 25 days, until the assault on 7 April, kept the village under blockade^[8]. On 7 April, the day of the assault on Samashki, the occupiers stopped 12 vehicles with Chechens who were leaving the village at a checkpoint of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and before the shelling began they let about a hundred people through. Some of the men among them Russian servicemen took by helicopter to the filtration camp in Mozdok, while those who had not managed to leave stayed in the village under shelling^[8]. On 8 April, 800-1,000 people gathered at the Russian checkpoint at the crossroads of the roads from Samashki and Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria near the border with Ingushetia. On the orders of Kulikov, the commander of the occupation troops, the commanders of the post did not let observers or Chechens from the village into Samashki. On 11 April, the Russian guards of checkpoint No. 13 did not let into Samashki Chechen women who were marching there against the war^[48].

On 30 September 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) and Russian police special forces surrounded Sernovodsk. The occupiers demanded that the Chechens of the village disarm the fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria and open the road to Russian military vehicles (see: "Collective Punishment")^[1]. According to "Memorial", there were more than 10,000 people in the village, according to the UN 20,000, and another more than 3,000 refugees lived in the buildings of the resort on the outskirts^[1][42]. On 26 October, Russian troops blocked the last road into Sernovodsk and stopped letting any vehicles into the village, including those with food (see: "Medical and Humanitarian Blockade")^[1]. Patricia Krokol, a representative of a British Christian community of opponents of the war, got into the village that day across a field, and on 20 April 1996 in Moscow she told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation: "At 11 in the morning we got into Sernovodsk, and 40 minutes later they blocked that road too, putting up 14 tanks"^[24]. In November, Russian servicemen began letting a bus with people and an ambulance into the village four times a day^{[1][141][135]}.

Russian troops surrounded Sernovodsk for more than five months, until the assault on 3 March 1996. On 4 March, the occupiers opened the way out of the village, but Russian soldiers and officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the posts did not let people leave in their own cars. On that day, about 10,000 people left Sernovodsk. On 5 March, the occupiers again closed the entry and exit, and about 7,000 Chechen civilians remained in the village (see: "Sham Corridor"). With shelling, Russian troops killed and wounded hundreds of them (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). On 9 March, after the capture of Sernovodsk, Russian servicemen opened the entry into the village and the exit from it, and only then did the Chechens take out the wounded^{[1][141][135]}.

On 10-11 December 1995, the Russian army surrounded Gudermes, the second-largest city of Ichkeria, east of Grozny, and let no one out of it. On 14 December, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated the city, and on 19-20 December Russian troops captured it (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[34]. From 11 to 20 December 1995, before the "elections" that Russia had scheduled in Ichkeria, Shkirko, the commander of the occupation troops, banned vehicles without passes from entering Grozny (see: "Sham Expression of Popular Will")^[1].

On 14 March 1996, units of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and of the Russian 58th Army surrounded Samashki and let no one through the checkpoint on the southern road to the village of Novy Sharoy^[24]. On 19 March, the occupiers let the Chechens out of the encirclement^[1]. In early April 1996, Russian pilots bombed every 15-20 minutes during the day the only road from Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, to Vedeno, a district center in the mountains in the southeast of Ichkeria (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). Chechens from Vedeno and the neighboring village of Dyshne-Vedeno left along this road for the plain at night^[1][24]. In the spring of 1996, Russian servicemen at the checkpoint near Shalazhi, a village southwest of Grozny, did not let Madina Magomadova from Grozny through to her parents, because she was registered as a resident of the city^[24].

The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that throughout the war Russian troops surrounded the villages and towns of Ichkeria again and again, restricted or completely closed entry and exit, and soldiers at checkpoints often blocked traffic on the roads^[1].

On 10 June 1996, Russia and Ichkeria signed a protocol to the ceasefire agreement of 27 May. The Russian delegation undertook to remove the checkpoints at the exits from villages and towns by 7 July^[16]. On 7 July, the command of the occupation troops refused to remove all the posts, citing the fact that the situation had not normalized (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[1]. On 8 September 1996, Russian units began leaving their checkpoints and Ichkeria^[9][142].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia twice held "elections" on the seized land of Ichkeria to pass off the puppet government as chosen by the people^[1].

By the autumn of 1995, the Russian army had seized Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria, and the plain in the north of the republic. On 24 October 1995, Russia put Zavgayev at the head of the puppet government in Grozny (see: "Puppet Government")^[1].

On 1 November 1995, the puppet parliament, assembled from deputies of the Soviet era, introduced the post of head of the republic. On 5 November, the deputies scheduled the election for this post for 16 December, the day of the elections to the Russian parliament. On 12 May 1996, the puppet deputies scheduled the election of a new parliament for 16 June, the day of the Russian presidential election^[1].

From 16 November 1995 until voting day, Russian servicemen at checkpoints let only people registered there into the stanitsa of Assinovskaya and the village of Sernovodsk in the west of Ichkeria, and did not let candidates and campaigners through (see: "Transport Blockade"). From 11 to 20 December, Shkirko, commander of the occupation troops, forbade entry into Grozny without a special pass. The occupiers at checkpoints did not let accredited journalists into the city^[1].

On 12 December 1995, the puppet parliament allowed voting at any polling station with any document^[1]. The Russian-controlled election commissions of the republic and of Grozny gave numbers of the city's voters that differed twofold: 120 and 250 thousand^[1][143]. Both commissions refused to show the voter lists^[1].

The staff of the Assistance Group, the mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), left Ichkeria for the voting days in December 1995. There were no international observers at the elections. On 9 June 1996, a week before the new elections, the puppet government declared the Assistance Group undesirable (see: "Expulsion of Foreign Missions")^[1].

On 6 December 1995, Russian soldiers at checkpoints did not let delegates from the south of Ichkeria into Grozny, and the congress of supporters of Khasbulatov, the former head of the parliament in Moscow, did not take place. On 9 December, Khasbulatov, Zavgayev's main rival, withdrew from the election^[1].

From 14 to 17 December 1995, the occupiers held the vote for head of the republic. Russian troops did not control the Shali district southeast of Grozny or the mountain districts in the south, and there was no voting there. Hundreds of thousands of citizens of Ichkeria had fled the war out of the republic and could not vote^[1]. On 18 December, the Russian-controlled election commission in Grozny announced that more than 60% of the population had voted and about 90% of them had chosen Zavgayev^[1]. On 21 April 1996, Ruslan Akhtakhanov, adviser to Dzhokhar Dudayev, the president of Ichkeria, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow about the voting in Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria: "The residents of Samashki said that there had been no elections in their village. <...> a week after the scheduled elections Mr. Zavgayev, sitting in a television studio, thanked the population of the republic that had supported him so vigorously. And he said that the strongest support — 70-80 percent of the population — came from the village of Samashki." According to Ruslan Akhtakhanov, before the elections members of the Russian-controlled village administration went around the village and copied the Chechens' passports and signatures into lists. Ninety-nine percent of those who voted on 17 December, he said, were from these lists^[24].

On 14 December 1995, the Russian-controlled administration of Gudermes, the second-largest town of the republic, broadcast by radio that the elections would be held anyway and that no one would shoot at people, while the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated the town from the occupiers that day. On 17 December at nine in the evening, as soon as the polling stations closed, Russian pilots began bombing Gudermes (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[34].

On 10 June 1996, in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, the delegations of Russia and Ichkeria recorded in the ceasefire protocol that elections would be held after the withdrawal of Russian troops and the disarmament of the army of Ichkeria^[16]. After the signing of the protocol, Lobov, the representative of the president of Russia in Ichkeria, said on Grozny television: "I see no serious reasons for their [the elections'] cancellation or postponement, as the separatists demand" (that is what the Russians called the government and the Armed Forces of Ichkeria)^[1]. On 14-16 June, the colonizer held the election of a new parliament of the republic and of the president of Russia, although its army remained in Ichkeria. Irina Dementyeva, correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Izvestia, wrote on 20 June: "As early as the morning of the sixteenth… the head of the republic [Zavgayev] named the percentage of those who had voted — 50. An hour and a half later the chairman of the republican izbirkom [election commission]… told the same journalists: as of 12 noon, 23 percent of the voters had voted". The Russian-controlled election commission in Grozny announced that more than 60% of the voters had voted and that Russian president Yeltsin had received more than half the votes in the Chechen Republic^[1]. On 17 and 18 June, the OSCE stated that the elections had not been free and fair and that the decision to hold them had violated the protocols of 10 June on the withdrawal of troops^{[1][144][145]}.

On 16 June 1996, Gudermes and the villages of Bachi-Yurt, Alleroy and Tsentoroy in the east of Ichkeria did not vote. The stanitsa of Shelkovskaya in the north of the republic, the town of Shali and the villages of Kurchaloy and Vedeno southeast of Grozny did not vote^[9]. After 16 June, officials and public figures of the republic confirmed in writing that there had been no elections in Gudermes, or in 64 villages, stanitsas and settlements of six districts of Ichkeria, including places where, according to official data, Russian troops were stationed. Heads of administrations subordinate to Russia signed some of these papers and certified them with seals bearing the coat of arms of Russia, and one paper was signed by the chairman and secretary of the election commission of the Gudermes district^[1]. On 3 July, in the second round of the election, there was no voting in Shali, Novye Atagi, Gekhi and Gekhi-Chu south of Grozny. The election commission closed the polling station in Urus-Martan, a town southwest of Grozny, at four in the afternoon, announcing that 98% of the voters there had already voted. According to the commissions' protocols, in the second round 74% of the voters in the Chechen Republic voted and 73% of them chose Yeltsin, and the Central Election Commission of Russia reported that it had received no information about violations^[1].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that both times the elections were not genuine and the voters could not freely express their will^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic. On 27 January 1997, the citizens of Ichkeria elected the president and parliament of the republic. Aslan Maskhadov became president^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers shielded themselves with peaceful Chechens from the fire of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria.

Russian soldiers led Chechens out of the basements where they were hiding from shelling, took men from their homes and seized doctors and patients in a hospital. The occupiers put them on armored vehicles or placed them in front of themselves so that the soldiers of the army of Ichkeria would not shoot^[1][31]. Russian servicemen threatened to burn or shoot the captured Chechens if the defenders fired or did not hand over captives^[81]. Russian soldiers released some Chechens from the human shield after a few hours and took others to their bases. There the occupiers put them in pits and beat them (see: "Torture and Abuse")^[81].

On 6-8 March 1996, when the army of Ichkeria encircled Russian checkpoint No. 6 in Grozny, an officer of the Russian commandant's office of the city advised the soldiers at the checkpoint over the radio to seize a couple of Chechen families and shield themselves with them. The soldiers at the post did not do so^{[146][1][147]}.

From 15 March 1996, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) and the Russian 58th Army stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria (see: "Military Intervention")^[1]. On 17 March, Russian soldiers drove Chechens out of the basement of a house on Rabochaya Street, where they were hiding from shelling. A major, the commander of a Russian unit, forced three women and the three Kireyev boys - aged five, eleven and twelve - to climb onto an armored vehicle^[1][81]. Leila Gaerbekova, one of the three women on the vehicle, told the human rights defender Andrei Mironov on 4 May 1996: "At gunpoint they put us on a tank [an armored vehicle] on Rabochaya Street. Three children, their mother Koka, me and my sister Anya Gaerbekova. <...> They placed us in front of the tank and said: 'If a single bullet comes from over there, we will burn you'. And there were no bullets from over there, nothing". The soldiers placed almost everyone who had been hiding in the basement in front of the vehicle and led them at gunpoint for about 300 meters, to the canal in the middle of the village. Between 12 and 2 p.m., the major told the Chechens to disperse. Khizir Khachukayev, the commander of the unit of the army of Ichkeria in Samashki, told the human rights defenders of "Memorial" that his soldiers did not fire at the armored vehicles with people on them and were forced to retreat, and put up their main resistance in the center of the village once the occupiers had let the people out of the human shield^[1][81].

On 15 March 1996, in Samashki, Russian soldiers led two elderly Chechens, the owner of a house on Vygonnaya Street and his neighbor, out of the house, put them on top of an armored vehicle and drove them around under bullets for six or seven hours. After nine in the evening, the occupiers' commander let both of them go^[81].

On 10 August 1996, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were liberating Grozny, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs searched City Hospital No. 9 in Grozny. For two days, the occupiers held about 500 patients, their relatives, doctors and nurses hostage (see: "Hostage-Taking"). Movsar Tembulatov, the deputy chief physician, told the human rights defenders of "Memorial" and Human Rights Watch in the hospital on 13 October 1996 how Russian soldiers went down into the basement: "they put me or one of the other doctors in front as some kind of cover, with a submachine gunner behind"^[81][1].

On 12 August 1996, soldiers of the army of Ichkeria repelled an attack by Russian troops trying to break through to the occupiers encircled in the hospital. The commander of the Russian servicemen in the hospital agreed to lead his soldiers out in exchange for captives and demanded 100 doctors, nurses, walking patients and their relatives as a human shield for himself. Khadis Malsagov, one of the hostages, told the human rights defenders of "Memorial" on 24 August 1996: "As soon as everyone had moved away from the hospital, they [the Russian soldiers] line the women up and say they will shoot them if the captives are not handed over to them immediately". The soldiers of Khizir Khachukayev handed over all the captives. At the gates of their base, the occupiers released the people from the human shield. When the people were returning to the hospital, Russian troops fired several dozen mortar shells at it, killed the nurse Toita Kutukhanova and wounded two nurses, two doctors and a woman patient (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). On the evening of 12 August and the morning of 13 August, the patients and medics left the hospital for the building of the International Committee of the Red Cross nearby^[81][1].

On 12 August 1996, soldiers of the 101st Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs took men from the blocks of Grozny around the "15th Gorodok", their base on Lenin Street, and shielded themselves with them on the way there (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[1]. Two of them, a father and son, the occupiers tied with wire to an armored personnel carrier, drove under fire to Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of the city, and released on 16 August^[81].

The 1996 report of "Memorial" says that Russian servicemen and officers of Russian agencies in Ichkeria systematically took hostages and shielded themselves with human shields. According to the report, the occupiers shielded themselves with Chechens during the last six months of the war, from March to August 1996, most often the soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs^[81].

The prosecutors of the Russian army did not investigate how Russian troops shielded themselves with Chechens during assaults and held no one accountable for it (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[31][1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russian servicemen looted museums and the homes of Chechens in Grozny, and specialists of the Russian ministry of culture took the most valuable of the surviving paintings from the ruins to Moscow.

From 1 to 4 January 1995, the occupiers shelled the building that housed the Chechen National Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, and burned both museums almost completely (see: "Destruction of Historical Memory")^[1].

Until the spring of 1995, Russian servicemen let none of the Chechens into the ruins of the museums and plundered what had survived. The occupiers took exhibits as trophies, according to rank and position^[24].

Russian soldiers loaded exhibits of the National Museum onto armored personnel carriers^[24]. Commanders of the occupation troops, with the help of soldiers, took more than one truckload of ancient books from the museum's manuscript department toward Mozdok, a town in North Ossetia, and Ingushetia, both under Russian control^[24].

In February 1995, officers of the FSK (a predecessor of today's FSB) packed paintings and other works of art from the ruins into a 20-ton railway container^[1]. At the end of March, the Russian ministry for emergency situations brought five specialists from the Russian ministry of culture and Moscow museums to Grozny. The group catalogued the works from the container^[23]. Khotin, deputy director of the ministry of culture's museum center and one of the five, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow in February 1996: "We tried to carry out of the ruins everything that could be carried out. At the same time, the state of preservation of the works was practically zero. … We conserved, made presentable and took away about 60 works of fine art"^[23]. Isa Adayev, director of the National Museum, told this tribunal in Prague in May 1996: "The art experts who came from Moscow helped to steal things, picking out what they wanted by degree of significance. These experts left behind what they called 'useless junk'"^[24].

In 1995, during the capture of Grozny, Russian soldiers twice looted the home library of the Chechen journalist Aslan Dukaev in the city, and his sister saved only a few books^[148]. In 1995, after the capture of Grozny, servicemen of unit 3111 of the Dzerzhinsky Division of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) searched the house of a Chechen on the outskirts of the city and took away a collection of ancient manuscripts, books and icons that Mikhail Patalov, a former deputy director of the Grozny Philharmonic, kept there. His complaint passed through eleven levels of the prosecutor's office, the prosecutors opened a case, but it went nowhere^[1].

In July 1995, the delegation of Ichkeria at the talks with Russia in Grozny demanded the return of the National Museum's exhibits. The Russian delegation verbally promised to look into it^[24]. Seven months later, in February 1996, the removed paintings lay in the storerooms of the Russian ministry of culture awaiting restoration^[23]. In July 2002, 43 works from the Grozny Museum of Fine Arts hung in Moscow at an exhibition of the Tretyakov Gallery^[149].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers did not let doctors and humanitarian aid reach the Chechens, and did not let the wounded out to the doctors.

Russian servicemen at the checkpoints around villages and towns surrounded before an assault did not let in doctors, UN and Red Cross staff, vehicles with food or buses for refugees. The occupiers did not let the Chechens they had wounded out to the doctors^[1]. Russian soldiers fired on ambulances and vehicles of humanitarian organizations^[1][150].

On 17 December 1994, Russian servicemen shot up a column of cars with refugees from Grozny near the border of Russian-controlled Ingushetia (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). The occupiers fired on ambulance doctors who were driving to the wounded from the Ingush side, and did not let them approach the site of the shooting until half past four in the morning^[1].

In January 1995, Russian officials directed humanitarian aid to the northern districts of Ichkeria. To the south of Ichkeria and to Russian-controlled Dagestan, where Chechens had fled, Russian agencies sent no aid^[42]. On 6 January, in Troitskaya, a stanitsa in Ingushetia, a soldier of a patrol of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs shot dead Ruslan, an unarmed driver from a column that a refugee woman from Grozny was leading there for the elderly (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[138]. In early April 1995, Russian officials held up for a day at a checkpoint just across the border of Ichkeria a Red Cross convoy with medical supplies for Grozny, citing the fact that the drivers did not have the required documents^[151].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. On 8 and 9 April, the special forces of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at checkpoint No. 13 did not let into the village doctors of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), of Médecins Sans Frontières and of the Russian Red Cross^[8][48]. Valery Borshchov, a deputy of the Russian parliament who was traveling to the village with the doctors on 8 April, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow in February 1996: "As the major, the commander of the 13th post, explained…, they, the military, are guided not by the Geneva Conventions [international treaties on the protection of the wounded and of civilians in war], but by the orders of the local commander, Colonel General Kulikov"^[23]. On 9 April, Dzeki Musayeva, born in 1920, died of a hypertensive attack without medical help^[8]. On 10 April, Russian servicemen allowed the wounded to be taken out, but did not let ambulances into the village, and Chechens from Samashki drove 15 wounded fellow villagers to the post on a bus, a truck and a tractor with a trailer. Russian servicemen from positions on the Sunzha ridge, a range of hills near the village, fired on the trailer and wounded Taus Ibishev a second time; he died a few days later in a hospital in Ingushetia. Ambulance doctors took the rest of the wounded from the post to hospitals in Ingushetia. After this, the occupiers let ICRC vehicles into the village, and on 13 April doctors of the Russian Red Cross. The report of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations says that at least 13 wounded Chechens from Samashki died because they did not receive medical help in time. The Mission published a list by name of those killed in the village, including those who died of their wounds without medical help^[8][1].

On 30 September 1995, Russian Internal Troops and police surrounded Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria near the border with Ingushetia, and did not let UN staff with humanitarian aid reach the 3,000 refugees at the village resort, among them 2,100 children (see: "Transport Blockade")^[1][152]. From 26 October, the soldiers did not let vehicles with food into Sernovodsk, and from November they let a truck with food in twice a week^[1]. To the appeal of the representative of the UN Secretary-General of 7 November 1995 about the shortage of food among the refugees of Sernovodsk, the Russian government replied almost four months later, on 29 February 1996^[42]. In December 1995, Russian servicemen fired on a Red Cross vehicle that was driving to Vedeno, a district center in the southeast of Ichkeria. The Red Cross staff could not come to terms with the occupiers and turned back^[140].

On 14 December 1995, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Gudermes, the second-largest city of Ichkeria, east of Grozny, and on 19-20 December Russian troops captured it after five days of shelling and bombing (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. The Russian government did not allow humanitarian organizations to evacuate Chechen civilians from the city, and the townspeople walked on foot to Russian-controlled Dagestan. On the way, refugees froze to death, among them at least four children^[34]. In Osman-Yurt, a village in Dagestan, five-year-old Zali Zelimkhanova, who was walking with her family from Gudermes, died. On 21 January 1996, her mother Melkhash Zelimkhanova told human rights defenders of the international organization Human Rights Watch and of "Memorial" there: "When we were in the basement [in Gudermes] it was very cold, and by the time we got here my daughter, Zali, got sick and died a sudden death"^[34]. After the capture of Gudermes, Russian servicemen for several days did not let ICRC staff into the city, while the elderly, women and children froze without food or water in the basements of destroyed houses. On 26 December, the ICRC began distributing aid in Gudermes^[153].

In December 1995 and January 1996, soldiers at Russian checkpoints hardly ever let through the vehicles of the Belgian section of Médecins Sans Frontières, and the doctors could not get medicines to Gudermes^[34]. On the eve of New Year 1996, Russian servicemen and officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the posts around Sernovodsk beat the crews of vehicles that were bringing New Year presents to the children^[24].

In 1996, Russian servicemen at the checkpoints checked humanitarian organizations for passes for travel around Ichkeria. Russian agencies issued a pass for two weeks, often a few days before it expired, or did not issue one at all^[150]. By 3 January, the occupiers had closed the roads around Grozny and to Gudermes to ICRC vehicles. The commanders of the occupation troops in Grozny and the military leadership in Moscow did not reply until the end of January to the ICRC's requests to name someone to negotiate with^[34]. On 5 March 1996, during the assault on Sernovodsk by the Russian units of Artemov, the commander of the occupation troops in the southwest of Ichkeria, the occupiers agreed with the ICRC to cease fire and let its staff through to the wounded and sick, but on 6 March the soldiers at the post did not let the ICRC vehicles through, saying that they had received no orders^[24][1]. The Chechens wounded by the occupiers reached doctors only on 9 March, when Russian troops captured Sernovodsk^[1], and the ICRC got into the village three weeks after the start of the assault on 3 March^[24]. During the assault on Samashki, on 16 March 1996 the occupiers did not let through 17 buses of the International Organization for Migration, which had agreed with the Russian military to evacuate those who remained in the village, and did not let the wounded out through Novy Sharoy, a village to the south, although the Chechens offered 100 million rubles and a car for this^[1][24]. On 19 March, when the occupiers opened the way out of Samashki, a doctor of the village hospital took the wounded to the hospital in Achkhoy-Martan, a district center in the west of Ichkeria^[1].

In the spring of 1996, Russian troops surrounded the mountain villages of the Vedeno, Shatoy and Nozhay-Yurt districts in the south and southeast of Ichkeria. The soldiers did not let doctors or humanitarian organizations in^[1]. On 10 July 1996, Russian troops surrounded Makhkety, a mountain village in the southeast of Ichkeria, and blocked the only road out of it, while soldiers at the Russian checkpoints around Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, did not let vehicles with the wounded through. Seriously wounded Chechens were carried out of Makhkety along mountain paths; four of them died of their wounds in the hospital in Shali^[1].

The human rights defenders of Human Rights Watch wrote in their review for 1995 that Russian troops again and again blocked or delayed humanitarian aid to civilians in Ichkeria, especially at the start of the war, and at least once fired on a Médecins Sans Frontières vehicle with a clearly visible emblem of the organization^[108]. On 26 March 1996, the UN Secretary-General wrote in a report to the Commission on Human Rights that, according to Human Rights Watch, Russian agencies created bureaucratic obstacles for aid organizations, hindered the distribution of aid and did not allow the sick and wounded to be evacuated from Grozny. Sergei Kovalyov, Russia's human rights commissioner, informed the UN that Russia was obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the war zone, including medicines to save the wounded^[42].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers left Chechens without drinking water.

Russian pilots and artillerymen more than once destroyed substations and the water supply system in Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria, leaving the townspeople without water^[23][139].

Russian servicemen fired from armored personnel carriers and helicopters at Chechens who were going for water (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[72][24].

On 31 January 1995, the occupiers shelled Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, from tanks and helicopters, leaving the Chechens in the village without water (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[8]. In February 1995, Russian artillery shelled and aircraft bombed Argun, a town east of Grozny. Chechens in Argun hid in basements and went out for water only between seven and nine in the morning, while the crews of Russian helicopters fired at passers-by in the streets^[72].

During the assault on Grozny in February 1995, Russian servicemen in the Katayama settlement within the city limits shot 28-year-old Dzhenchuraeva with the cannon of an armored personnel carrier as she was carrying water. Her brother tried to carry the body home and survived, although the occupiers wounded him in the shoulder. Lipkan Bazaeva, a teacher from Grozny and the wife of the murdered woman's cousin, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Prague in May 1996: "She went for water, believing that a woman would not be killed"^[24].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) and OMON troops (police special forces) stormed Samashki. On 8 April, Russian soldiers searched houses in the village and set fire to most of them (see: "Total Destruction of Infrastructure"). On the morning of 8 April, Russian servicemen drove Yuzbek Shovkhalov, an elder of Samashki, into the basement of his house on Kooperativnaya Street, and the basement filled with smoke. In April 1995, the elder told the observer mission of Russian human rights organizations how he ran out of there with burns: "I run, thinking, at least there was a flask of water standing there. No, they had carried it out, they're drinking the water. They're all sitting on the other side of the street, sitting, laughing, cracking sunflower seeds"^[8][1]. On 10 April, a Chechen woman named Karnukaeva of Rabochaya Street told the mission about soldiers in the neighbors' yard, where she had hidden on 8 April: "They say to the old woman: 'Is this your drinking water?' She says: 'Yes, it's clean water.' 'Go on, you drink it first.' She took a mug, drank some water, then they drank themselves and spilled it, didn't leave a drop. They turned over all those barrels and flasks and poured out the water. In case anything happened, if there was a fire, so that no one could put it out. That's probably what they were thinking"^[8].

By 12 April 1995, Russian servicemen had shot through the water barrels in Samashki, and the Chechens in the village had nothing to keep water in^[23]. The diary of a Memorial observer records on 14 April that the village was receiving no water, gas or electricity. That day, the command of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs eased entry into Samashki, and Kosov, an adviser to the president of Russian-controlled Ingushetia, organized the delivery of bread and water to the village^[48].

In the spring of 1996, a year after Russian troops captured Grozny, there was no water in the city's apartments, and there were two to three liters per person a day. The townspeople walked 5-10 kilometers for water and took it from the dirty Sunzha river, which flows through the city^[24]. In August 1996, Russian pilots bombed Grozny, and artillerymen shelled the city (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). A bulletin of the International Committee of the Red Cross of 2 September 1996 says that after these strikes all 80 thousand people in Grozny were left without drinking water, and at the end of August Red Cross engineers reached the city's only working pumping station and began distributing water, three liters per person a day^[139].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russian servicemen and police officers extorted money, gold, cars and other valuables from Chechens.

At checkpoints, Russian police officers and soldiers took money from drivers for passage and took cars away from Chechens. Such posts stood in Grozny at every stop and on the road from Gudermes to Argun, towns east of Grozny^[24].

Russian guards of the filtration camps and of the pits at military units demanded money from detained Chechens for their release (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[23][100].

Russian troops surrounded villages and took money from Chechens in exchange for not bombing them and for letting the Chechens leave^[24][154]. Russian servicemen demanded weapons that the Chechens did not have and took money instead. Often, a month after the payment, a new Russian unit surrounded the village and demanded money again^[24].

On 7-8 April 1995, Russian soldiers who were storming Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, brought the men from Vygonnaya Street out of a basement and demanded gold and money from the women in exchange for not taking the men away. The occupiers took the men, stripped and bound with wire, to the pits near Assinovskaya, a neighboring stanitsa, and to the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[48]. In May, the headquarters of the joint grouping of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Ichkeria, in a "Memo", prohibited soldiers at the posts from taking belongings and food from Chechens passing through^[1].

In the summer of 1995, the puppet government in Grozny began paying compensation from the Russian budget to Chechens whose homes the occupiers had destroyed^[137][1]. Officials of the puppet government who distributed the payments usually kept 15 to 50% of each family's money for themselves. By the count of the Chechen journalist Musa Muradov, of the 60 thousand families of Grozny who had lost their housing, no more than one and a half thousand received money^[137]. In the autumn of 1995, Russian soldiers at the checkpoints near Achkhoy-Martan and Sernovodsk, villages in the west of Ichkeria, took from everyone who entered or left the village 100,000 rubles (23 dollars) at Achkhoy-Martan and 50,000 rubles at Sernovodsk^[42].

Before the assault in March 1996, Chechens in Samashki sold cows to buy weapons, hand them over to the Russian servicemen and save their homes. Zinaida Baisayeva, who lived in the village, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow on 22 April 1996: "Approximately 9-10 times we gave money so that they would not bomb us. But they shelled us anyway every night." On the night of 14 March 1996, the occupiers surrounded Samashki. Russian servicemen told the village head and the elders that they would give a "corridor" so that fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria could leave the village at night, and that they would then check passports and leave. Zainap Baisayeva from this village told the Glasnost tribunal: "For this one-hour corridor they asked, as I was told, 58 million rubles. This money was collected from the residents of the village. My brother gave a million [rubles] — the last he had earned… All the money was handed over to the checkpoint, to whoever was in command there." For a second "corridor", for Chechen civilians to leave the village, the Russian servicemen demanded 10 thousand dollars. Chechens from Samashki told human rights defenders of Memorial that on 14 March the village head took weapons and 50 million rubles (10 thousand dollars) to Russian checkpoint No. 13. On the morning of 15 March, the occupiers gave the Chechens two hours to leave the village (see: "Sham Corridor") and began the assault^[24].

In the spring of 1996, the occupiers and the puppet government in Grozny forced villages to sign "Protocols on Peace and Accord" and to surrender weapons (see: "Collective Punishment")^[1]. Chechens in Gekhi, a village southwest of Grozny, paid Russian servicemen about a hundred million rubles when signing the "Protocol on Peace and Accord". In Mesker-Yurt, a village southeast of Grozny, the occupiers received a hundred thousand rubles from each house^[24]. On 7 April 1996, Russian servicemen ordered Saidash Shamakhurov from Gikalovo, a village south of Grozny, to drive in his own car to Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny. On 27 April, the occupiers exchanged him for a captured Russian soldier (see: "Hostage-Taking"), and three days later returned his car to him, taking 2,000 dollars and one more prisoner for it^[31]. In April 1996, the occupiers surrounded Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, and Russian soldiers at the post did not let Chechens out of the town, demanded money from them and fired into the ground in front of them. On 26 April, more than a thousand Chechen women and children left Shali on foot^[1][154].

The 1995 report of the observer mission of Russian human rights organizations says that Russian guards extorted money where they held detained Chechens before sending them to filtration camps, because no one controlled these places and they had no official status^[100].

Despite the "Memo", Russian servicemen and police officers kept extorting payments at checkpoints until the end of the war in 1996, and Chechens complained about them to human rights defenders^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers shelled and bombed entire villages and towns of Ichkeria for refusing to submit.

As a rule, the command of the occupation troops demanded that the Chechens in the villages hand over their weapons, not fire at Russian soldiers, or make the Armed Forces of Ichkeria leave the village^[1]. In other villages Russian commanders demanded the handover of captured Russian servicemen or passage for their vehicles through the village^[24][155]. Commanders of the occupation troops, citing their intelligence data, demanded that the Chechens in a village hand over an arbitrary number of assault rifles in exchange for safety^[121].

If a village did not meet the demands, Russian troops surrounded it. The occupiers did not let Chechens out of the village and did not let food and medicine through to them (see: "Medical and Humanitarian Blockade"). Russian artillery shelled the surrounded village, and aircraft bombed it (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). The Russian military opened fire before the deadline they themselves had set, or after the village had handed over its weapons^[1][121].

After fighters of the army of Ichkeria took Russian special forces soldiers prisoner on 8 January 1995, Russian pilots in helicopters threatened to bomb Komsomolskoye, Alkhazurovo and Roshni-Chu, villages to the southwest of Grozny, and then struck the outskirts of Roshni-Chu, although the special forces soldiers were not in the village^[1][24]. In January the crews of Russian helicopters scattered over Bamut, a village to the southwest of Grozny, leaflets of the command of the occupation troops threatening to respond with "powerful missile and bomb strikes" if fire was opened from the village at Russian troops^[1]. In January the occupiers scattered over Shali, a town to the southeast of Grozny, leaflets threatening to open "return fire" "on the whole village" for "a single shot [toward the occupiers] from Shali"^[1][8].

From 26 February to 3 March 1995 the Russian military at the post near Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, threatened the elders with a strike on the village if they did not persuade their fellow villagers to "settle the matter peacefully"^[8]. On 8 March the elders undertook to get the army of Ichkeria out of the village and hand over heavy weapons, and the Russian general Kosolapov signed an agreement with them under which Russian troops would not enter Samashki and would not use force against Chechen civilians (see: "False Guarantees of Safety"). The elders fulfilled their obligation, but from 13 March the Russian military at the posts let no one out of Samashki for 25 days and did not let food and medicine through (see: "Transport Blockade")^[8]. On 6 April Romanov, the deputy commander of the occupation troops, demanded that by seven in the morning of 7 April the village hand over 264 assault rifles, two machine guns and one infantry fighting vehicle and let the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) into the village, but the elders replied that there were not that many weapons in the village^[1][8]. On 7 April a Russian general who refused to give his name gave the elders until 4 p.m., but the occupiers began shelling the village with mortars earlier. Yuzbek Shovkhalov, an elder of Samashki who took part in the talks with the command of the occupation troops, told a Memorial observer on 9 April 1995 what happened when Russian troops stormed the village: "'Give us the militants [this is what the Russians called the Armed Forces of Ichkeria].' I say: 'There are no militants here'… Armored personnel carriers... They fire from heavy machine guns. Right in the village. At the house where people live... Either they burn the house down, or the house perishes, anything at all..."^[8]. On 7 and 8 April the Russian military killed 103 Chechen civilians in Samashki, whom human rights defenders recorded by name (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8][1].

On 3 March 1995 the command of the occupation troops demanded that the Chechens in Argun, Gudermes and Shali, towns to the east and southeast of Grozny, persuade the Armed Forces of Ichkeria to leave in order to save people's lives^[1][8]. On 23 March the occupiers captured Argun, and on 30-31 March, when the defenders were forced to leave, Gudermes and Shali (see: "Military Intervention")^[1]. On 8 April Labunets, the commander of the occupation troops in the south of Ichkeria, threatened in writing to shell Zakan-Yurt, a village to the east of Samashki, with artillery if the Chechens in the village did not hand over their weapons and surrender the fighters of the army of Ichkeria, and on 11 April soldiers of the Russian MVD searched every yard and found no weapons^[48][8]. In April 1995 the Chechens in Bachi-Yurt, Koshkeldy and Alleroy, villages in the east of Ichkeria, under threat of bombing bought assault rifles and handed them over to the occupiers, but the Russian military shelled these villages anyway (see: "Total Destruction of Infrastructure")^[121][1]. The Internal Troops of the Russian MVD and the Russian police kept Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria where more than 10,000 people and more than 3,000 refugees lived, encircled for more than five months, from 30 September 1995 until the storming in March 1996^[155][1]. Artemov, the commander of the occupation troops in the southwest of Ichkeria, threatened the village in writing with artillery and air strikes if the village did not disarm about a hundred fighters of the army of Ichkeria and let Russian vehicles through Sernovodsk^[155].

On 11 February 1996 the command of the occupation troops demanded that the Chechens in Novogroznensky, a settlement in the east of Ichkeria, hand over their weapons and expel the defenders, and when the defenders did not leave, the occupiers killed at least 50 Chechen civilians in the settlement by shelling and storming (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. In March 1996 the Russian military demanded that Katyr-Yurt, a village to the southwest of Grozny, hand over assault rifles and ten captured Russian soldiers who were not in the village, and on 28 March a Russian pilot dropped bombs on the village and killed nine people from the Khazhgiriyev family (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[24][1].

In the spring of 1996 the command of the occupation troops and the puppet government in Grozny forced villages to sign a "Protocol on Peace and Accord". Under this document a village undertook to surrender the defenders, hand over weapons and let the Russian military in, and for a single fighter of the army of Ichkeria found in the village the occupiers threatened to shoot Chechens and destroy the village^[24]. On 31 March 1996 Russian President Yeltsin, by Decree No. 435, made the signing of such protocols part of his program for Ichkeria^[156], and Russian aircraft bombed villages that refused to sign the protocol^[1].

On 17 April 1996 the Chechens in Chiri-Yurt, a village to the south of Grozny, released captured Russian servicemen under an ultimatum from General Shamanov, but as the occupiers' vehicles were leaving the village, Russian tank crews with a single shot razed to the ground the house of the family of Abdulla Dakhayev, the representative of the authorities of Ichkeria in Chiri-Yurt^[1]. On 19 April the occupiers surrounded Shali, and on 25 April demanded that the town surrender the defenders, hand over weapons and release captured Russian soldiers. On the same day Russian pilots bombed the town (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[154][1]. At the end of April the elders of Komsomolskoye signed a peace agreement with the occupiers, but from 30 April to 1 May Russian pilots bombed the village and wounded four Chechen civilians^[157]. On 6 May Russian troops captured Shali without a fight; there turned out to be no defenders or prisoners there^[1]. On that day the occupiers surrounded Komsomolskoye and threatened to destroy it if the fighters of the army of Ichkeria did not hand over their weapons by nightfall, but at about three in the afternoon, before the deadline, Russian artillery opened fire and killed several Chechen civilians^[24].

On 8 July 1996 Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation troops, at a press conference in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, threatened Ichkeria with retaliatory measures if Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president of Ichkeria, did not return all Russian prisoners on 9 July^[158]. From 9 to 15 July Russian troops surrounded and shelled Gekhi, a village to the southwest of Grozny where a unit of the army of Ichkeria was stationed, and Makhkety, a mountain village in the southeast of the republic. In Gekhi the occupiers killed 19 Chechen civilians, in Makhkety 25 (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[83][9][159]. From 10 July the occupation command introduced a curfew in Ichkeria and banned driving into and out of Grozny by car^[1][9].

The Russian military destroyed the houses of relatives of the leaders of Ichkeria and the commanders of its army^[1][9]. On 15 July 1996 the crews of seven Russian helicopters struck Starye Atagi, a village to the south of Grozny, with missiles and destroyed the house of the mother of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president of Ichkeria, but the mother and the neighbors survived^[9][83]. In the summer of 1996 the Russian military blew up the house of the father of Shamil Basayev, one of the commanders of the army of Ichkeria, in the mountain village of Vedeno^[1].

On 19 August 1996 Pulikovsky, the acting commander of the occupation troops, demanded that the army of Ichkeria leave Grozny and gave the citizens of Ichkeria 48 hours to leave the city, where, according to some data, at least 50-70 thousand people remained, and according to others, 300 thousand^[1][9][27]. The general threatened after that deadline to strike the city with aircraft, artillery and multiple rocket launchers, which cannot fire with precision, and on the night of 20 August, without waiting for the deadline to expire, the occupiers resumed the shelling and bombing of Grozny^[9].

The human rights defenders of Memorial write that the command of the occupation troops made its demands of a whole village and, in case of refusal, threatened reprisals against everyone who lived in it^[1]. A Human Rights Watch report of May 1995 says that demands to hand over weapons sometimes serve the Russian military as a pretext for attacking a village or for detaining Chechens^[121]. It is unknown how many such crimes the occupation troops committed from December 1994 to August 1996.

On 21 August 1996 General Lebed, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, canceled General Pulikovsky's threat to strike Grozny and called it a bad joke to journalists^[9][160].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russian leaders and the command of the occupation troops declared that fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria would be shot on the spot and destroyed.

The top leaders of Russia declared to journalists in Moscow that the fighters of Ichkeria had to be destroyed^[100][75], and the command of the occupation troops declared it in ultimatums and orders to the troops^[1].

In February 1995, Kolesnikov, the Chief of the General Staff of Russia, said of the Chechens captured by Russian troops: "Prisoners are treated well, although we don't have to, because by law one could shoot them on the spot as bandits" (this is what Russia called fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria)^[100][72].

On 10 January 1996, Russian pilots in helicopters fired missiles at the head of a column of buses that had crossed from Russian-controlled Dagestan into Ichkeria^[1]. In the buses were fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria under the command of Salman Raduyev and the hostages they had seized in Kizlyar, a town in Dagestan. Human rights defenders of Memorial write, citing Valery Yakov, a correspondent of the Moscow newspaper Izvestia who spoke with the special forces soldiers: "The special forces landing party set down nearby had orders to destroy the terrorists [this is what the Russians called fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria] who remained alive after the strike"^[1]. With the first missiles the pilots destroyed the Russian police car that was escorting the column, and ceased fire. The landing party did not attack the buses. The fighters of the army of Ichkeria with the hostages returned to Dagestan and dug in at Pervomayskoye, a village near the border of Ichkeria^[1].

On 15 January 1996, Russian troops under the direction of FSB director Barsukov and Minister of Internal Affairs Kulikov began to storm Pervomayskoye^[1]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write: "During the blockade, the attempted assault and the shelling of the village of Pervomayskoye, the main task of the federal side [the Russian troops] was not to free the hostages but to destroy the terrorists. This criminal approach led to the death and wounding of some of the hostages." On 18 January, most of the fighters of the army of Ichkeria broke out of the encirclement and returned to Ichkeria, taking hostages with them. According to a memorandum of the security committee of the Russian parliament, 16 hostages died in Pervomayskoye^[1]. On 20 January, Minister of Internal Affairs Kulikov said in an interview with the newspaper Rossiyskiye Vesti that Russian troops had killed 153 fighters of the army of Ichkeria in Pervomayskoye and captured about 40. The occupiers sent all the prisoners to a filtration camp^[161]. Russia exchanged the prisoners for the police officers whom Salman Raduyev's fighters had taken with them from Pervomayskoye, and the bodies of the killed fighters for the civilian hostages taken to Ichkeria^[1].

On 15 January 1996, the day of the assault on Pervomayskoye, Yeltsin said of Salman Raduyev's fighters: "We still want these terrorists to be punished. And, in general, uprooted from the Chechen land"^[75]. On 16 January, Yegorov, head of the Russian president's administration, said that he was "in favor… of all the bandit formations [this is what Russia called the Armed Forces of Ichkeria]… being destroyed"^[75]. On 19 August 1996, Pulikovsky, the commander of the occupation troops, demanded that the Armed Forces of Ichkeria leave Grozny, gave Chechen civilians 48 hours to leave the city and announced that he would then strike "at the locations of the militants" with aircraft, artillery and multiple rocket launchers, which cannot fire with precision. On the night of 20 August, without waiting for the deadline to expire, Russian troops again began shelling and bombing Grozny (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers killed detained Chechens without trial.

In early 1995, during "zachistki" ("sweeps", as Russians called house searches and detentions of Chechens) in Grozny, Russian servicemen shot peaceful Chechens dead right after detaining them^[1]. Russian escorts killed them on the way, in the backs of trucks and in columns on foot^[1][8].

At the bases and positions of their units, Russian servicemen beat detained Chechens to death or shot them. The occupiers secretly buried the bodies of the killed near their positions and did not return them to the families (see: "Desecration of the Dead")^[1][23][24].

In early January 1995, Russian soldiers detained more than 60 men near the cannery in Grozny. On 3 January, an escort drove them to the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia. When one of the two trucks broke down, the guards laid everyone in the back of the second one, in six layers and more. Those lying in the lower layers suffocated, and the escort shot at those who tried to move^[1]. Zakrail Vairayev rode in that truck. On 28 February 1995, in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, he told a human rights defender of the American organization Freedom House about the journey. The record of his testimony says: "The vehicle was carrying 63 people. On the way, two suffocated, and six were shot right there, in the vehicle. So the dead rode along with the rest all the way to Mozdok. They beat us the whole way"^[100]. Among those shot dead in the back of the truck was Ruslan Kasayev, a young man from Grozny^[1].

On 28 January 1995, Russian soldiers led the Khamidov brothers under escort across the grounds of a unit of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) on Mayakovsky Street in Grozny. A neighbor heard one of the brothers shout that they were being led to be shot, and told their father Khusein Khamidov, who from January 1995 had been searching for people missing in Ichkeria and opening mass graves. From the neighbor's words, the father found the grave at the place the Russian military unit had left^[1]. On 24 April 1996, in Moscow, Khusein Khamidov told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation: "On 2 April [1995] I dug up a burial of five bodies in the yard of a private house at 16 Mayakovsky Street, and among them were my sons. … Their legs were tied with rope, all their teeth were knocked out, there were marks of severe beatings on their bodies". Of other graves the brothers' father told the tribunal: "On the basis of the exhumations we carried out, I can state that people were shot at the former locations of [Russian] military units. They were taken away in galoshes, in house clothes, with pillowcases pulled over their heads. Many of the exhumed bodies had their hands and feet tied with barbed wire, and there were numerous knife wounds"^[24]. On 17 May 1995, the prosecutor of the occupation administration in the Zavodskoy district of Grozny opened a case into the murder of the brothers. Russian military prosecutors received the case and suspended it because they had not found the culprits^[1].

In April 1995, Russian servicemen detained three Chechens near the filtration camp on the northeastern outskirts of Grozny; they had come for a released relative. The relative found their bodies in a sewer pipe a kilometer and a half from there: the eyes of the killed had been gouged out and their ears cut off, and each had 15 bullet wounds^[23]. On 7-8 April 1995, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Russian police officers, during searches in Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, shot detained Chechen men in courtyards, and the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations named 27 of them (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8]. The Russian escort that led detained Chechens from Samashki to a military unit in the hills north of the village shot three of them dead on the way: one of them, wounded, a soldier killed on the order of the escort commander^[8][1]. On 9 May 1995, soldiers of the 503rd regiment of the Russian army detained three Chechens from Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, at a checkpoint. After the regiment left on 3 June, relatives found the bodies of two of them secretly buried in a field near Shali, and on 6 June the body of the third at a cemetery; all the bodies bore marks of torture^[23][1].

On 23 February 1996, when the Russian 58th Army was advancing on Bamut, a village southwest of Grozny, soldiers of that army put Sharip Batayev, a Chechen from Arshty, a village in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, onto an armored personnel carrier. On 20 March, investigators from Ingushetia found his body in a shallow grave near the position of the reconnaissance troops of the 693rd regiment of the 58th Army: the occupiers had broken his wrists and shot him in the back of the head^[1][24]. From 3 to 9 March 1996, Russian troops stormed Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and soldiers detained a young Chechen woman in the street and took her into a neighboring house, where her body was later found^[162][135]. On 20 March, seven Russian servicemen landed from a helicopter at a dairy farm near Nagornoye, a village close to Grozny, lined up the peaceful Chechens who were hiding in a barn and shot the youngest men. Sources differ: Human Rights Watch writes of two brothers killed, while the Chechen Women's Committee named five people shot at the farm and Umar Tuzhuyev, whom the servicemen threw alive out of the helicopter^{[31][107][24]}.

On 28 March 1996, the occupiers gave up three Chechens and the bodies of two more detainees in exchange for five of their soldiers, and on one of the bodies Sultan Kacheyev, a commander of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, saw a bayonet wound (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[31][107]. On 30 April, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs detained Chechens, residents of the city, at a checkpoint in Grozny and threw them into a pit in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny. The guards beat two of them to death; the rest were taken out of Khankala on 3 May by the Russian criminal investigation police, and a prosecutor of the puppet government confirmed that both had died of beatings and had had no connection to the army of Ichkeria^[1]. On 12 May, Russian troops seized Kharsenoy, a mountain village in the south of Ichkeria, and soldiers shot dead on the road six young Chechens who had left the village, and did not return their bodies to their relatives. In the village, the soldiers shot dead another young Chechen who asked them not to enter the mosque^[24]. On 17 August 1996, masked Russian servicemen searched houses near the republican hospital in Grozny. When the occupiers left the block, relatives found in a neighboring yard the bodies of two Chechens, cousins, with their hands tied with wire and marks of torture^[81].

On 26 March 1996, the UN Secretary-General transmitted to the UN Commission on Human Rights reports that Russian troops had executed captured Chechen men without trial: peaceful people and soldiers of the army of Ichkeria^[42]. The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Russian servicemen executed people in Ichkeria without trial. In their conclusion, escorts and guards felt unpunishable in the first hours and days after a detention because the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs counted a detainee's term of custody from the hour he was brought to a filtration camp^[1][8]. It is unknown how many detained Chechens the occupiers killed from December 1994 to August 1996. In early 1997, the human rights defenders of "Memorial" wrote of detained and missing Chechens: "Many of them have died, and now it is necessary to find the places of their burial, exhume and identify the bodies"^[103].

Russian military prosecutors put Sokolov, the former commander of the 503rd regiment, on trial for the murder of three Chechens from Shali, but a military court returned the case to the prosecutors, and by the spring of 1998 they had not completed it (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers beat and tortured detained Chechens.

Russian soldiers together with police officers beat them at checkpoints and during "zachistki" ("sweeps", as Russians called house searches and detentions of Chechens)^[8]. The occupiers' escorts beat them in trucks and helicopters. On unloading, the soldiers made them run between two rows of guards, who beat the running men with clubs and rifle butts^[1][8].

During interrogations, Russian servicemen and police officers demanded that Chechens admit they had fought, name soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria and the places where weapons were hidden^[1]. In pits, prison vans and tanks, Russian guards held them for several days with their hands tied, blindfolded, without water or food^[1][31]. The occupiers released the beaten prisoners without charges or gave them up for exchange for captured Russian servicemen (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[1].

Russian servicemen and police officers, from soldiers at checkpoints to military investigators at bases, tortured Chechens from December 1994 to September 1996. On 25 December 1994, near the settlement of Dolinsky northwest of Grozny, Russian soldiers detained and beat Ali Israilov from Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria. The guards of the camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, beat him for three more days and released him. After the beatings, Ali Israilov spent a month and a half in treatment^[100].

Until the end of January 1995, the OMON from Ryazan, a Russian police unit, guarded the filtration camp of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Mozdok and tortured detained Chechens during interrogations in prison railcars (see: "Filtration Camp System"). The guards whom the Ministry of Internal Affairs sent to replace them on 24-26 January did not torture during interrogations, but beat the prisoners^[1].

On 1 January 1995, Russian soldiers detained Zakrail Vairayev near the cannery in Grozny, and the guards in Mozdok and in Pyatigorsk, a city in the south of Russia, beat him so badly that his chest cracked and his tuberculosis flared up. The guards of the Mozdok camp left him, sick, in a prison railcar for eight days and then sent him to a hospital in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia^[100]. From 3 January to 15 February 1995, the guards of the camp near the cannery in Grozny, the escorts and the guards of the prisons in Pyatigorsk and in Stavropol, another city in the south of Russia, beat Magomed Meiriev from Grozny, and in Pyatigorsk they set a dog on him. On 15 February, the occupiers released him in Mozdok with scars from rifle butts and bites^[100]. On 23 January 1995, at checkpoint No. 13 between Sernovodsk and the neighboring village of Samashki, officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs beat Akhmed Idrisov from Grozny, threatening to kill him, and on 31 January released him as innocent, with broken ribs^[100]. In the spring of 1995, the guards of the camp near the cannery in Grozny gave the prisoners urine instead of water^[24]. On 25 March 1995, Russian soldiers detained the Chechen Isani Khanoyev in his home in Assinovskaya, a stanitsa in the west of Ichkeria. The guards of the military unit near the stanitsa beat him at night and tortured him with electric current, and on 6 April the Ministry of Internal Affairs released him from Mozdok as innocent^[1].

From the end of January 1995, Russian servicemen held detained Chechens in pits and prison vans at military units, where human rights defenders and prosecutors were not allowed. There were such pits in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, and near Assinovskaya^[1].

On 7 April 1995, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) stormed Samashki. That day, officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs detained at a checkpoint Makhmudemin Iziev from Samashki, who was leaving with his family for Sernovodsk, and sent him by helicopter to the field command post of the Russian troops near Assinovskaya^[1]. On 8 April, soldiers of the Internal Troops beat Chechen men and teenagers with rifle butts during searches in Samashki, and at the military unit north of the village and near Assinovskaya soldiers set dogs on them^[8][48][17]. Near Assinovskaya, the guards held Makhmudemin Iziev for three days without water or food in a prison van at the bottom of a pit. During interrogations, the servicemen beat him in the kidneys and the chest, attached wires to his neck and tortured him with electric current, which left burns^[8][1]. On 10 April, the occupiers sent him by helicopter to the filtration camp in Mozdok, and that day six underage Chechens from Samashki were released from there bruised and with bite marks^[8][48][17]. Before the visit of representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross on 11-13 April, the camp guards threatened the detained Chechens: "They will leave, and you will stay here"^[8]. On 18 April, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs released Makhmudemin Iziev as innocent. On 20 April, in Sernovodsk, he told the "Memorial" observers about Mozdok: "During interrogations they beat me again and threatened to shoot me. The investigator himself did not beat me; people in masks did the beating when he left the compartment"^[1].

In the summer of 1995, the guards near Assinovskaya hung Ramzan Isayev from Alkhan-Yurt, a village southwest of Grozny, by his handcuffs, burned his feet with a torch, squeezed his head with a metal hoop and tortured him with electric current, and then the occupiers gave him up in exchange for a captive from the Russian army^[1]. In July 1995, Russian soldiers put Mikael Ivgiev, a journalist of the Chechen magazine "Orga", for two weeks into a tank buried in the ground in Khankala, where the servicemen tortured him with electric current and hung him by his hands tied behind his back; Mikael Ivgiev survived^[1]. On 23 December 1995, Russian servicemen detained Ruslan Soslambekov at a checkpoint at the entrance to Grozny and held him for 28 days in a camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in garages on the outskirts of the city, where the guards, in front of him, set dogs on prisoners and beat their insides to a pulp, and then released him^[23].

In early 1996, the guards of the camp in Grozny hung a Chechen horizontally and beat him, and the doctors of City Hospital No. 9 treated him for broken ribs^[31][107]. In February 1996, the occupiers brought for exchange to Shatoy, a district center in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria, a captured Chechen beaten so badly that he was carried out of the armored personnel carrier in people's arms, and the army of Ichkeria gave up Russian soldiers for him^[1]. In March 1996, soldiers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs held three Chechens from the checkpoint between Goity and Starye Atagi, villages south of Grozny, for thirteen days in a railway tank car in Khankala, staged their execution and cut them with a knife, and in April military investigators in Khankala drove needles under the fingernails of Saidash Shamakhurov from the village of Gikalovo. The occupiers gave all four up for exchange (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[31].

In May 1995, Sergei Kovalyov, head of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights defenders, wrote that his group had interviewed more than a hundred Chechens, former prisoners of the Russian occupiers. According to him, the occupiers beat and humiliated almost every one of them, and tortured many^[163]. In September 1995, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture wrote to the government of Russia that camp guards systematically beat many prisoners to extract confessions of support for Dzhokhar Dudayev^[17]. The human rights defenders of "Memorial" write that most of the people who passed through the filtration camps complained of cruel treatment, and that forensic medical examinations confirm their accounts. According to the "Memorial" report, in the pits at military units the occupiers tortured more and more often, and near Assinovskaya also in 1996^[1]. In January 1997, the human rights defenders of Human Rights Watch wrote that in 1996 Russian servicemen continued to torture Chechens in Khankala^[31]. It is unknown how many such crimes the occupation troops committed from December 1994 to September 1996. The human rights defenders of "Memorial" published the accounts of detained Chechens about beatings and torture in the camps in the winter and spring of 1995^[100].

Russian courts convicted not a single occupier for the torture and abuse of Chechens (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. Russian servicemen held Chechens at their bases in Grozny and in Khankala at least until the end of September^[1]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers burned the bodies of the Chechens they had killed, cut off the ears of the dead, secretly buried bodies in unmarked graves and did not give them back to the families.

Russian servicemen killed detained Chechens and secretly buried the bodies near their positions, and such graves were often mined^[1]. The occupiers did not let relatives onto the grounds of their units, and families found the graves only when the unit had left^[1][23].

In captured villages, Russian soldiers threw the bodies of the Chechens they had killed into houses they had set on fire, or doused them with gasoline and set them alight^[8][24]. The occupiers cut off the ears of dead Chechens^[31][24].

Russian servicemen brought bodies in a "Ural" truck to the Karpinsky cemetery in the west of Grozny from the checkpoints and from the filtration camps to which the occupiers took detained Chechens. Gravediggers laid them in fresh pits, three to five in each^[23]. At the start of the war, the Russian army took some of the bodies to Rostov, a city in the south of Russia, to the refrigerator railcars of its 124th medical laboratory, and did not give them back to the families of the dead^[164][24].

On 17 December 1994, Russian soldiers in armored personnel carriers shot up a column of cars with refugees from Grozny near the border with Russian-controlled Ingushetia and killed ten people. The occupiers took the bodies away, and the Russian police in Ingushetia found only one of them^[1]. On 31 December 1994, the occupiers detained two young Chechens in the basement of a hospital in Grozny, where they were hiding from the shelling. The parents of one of them later collected his body from a morgue in Moscow and buried him at home, while the relatives of the other had still not found him by 2015^[165]. From December 1994 to May 1995, the occupiers detained 27 Chechens in Grozny and took them to the filtration camp in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, and by April 1996 their bodies were brought back from there. Those whom the Russian escort shot or threw out of the vehicles on the way to Mozdok were buried unidentified by villagers, and relatives later found them by descriptions of the bodies and clothes^[24].

On 28 January 1995, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) led two brothers, aged 18 and 21, under escort through their unit on Mayakovsky Street in Grozny, shot them and secretly buried them in the yard of a house on the grounds of the unit. On 2 April, when the unit had left, their father Khusein Khamidov found the grave from a neighbor's account, took the bodies out of the ground in the presence of a forensic doctor and buried his sons by his house^[1][24][166]. At the end of March 1995, criminal investigators from Moscow began opening the pits with bodies at the cemetery near the cannery in the Zavodskoy district of Grozny. Forensic doctors of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs recorded the cause of death as shooting, death by fire or knife wounds, and some of the bodies had no head^[23][24].

On 7 April 1995, the occupation troops stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria. On 7 and 8 April, Russian servicemen went from house to house and killed Chechen civilians (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). The 1995 report of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations says: "Numerous accounts by witnesses have been recorded of the deliberate burning by Russian servicemen of the bodies of dead residents." The Mission named 13 people whose bodies the occupiers had burned. On the evening of 7 April, Russian soldiers killed Ali Sugaipov, Emin Nadyrov, Khamzat Kharkharoyev and his son Akhmed, and on the morning of 8 April fellow villagers found their burned bodies in one yard^[8]. Russian tank crews wounded 62-year-old Dogu Tsatishayev, and soldiers shot him dead at point-blank range with an automatic rifle in house 93 on Sharipov Street, poured gasoline over the body and set it on fire^[8]. On 20 April, Tamara Mutiyeva from Samashki told observers of the Russian human rights organization "Memorial" that Russian servicemen had killed and burned her half-sister. Andrei Blinushov, one of the observers, recorded in his diary: "To this day the sister and mother of the murdered girl are collecting pieces of her bones in the ruins of the house"^[48].

On 9 May 1995, soldiers of the 503rd regiment of the Russian army unlawfully detained at a checkpoint Ayub Domayev, Aslambek Suleimanov and Shamkhan Tashukhadzhiyev from Shali, a town southeast of Grozny, and killed all three (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees"). Vladimir Yemelyanenko, a correspondent of the Moscow weekly Moskovskiye Novosti, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow on 21 February 1996 that the military did not let the relatives onto the grounds of the regiment and in answer to their questions "said that no such people had passed through here"^[23]. On 3 June, the 503rd regiment left its camp in a field near Shali, and a conscript soldier who had fled the regiment showed the families where the soldiers had buried the three Chechens. Near the camp of the reconnaissance company, at a depth of two meters, the relatives found the bodies of Ayub Domayev and Aslambek Suleimanov. In another place in the field they dug up the car in which the three Chechens had been traveling, crushed by tank tracks. On 6 June, the body of Shamkhan Tashukhadzhiyev was found at the cemetery on the outskirts of Shali^[1][23].

In September 1995, Chechen women from Grozny found by the fresh pits at the Karpinsky cemetery five green military shell boxes containing bones and ashes, and handed them over to the OSCE mission. According to the expert examination, one of the boxes contained the remains of people aged 20-23, burned, doused with sulfuric acid and broken into small pieces^[23]. In early October 1995, the Czech journalist Petra Procházková filmed at the Orthodox cemetery in Grozny pits with several dozen bodies, to which the occupiers brought new bodies at night in their vehicles, and reported this to the OSCE^[24].

At the end of February 1996, Russian servicemen killed the detained Sharip Batayev, a Chechen from Arshty, a village in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, and buried the body at a depth of 20 centimeters on a hillside below the trenches of the reconnaissance troops of the 693rd regiment of the Russian 58th Army. On 20 March, investigators from Ingushetia dug up the body, and on the same day it was buried according to Muslim custom^[24]. From 3 to 9 March 1996, Russian troops stormed Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and burned the mosque there, to which on 4 March villagers had brought the bodies of Chechens killed by the occupiers in order to bury them later^[122]. On 11 March, women from Sernovodsk, whom the occupiers had let home for a few hours, found seven burned bodies by the burned-down mosque^[24]. During the assault on Sernovodsk, the crews of Russian helicopters wounded an elderly Chechen with rockets at the resort near the village where refugees lived, and the wounded man died on the threshold of his room. The occupiers searched the resort, and after that only burned remains were found where the body had been^[24]. On 20 March 1996, Russian soldiers who had landed from a helicopter near a dairy farm by Nagornoye, a village next to Grozny, shot detained unarmed Chechens there: two according to Human Rights Watch, five according to the Chechen women's committee. The killers cut off the ears of the dead and slit their stomachs with a knife^[31][24]. On 12 May 1996, Russian troops captured Kharsenoy, a mountain village in the south of Ichkeria, and shot seven young Chechens from the village. Fellow villagers buried one of them, while the bodies of the other six the occupiers never gave back to the relatives^[24]. On 15 July 1996, in the northwestern suburb of Grozny, soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs from two armored personnel carriers shot unarmed people in passenger cars. The occupiers set fire to the cars with the bodies, and cut off the ears of some of the dead^[83][1].

The 1997 report of Human Rights Watch says that from March 1995 to January 1997 the "Victims of War" society headed by Khusein Khamidov helped recover 926 bodies from mass graves in Ichkeria. Forensic doctors in Rostov established the names of 426 of them, and about 80 more mass graves had not been opened by January 1997^[31].

In June 1996, the prosecutor's office of the administration installed by Russia in Grozny handed over to Russian prosecutors 342 cases on crimes of the occupiers, among them on cut-off ears and on bodies thrown from helicopters. Russian prosecutors returned more than half of the cases for further investigation, and closed or did not consider the rest (see: "Impunity of Perpetrators")^[31]. On 3 October 1996, a month after the peace agreements in Khasavyurt, Chernomyrdin, the chairman of the Russian government, and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the acting president of Ichkeria, signed a statement in Moscow. Under it, Russia undertook to open access to burial sites for examination and excavation at Ichkeria's first request^[167]. By mid-October 1996, Russian officials, contrary to the statement, were not letting the "Victims of War" society open the graves: they said they had no bodies, or demanded bribes^[31].

In December 1997, several dozen bodies of Chechens, wrapped in blankets, still lay in the refrigerator railcars of the 124th laboratory of the Russian army in Rostov. A delegation of Ichkeria came to Rostov and asked for them back, but the laboratory staff did not return a single body^[164]. In 2019, Alexander Cherkasov of "Memorial" reported that several years earlier about a hundred unidentified remains from the time of the war had been taken out of the refrigerators of the 124th laboratory: some were sent to the Chechen Republic, others were buried under numbers in cemeteries in Moscow^[168].

In 2014, Russian servicemen found in the Oktyabrsky district of Grozny a mass grave from the first war with the remains of more than 160 people and took them to Rostov for examination. According to the experts, apart from two Russian servicemen, those lying there were most likely civilian men, women and children. On 31 December 2016, the remains of 109 people from this grave were brought from Rostov to Grozny. Relatives identified two of them by genetic profiles and took them, while the other 107 were buried in two temporary mass graves at the cemetery near the village of Pobedinskoye outside Grozny, and the relatives received no lists of the dead^[169][170].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers looted Chechen homes and carried the belongings away in military vehicles^[1].

Officers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and soldiers of the Russian Internal Troops (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), during "zachistkas" ("sweeps", as the Russians called house searches and detentions of Chechens) in Grozny, went from house to house with weapons. The occupiers took money, gold and valuables from the owners. Chechen families filed the most complaints of looting against them^[1].

From December 1994, Russian police officers and fighters of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs looted Chechen families in the stanitsa of Assinovskaya in the west of Ichkeria^[8]. In mid-January 1995, the elders let Russian troops into the stanitsa after they promised to do no harm (see: "False Guarantees of Safety"), and the occupiers looted the homes of Chechens^[72]. On 28 and 29 January, the Russian military surrounded a block in the settlement of Butenko on the outskirts of Grozny with armored personnel carriers, went from yard to yard with weapons, took a thousand dollars from Leila Bapayeva, and from her neighbor, a mother of eleven children, her "Mother Heroine" medal^[23][1]. In late January, the occupiers loaded appliances from abandoned houses of Grozny into armored personnel carriers, and a Russian captain drove a covered truck full of furniture through the city^[1][8]. In February, because of the looting in Assinovskaya, the head of the Achkhoy-Martan district in the west of Ichkeria and a representative of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria refused to let the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs into the villages of the district^[8].

In the winter of 1995, after the seizure of Grozny, the Russian military carried the belongings of Chechens on army vehicles through Ingushetia to North Ossetia, Russian-controlled republics to the west of Ichkeria. Russian traffic police recorded many such cases at their posts in Ingushetia^[1].

In February 1995, Russian Justice Minister Kovalyov and General Babichev, who commanded one of the occupiers' groupings, declared on air that soldiers who take food from abandoned houses, or whatever is lying around unguarded, commit no crime^[1].

On 1 March 1995, Sobolev, deputy director of the FSK (predecessor of today's FSB), admitted on the Vremya program of the ORT television channel that the Russian military in Ichkeria had looted. Russian soldiers who on 30 March 1995 seized Gudermes, the second-largest town of Ichkeria, took whatever they wanted at the market and did not pay^[1][34]. Until December 1995, Russian servicemen who served in Gudermes on contract in 45-day shifts got drunk before going home, entered the homes of Chechens and took chickens, geese, carpets and dishes^[34].

On 7-8 April 1995, the Internal Troops and police special forces of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and killed 103 peaceful Chechens (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). Along with armored vehicles, the occupiers brought military trucks into the village. The soldiers loaded video equipment, tape recorders, televisions, carpets and furniture into them and into armored personnel carriers, and searched women's necks for gold^[8][48]. On 13 April, Sadulla Yusupov from Samashki told Oleg Orlov, a staff member of Memorial, how he climbed out of the cellar where a Russian serviceman had wounded him with a grenade and saw three occupiers in the yard: "They dragged out this little safe, this one here. We kept money and papers in it. Two of them are opening it with something, trying to open it, and the third is guarding them and shooting chickens, into the house". The soldiers opened the safe and left. Human rights defenders of the Observer Mission found Sadulla Yusupov's house burned down, but there were no traces of fighting on its walls^[8][1].

In April 1995, Albast Madayev from Samashki wrote to Govorukhin, chairman of the Russian parliament's commission investigating the causes of the war in Ichkeria: "They burned my house with a shot from a flamethrower, killed 3 cows and 12 sheep. Of the household belongings, they took away what they could and set fire to the rest"^[48]. The commission received 221 statements from Chechens of this village. In 60 of them it is said that the Russian military took valuables, food and shot livestock from the houses, and often burned the rest (see: "Total Destruction of Infrastructure"). On 6 June, Govorukhin, chairman of the commission, told Krasnaya Zvezda, the newspaper of the Russian Ministry of Defense, that he did not believe in the looting in Samashki. Not one of the complainants received an answer^[8].

In April 1995, an officer of the Russian FSB confirmed in Ichkeria to Viktor Kurochkin and Viktor Sheinis, deputies of the Russian parliament, that soldiers of the occupation troops were looting the seized villages on a mass scale. The officer had filed a report about this to his superiors and received no answer^[1]. On the night of 7 July 1995, the Russian soldiers Korovin, Shulin and Petrov came from their unit to the settlement of Rodina to demand money and gold from Chechens, killed two of them and wounded three. A year later, a military court gave Korovin 14 years, and Shulin and Petrov six and three years^[171][1]. From 30 September 1995 to March 1996, police officers and soldiers of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs who kept Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, encircled looted Chechen families and drove away their livestock (see: "Transport Blockade")^[24]. On 14 December 1995, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Gudermes, and on 19-20 December Russian troops seized the town again. Russian soldiers lived in dachas outside the town, came every day into the homes of Chechens and took carpets, dishes, food and Red Cross medicines^[34].

In February 1996, the Russian military looted the houses that had survived the stormings in the settlement of Novogroznensky in the east of Ichkeria^[1][24]. On 9 and 10 March, the Russian military carried mattresses, refrigerators and other belongings of Chechen families out of Sernovodsk on some thirty trucks, which doctors of the international organization Doctors Without Borders counted. At the resort north of the village, Russian soldiers looted and set fire to the apartments where refugees were living^[24]. In March 1996, Russian soldiers looted the surviving houses in Samashki^[24][1]. Russian guards in the prison of Pyatigorsk, a town in the south of Russia, took fur hats, leather jackets, shoes, money and gold from 91 Chechens whom the occupiers had unlawfully detained near Samashki on 15 March 1996 (see: "Filtration Camp System"). On 19 April, the Ministry of Internal Affairs released them without charges^[31][1]. In August 1996, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria were liberating Grozny, the reconnaissance battalion of the Russian army's 205th Brigade drove townspeople out of the 16-story buildings on Altaiskaya Street near the old airport, where there was no fighting, and loaded their belongings into vehicles. When the fighting ended and the soldiers left, the townspeople found almost all the apartments looted^[1]. On 17 August 1996, soldiers of the 101st Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs searched the houses around the "15th Gorodok", their base in Grozny, took whatever they wanted and shot up the rest with assault rifles^[81].

On 20-22 August 1996, Aleksei Karmayev, a 67-year-old disabled man from Grozny, went to the headquarters of the 276th Regiment of the Russian army to demand that Russian soldiers stop looting and return his belongings. On 24 August, eight soldiers of the regiment led him away from the yard of his house on Kommunisticheskaya Street, after which the disabled man went missing (see: "Abduction of People")^[31][107].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that soon after the start of the war the occupiers began to loot and destroy the property of Chechens on a mass scale, and that Russian commanders and military prosecutors did not seriously combat the looting. By Memorial's conclusion, soldiers went on looting even after the leadership of the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, in an address to the troops in February 1995, acknowledged looting, extortion and violence against peaceful Chechens^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russian troops bombed and shelled the towns of Ichkeria without distinguishing residential houses from military targets^[1].

Russian aircraft dropped unguided bombs and cluster bombs filled with steel balls or needles on Ichkeria^[1]. The crews of Russian helicopters fired unguided rockets at towns and villages^[23][24]. The occupation troops shelled residential districts with tube artillery, mortars and the Grad and Uragan multiple rocket launchers, which cannot fire with precision^[1]. In Grozny, the capital of Ichkeria, the Russian military hit residential houses with people inside with depth charges, the kind used to sink submarines. Such a bomb pierces a dozen concrete floors and explodes inside the house^[1].

The occupiers shelled markets and hospitals^[1]. Russian troops bombed villages before a storming, after capture and during "ceasefires" with Ichkeria (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[1].

Russian pilots bombed and artillerymen shelled the towns and villages of Ichkeria throughout the war, from September 1994 to August 1996. On 2 September 1994 Russian pilots struck three villages twenty kilometers from Grozny with rockets^[89][90]. On 23 November pilots fired at a poultry farm in Shali and wounded seven Chechen civilians^[172]. On 25 November pilots struck the Grozny airport and the residential houses next to it and, according to different sources, killed three or six people^[52][173]. On 26 November, while Russian tank crews were storming Grozny, pilots fired at the city. According to the Chechenpress agency, the tank crews and pilots killed from 25 to 39 civilians^{[174][175][176]}. On 29 November pilots fired rockets at the airport and the center of Grozny and, according to the Department of State Security of Ichkeria, killed 14 people^[177][35]. On 30 November Russian aircraft bombed Grozny twice and, according to an adviser to the president of Ichkeria, killed up to 80 people^[52][178]. On 3 December 1994 a Russian pilot dropped a bomb on a five-story residential building in Argun, a town to the east of Grozny, but the bomb pierced the wall and did not explode^[23]. On 12 December Russian pilots in helicopters and aircraft bombed the residential districts of Dolinsky, a settlement to the northwest of Grozny^[82][1]. On 13 December pilots fired at four cars with refugees near the village of Novy Sharoy in the west of Ichkeria and killed three refugees^[1][23].

From 18 December 1994 Russian aircraft bombed Grozny, and from 19 December until the storming on 31 December they did so every day^[1]. Deinekin, the commander of the Russian military aviation, said in an interview with the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets on 21 March 1995 that until 29 December, because of bad weather, the pilots could not use laser- or television-guided bombs and missiles over the city. Russian pilots dropped unguided bombs on the city through the clouds from a height of five to seven kilometers when, in the commander's words, "the ground could not be seen at all"^[1]. In January and February 1995 Russian troops shelled the residential districts of Grozny with tube artillery and multiple rocket launchers, and pilots bombed the city. Andrei Mironov, a Russian human rights defender who lived in Grozny for three months, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost foundation in Moscow in February 1996: "And then the shelling ends, you walk out of the house and see: corpses here, corpses there. Old people lying. Next to them a sled, on the sled a canister of water." About the needles with which the occupiers filled shells and bombs, the human rights defender told the tribunal: "All of Grozny was strewn with them. These elements are good only for hitting unprotected people"^[23]. The human rights defenders of Memorial write that Russian pilots knowingly bombed Grozny without aiming and that such strikes inevitably killed many townspeople. By the estimate of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights organizations, from December 1994 to March 1995 the occupiers killed 25,000-29,000 civilians in the city (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[1].

On the night of 21 December 1994 Russian artillerymen hit a house in Novoartyomovo, a village near Grozny, with a shell and killed five children. Two more Chechen girls from this house died of their wounds in hospital^[1]. On 24 December, 19 unidentified bodies of townspeople killed by Russian pilots lay in the morgue of the Central Republican Hospital of Grozny^[1]. From 26 to 28 December 1994 Russian aircraft bombed about 40 villages^[1]. On 29 December the bodies of two children, two women and four more people, whom Russian artillerymen had killed while shelling the outskirts of Grozny, were brought to the morgue of the Central Republican Hospital^[1].

On 3 January 1995 Russian pilots fired at a bus stop near Starye Atagi, a village to the south of Grozny, and killed the driver of a truck standing nearby and several more people there^[72]. On that day Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs on the bazaar, the hospital and the car market of Shali^[1][23]. By the count of the human rights defender Andrei Mironov, with one bomb at the car market the pilots killed from 130 to 160 people^[23]. On 31 January artillerymen shelled Samashki and killed four people on Chapayev Street. On 2 February artillerymen hit one yard on this street with a mortar and killed a woman and a 14-year-old girl in the morning, and three people at a funeral in the afternoon^[8]. On 11 or 12 March 1995 pilots bombed Mozdokskaya Street in Shali and destroyed 68 houses on it^[1]. On 22-23 March the crew of a Russian helicopter fired at a truck with refugees near the village of Mesker-Yurt near Shali and killed the driver and a passenger^[1]. On 26 March the crews of six Russian helicopters fired rockets at Samashki and seriously wounded four people^[8]. On 6 April artillerymen shelled Niki-Khita, a mountain village in the southeast of Ichkeria, with Grad rockets and missiles and killed two Chechen children^[1][30]. On 24 April 1995 pilots bombed Nozhai-Yurt, a village in the southeast of the republic where there were no fighters of the army of Ichkeria, and killed four Chechens^[30][121]. According to the international organization Médecins Sans Frontières, in the 15 days before 27 May 1995, 74 people wounded by Russian pilots were brought to the hospital of Shatoy, a mountain village in the south of Ichkeria^[110]. On 8 October 1995 Russian pilots bombed Roshni-Chu, a village to the southwest of Grozny, and, according to the villagers, killed 28 people - Chechen civilians and fighters of the army of Ichkeria^[179][1]. From 14 to 20 December 1995 Russian troops shelled and bombed the residential districts, hospitals and mosque of Gudermes, the second-largest town of Ichkeria^[1]. Shkirko, the commander of the occupation troops, named 267 civilians killed in Gudermes^[1][34].

From 11 to 20 February 1996 Russian troops shelled Novogroznensky, a settlement in the east of Ichkeria, and, according to the Agence France-Presse agency, killed at least 50 Chechen civilians^[1]. Jaromír Štětina, a correspondent of the Czech agency Epicentrum, asked Tikhomirov, the commander of the occupation army, at a press conference whether the general knew about the civilians in the settlement. The commander answered the journalist: "We cannot establish the difference between a militant [this is what the Russians called the fighters of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria] and a civilian resident"^[24]. Until the first days of March 1996 artillerymen destroyed the villages of Alleroy and Tsentoroy, to which the defenders of the settlement had been forced to retreat, and continued the shelling after the defenders had left them. The artillerymen killed Chechen civilians in these villages^[1]. From 3 to 9 March artillerymen shelled Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and killed at least 45 civilians^[1]. From 6 to 8 March, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated most of Grozny, Russian troops shelled the residential districts of the city, and after the defenders left, its southern districts for several more days. According to the Russian military prosecutor's office, 250 civilians died in Grozny on 6-11 March^[9][1].

On the night of 14 March 1996 Russian troops surrounded Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria where about 12,000 people lived. On 15 March the Russian military gave the Chechens in the village two hours to leave before the storming, and about half of them did not manage to get out (see: "Sham Corridor"). At 10:16 Russian troops began shelling Samashki from armored personnel carriers, tanks, tube artillery and mortars, and from helicopters and aircraft, while the Chechens who remained in the village hid in cellars^[1]. Viktor Kurochkin, a deputy of the Russian parliament, told the Glasnost tribunal in Moscow on 24 April 1996: "Eight or ten 'Uragans' [multiple rocket launchers] were working there — and that is the most terrible weapon for populated areas"^[24]. The human rights defender Andrei Mironov was in Sleptsovskaya, a stanitsa in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, on 17 March, and told the tribunal on 20 April: "I counted the explosions. At first it was one explosion per second, then more. The village was shelled for about six days. Of those, roughly five days — one explosion per second or slightly more often (1-2 explosions per second), that is, no fewer than 70 thousand shells a day"^[24]. By 19 March, when Russian troops opened a way out of the encirclement, the occupiers had destroyed almost all the houses in Samashki^[1]. Sources differ on the number of Chechen civilians the occupiers killed in the village during the storming: 35 according to the villagers' list^[1] or about 600 according to a doctor who treated people in Samashki^[9][24].

On 28 March 1996 a Russian pilot dropped two bombs on Katyr-Yurt, a village to the southwest of Grozny, and killed nine people from the Khazhgiriyev family, among them two pregnant women and four children^[1][24]. On 3 and 4 April 1996 pilots bombed Shalazhi, a village to the southwest of Grozny, and killed three Chechens^[1][24]. On 25 April 1996 pilots bombed Shali, surrounded by Russian troops, where about 50 thousand civilians remained^[136]. The pilots killed Chechen civilians and wounded, according to the head of the Shali district speaking to the Interfax agency, 29 people^[1]. On that day Russian aircraft bombed Chishki, a mountain village to the south of Grozny, and killed one Chechen woman^[1]. On 7 May the crews of five Russian helicopters struck Urus-Martan, a town to the southwest of Grozny, and killed five Chechens at the market^[1][43]. On 10 and 12 May helicopter crews fired at the town again and killed one person each time^[1][24].

In July 1996 Russian troops shelled and bombed Gekhi, a village to the southwest of Grozny, and, according to the newspaper Izvestia, killed 19 Chechen civilians^[1][83]. Artillerymen shelled Makhkety, a mountain village of the Vedeno district in the southeast of Ichkeria, with Grad and Uragan rockets and by 15 July had killed 25 Chechen civilians there^[1][9][83]. On 15 July the crews of seven Russian helicopters destroyed six houses in Starye Atagi with missiles (see: "Collective Punishment")^[9][180]. In July 1996, while shelling Dargo, Belgatoy, Vedeno and other villages of the Vedeno district, Russian troops killed at least 30 Chechens^[9]. From 20 July until the first days of August 1996 Russian pilots continuously bombed the villages of five districts in the south of the republic^[1].

In August 1996, when the army of Ichkeria attacked the occupiers in Grozny, Russian pilots bombed the city although low clouds prevented them from aiming^[1]. According to journalists' estimates, from 6 to 22 August 1996 the occupiers killed about 2,000 civilian townspeople in Grozny. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that no one kept an exact count^[1]. On 7 August pilots destroyed the surgical department of City Hospital No. 4 and killed seven medical workers^[1]. On 14 August the crew of a Russian helicopter five kilometers from Grozny fired at cars with civilians and killed at least four people, among them two children^[181]. On that day Russian pilots bombed Komsomolskoye, a village to the northeast of Grozny, and killed nine Chechens^[182]. On 17 August 1996 soldiers of the 101st Brigade of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) fired with assault rifles, the machine guns of armored vehicles and mortars at the residential houses near the "15th Gorodok", their base in Grozny, and killed four people^[81]. From 19 to 21 August Russian artillerymen shelled Chernorechye, the southern district of the city^[1], Griboyedov Street^[1] and Minutka Square^[9] in Grozny, and on 20 August fired 60 Grad rockets at the city^[1][9]. In Chernorechye on 19 August artillerymen killed an elderly woman^[1]. On 21 August pilots dropped incendiary bombs from a great height on the five-story buildings on Saikhanov and Ulyanov Streets, where there were no fighters of the army of Ichkeria^[9][1]. The buildings burned out from the inside, while the people who were hiding in the cellars survived^[1].

The human rights defenders of Memorial write that firing without distinguishing targets was one of the main features of the actions of the Russian military throughout the war and that civilians suffered most from the bombing and shelling^[1]. On 25 January 1996 the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions wrote in a report to the UN Commission on Human Rights that the Russian military had killed thousands of citizens of Ichkeria, including when they deliberately and indiscriminately shelled residential districts with heavy weapons and bombed them^[30]. It is unknown how many such crimes the occupation troops committed from September 1994 to August 1996.

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers detained Chechens as vagrants and forced them to sign confessions that they had fought in the Armed Forces of Ichkeria or helped them.

In 1995, in its orders for the detention of Chechens, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs most often referred to decree No. 1815 of Russian president Yeltsin of 2 November 1993 "On Measures to Prevent Vagrancy and Begging"^[101]. Most of the detained Chechens had their documents on them, and some of them the ministry took from their own homes^[1]. The first thing the occupiers did was tear up their identity papers in front of their eyes^[163].

Russian investigators demanded that the detainees confess to helping the army of Ichkeria and told them, blindfolded, to sign papers they could not see^[163]. The occupiers extracted confessions by torture, including with electric current, in pits and prison vans at checkpoints and military units (see: "Torture and Abuse")^[1].

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs released most of the detained Chechens without charges. According to a certificate by Zlydenko, deputy head of Russia's prison service, from 11 December 1994 to 22 July 1995, 1,325 people passed through the filtration camps for detainees in Mozdok, a town in Russian-controlled North Ossetia, and in Grozny. The ministry handed a hundred of them over to investigators (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[1].

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, from 28 January 1995 to July 1996 the ministry charged 51 people of those who had passed through the camp in Grozny, released 1,024 and exchanged 109 for captured Russian servicemen^[1].

On 1 February 1995, Ilyushenko, acting prosecutor general of Russia, charged Dzhokhar Dudayev, the elected president of Ichkeria, with high treason and incitement to terrorism on the basis of a telephone conversation which the prosecutors said they had intercepted^[69]. The Prosecutor General's Office put the president of Ichkeria on a wanted list, and on 21 April 1996 the Russian military killed him near Gekhi-Chu, a village southwest of Grozny (see: "Neutralization of the Opposition")^[1][15]. On 6 April 1995, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs took 16 Chechens out of the filtration camps and forced each of them to sign a paper that called him a fighter of the army of Ichkeria, although, by their own account, none of them had fought. In Malye Atagi, a village south of Grozny, the ministry handed them over to the army of Ichkeria in exchange for a captured Russian major (see: "Hostage-Taking")^[48].

On 15 March 1996, Russian soldiers at the checkpoint near Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, detained 91 Chechens who were leaving the village before the assault. Russian investigators interrogated the detainees in the prisons of Pyatigorsk and Stavropol, cities in the south of Russia. One of them, Murat Ganiev, told Human Rights Watch on 14 October 1996: "I told them I wasn't a fighter. … They said that if I said I was a fighter they would release the other forty-six. The only thing they gave us to sign was our release papers"^[31]. Five weeks after the detention, on 19 April 1996, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs released all the Chechens from Samashki without charges^[1].

In a report of January 1997, Human Rights Watch wrote that the Russian government had not disclosed how many Chechens from the filtration camps it was holding in prison on charges of taking part in the fighting, or under which articles they had been tried^[31].

By January 1997, when the last Russian troops had left Ichkeria, deputies of the Russian parliament had drafted an amnesty only for Russian servicemen. This draft did not allow the release of Chechens who were held in custody for taking part, or allegedly taking part, in the fighting^[31]. On 12 March 1997, the deputies in Moscow, by resolution No. 1199-II, declared an amnesty for crimes connected with the war, but did not extend it to those charged and convicted under 17 articles of the Criminal Code, including for banditry and murder. The deputies allowed cases under these articles to be closed only against those whom Russia handed over in exchange for its own servicemen and citizens held in Ichkeria^[32].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers promised the villages of Ichkeria not to touch the Chechens if a village handed over its weapons, sent away the Armed Forces of Ichkeria or let Russian troops in, and then looted, bombed and stormed the villages that had believed them.

Russian generals and officers gave their promises to village heads and elders at their posts, by word of mouth or in the form of a written treaty^[8].

In mid-January 1995, the elders of Assinovskaya, a stanitsa in the west of Ichkeria, let in Russian troops, who promised through loudspeakers and leaflets not to touch anyone. The occupiers looted houses and abused Chechens, and by 16 February every Chechen family had left the stanitsa (see: "Pillage")^[72].

On 21 February 1995, the head of Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and the elders asked Kosolapov, a general of the occupation forces, at the Russian post near the village what they should do so that there would be no war in the village. The report of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights defenders gives the general's answer: "You have to hand over the heavy weapons, set up a militia team of 40-45 men to guard the village, draw up a protocol of accord with the seals of the imam and the chairman [of the village administration], explain it to the people — that is all that is required of you". On 6-7 March, fighters of the army of Ichkeria from other villages were forced to leave at the demand of the Chechens of Samashki. On 8 March, the head of the village, the imam and five elders signed a treaty with the Russian troops. The village undertook to hand over its heavy weapons and send away the army of Ichkeria, and in exchange the elders asked the Russian troops not to enter Samashki and not to use force against Chechen civilians. General Kosolapov signed the treaty and gave a copy to the head of the village^[8].

Eighteen days after the treaty, on 26 March 1995, Russian pilots in six helicopters fired rockets at Samashki and seriously wounded four Chechens. On 28 March, the colonel who commanded the Russian post near the village demanded that small arms be handed over, although the treaty said nothing of this. The head of Samashki collected six assault rifles in the village and handed them to the occupiers. On 6 April, Romanov, deputy commander of the occupation forces, demanded that the village let in the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) and hand over 264 assault rifles by seven in the morning of 7 April (see: "Collective Punishment"). The elders replied that there were not that many weapons in the village, and the head of Samashki asked for three days to collect about fifty assault rifles. Romanov refused. On 7 April, the occupiers shelled Samashki with mortars and stormed the village. On 7 and 8 April, the Russian military killed 103 Chechen civilians in the village, whom human rights defenders recorded by name (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[8]. On 11 April, five elders of Samashki handed human rights defenders at the Russian post a written statement: "We believed the MVD of Russia… we forced all the militiamen to leave our village of Samashki. We believed the military that in this case they would not touch the civilian population. And once again a lie. On 7 April the special forces of Russia's MVD began to enter the village"^[8][48].

Around 20 April 1995, the elders of Ishkhoy-Yurt, a village in the east of Ichkeria, let in Russian servicemen who promised only to pass through the village^[1]. The occupiers fired their assault rifles at the houses and killed a woman who was carrying a child, and the child survived^[121].

In the spring of 1996, Russian troops surrounded the villages of Ichkeria and shelled them (see: "Collective Punishment")^[24]. Then the occupiers and the puppet government in Grozny signed a "Protocol on Peace and Accord" with the village. The village undertook not to let in fighters of the army of Ichkeria, and in return Russia promised that it would be spared any fighting^[14]. On 14 March, Artemov, commander of the occupation forces in the south-west of Ichkeria, gave Russian deputies his word of honor that he would not storm Samashki, because the village was handing over its weapons^[24]. On 15 March, the occupiers stormed the village and killed at least 35 Chechen civilians (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1].

On 31 March 1996, Russian president Yeltsin, by decree No. 435, named "the signing of protocols on peace and accord" one of the main directions of his program for the Chechen Republic^[156]. According to the French agency AFP, even before the decree, by 28 March, more than 120 villages of Ichkeria had signed protocols with the occupation forces^[130]. On 2 April, Russia and the puppet government signed a "Protocol on Peace and Accord" with Shalazhi, a village south-west of Grozny^[1]. On the night of 3 April and on 4 April, Russian pilots bombed the village, destroyed dozens of houses, killed three Chechens and wounded more than three hundred (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1][24]. By 20 April, according to Zavgaev, head of the puppet government, only 15 villages and towns of Ichkeria had not signed the protocol^[1]. On 25 April, Russian pilots bombed Chishki, a village south of Grozny, which had signed a "Protocol on Peace and Accord" shortly before. The pilots killed one Chechen woman and wounded two more Chechens^[1].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write: "At times neither a truce, nor the signing of a 'protocol on peace and accord' by a settlement, nor even the occupation of a village or town by the federal [Russian] troops saved it from indiscriminate attacks, air strikes and artillery shelling"^[1]. Tim Guldimann, head of the mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Grozny from January 1996, wrote in 1998 that the commander of the occupation forces and Zavgaev, head of the puppet government, in part forced these protocols upon the villages^[14].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russia declared ceasefires or signed them with Ichkeria, while the occupation forces went on bombing villages and launched new offensives.

Russian president Yeltsin declared an end to hostilities by decree and in televised addresses to the citizens of Russia^[1][22]. Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin, commanders of the occupation forces and Russian delegations agreed on ceasefires with representatives of Ichkeria^[1]. Russia scheduled ceasefires before Yeltsin's annual address to the Russian parliament on 16 February 1995 and before the Russian presidential election in the summer of 1996^[1].

On the night of 10 January 1995, the Russian government declared a 48-hour ceasefire and demanded that the Armed Forces of Ichkeria surrender, and in the daytime the Russian army continued its assault on Grozny^[1][24]. On 17 January, Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin agreed with the ministers of Ichkeria on a ceasefire in several stages, and on the night of 19 January Russian pilots dropped concrete-piercing bombs on the presidential palace in Grozny^[38][1]. On 13 February, Kulikov, commander of the occupation forces, agreed with Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Main Staff of the army of Ichkeria, on a "truce" until 19 February, and on 18 February Russian artillerymen shelled the positions of the army of Ichkeria east of Grozny^[1].

On 26 April 1995, Russian president Yeltsin signed a decree ending hostilities in Ichkeria from 28 April to 12 May. The decree says: "in the event of armed provocations in the ChR [the Chechen Republic], the actions of the units and formations of the temporary joint forces [Russian troops]… shall be determined in accordance with the situation"^[1][183]. General Troshev, who in the spring of 1995 commanded the troops of the Russian defense ministry in Ichkeria, wrote in his memoirs: "We understood that the declaration of the moratorium [the end of hostilities] was of a purely political nature — the country was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Great Victory…"^[184]. On 9 May, heads of foreign states came to Moscow for the celebration^[1].

From 28 April to 12 May 1995, Russian soldiers went on killing Chechen civilians^[1]. On 1 May, a Russian sniper killed six-year-old Zulikhan Yunusova in Starye Atagi, a village south of Grozny. Isa Adayev, director of the Chechen National Museum, was at her funeral and in May 1996 told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Prague: "A few days later, at a meeting with the military commandant, it turned out that the soldiers had been drunk and were shooting on a bet: would they hit or not. That is how they killed the girl"^[24]. On 10 May, Russian soldiers from the commandant's office of the Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny mortally wounded Sh. Chantiev at the wheel of his car^[1]. On 11 May, two days after the celebration in Moscow, Russian pilots bombed Shatoy, a district center in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria^[23]. It is unknown how many such crimes the occupation forces committed from 28 April to 12 May 1995. On 12 May, as soon as the decree expired, the Russian army resumed its offensive on the mountain districts of Ichkeria^[1].

On 30 July 1995, Russia signed an agreement with Ichkeria on the cessation of hostilities (see: "Sham Treaties"). From 17 August, Russian pilots bombed Roshni-Chu and Tangi-Chu, villages south-west of Grozny, and on 9 October the occupiers launched a new offensive^[23][1].

On 31 March 1996, Russian president Yeltsin, by decree No. 435, announced "the cessation, from 24.00 hours on 31 March 1996, of military operations on the territory of the Chechen Republic"^[156]. On 1 April, Tikhomirov, commander of the occupation forces, announced that he would continue the war, and on 4 April Russian soldiers stormed Goyskoye, a village south-west of Grozny, and killed 26 Chechens in the fighting^[1]. On 27 May, Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, acting president of Ichkeria, signed a ceasefire agreement in Moscow, and on the evening of 3 June Russian pilots bombed villages of the Nozhay-Yurt and Vedeno districts in the south-east of Ichkeria^[16][1][65]. On 10 June in Nazran, Russia undertook to stop the bombing and to remove its checkpoints by 7 July, and on 9 July, six days after Yeltsin's victory in the Russian presidential election, the occupiers launched a new offensive^[16][158][1]. On 13 August, Pulikovsky, acting commander of the occupation forces, met Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Main Staff of the army of Ichkeria, and Ichkeria announced that they had agreed to cease fire from noon on 14 August. On 14 August, Russian pilots bombed Komsomolskoye, a village north-east of Grozny, and killed nine Chechens^[171][182]. On 18 August, the command of the occupation forces concluded a ceasefire agreement with the army of Ichkeria, and on the night of 20 August Russian pilots resumed the bombing of Grozny^[185][1].

Sergei Kovalyov, head of the Observer Mission of Russian human rights defenders, wrote in the American magazine The New York Review of Books on 11 May 1995 that the ceasefires declared by Russian commanders were disingenuous concessions to domestic and foreign pressures, not the start of a genuine peace process^[163]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that Russia used the "truce" of 1995 to prepare elections and entrench the puppet government, and that Yeltsin's "peace plan" of 1996 remained in force until the election results were tallied in Russia^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, Russia signed peace agreements with Ichkeria in Khasavyurt and recognized in them "the inadmissibility of the use of armed force or the threat of its use in resolving disputed questions" (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1]. Three years after the agreements in Khasavyurt, Russia attacked Ichkeria again. On 21 September 1999, Russian pilots began bombing Grozny, and on 29 September the Russian army invaded the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. The occupiers announced "corridors" for Chechens to leave surrounded villages and towns, and then fired on those leaving, detained men at the exit and bombed the villages together with those who had not managed to get out.

The "corridors" were announced by the command of the occupation forces when it surrounded a village or town before an assault^[1]. Russian commanders passed the conditions for leaving to the head of the village at their checkpoint or announced them through the ITAR-TASS agency, and gave the Chechens from two hours to two days to get out^[1][186]. The occupiers began shelling before the appointed time or closed the "corridor" before it ended. Russian generals declared that all Chechen civilians had left, and the troops fired on everyone who remained in the village^[1].

On 7 April 1995, a Russian general who refused to give his name gave the Chechens in Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, until four in the afternoon to leave, announcing this at one o'clock, and 15-25 minutes before the deadline the occupiers began shelling the village with mortars. Of the five thousand people in the village, 100-150 managed to get out before the shelling, and even before the appointed hour the Russian military killed two teenagers and mortally wounded a woman who were leaving the village^[8]. On 1-2 June 1995, the command of the occupation forces, by agreement with the Assistance Group of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, opened a "corridor" for Chechens to leave the Shatoy district in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria, only in the daytime, from ten in the morning to seven in the evening. Russian tank crews fired on a column of refugees from Borzoy, a village in this district, and pilots bombed it and killed at least four refugees^[1]. On 18 December 1995, while Russian troops were shelling Gudermes, the second-largest town of Ichkeria, east of Grozny, the crew of a Russian helicopter fired rockets in an open field at Chechen refugees, mostly women, who were walking from the town along the "humanitarian corridor" eastward to Khasavyurt, a town in Russian-controlled Dagestan. The crew killed the son of one of the refugee women (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[34][24].

On 19 February 1996, on the third day of the assault on the settlement of Novogroznensky in the east of Ichkeria, Kvashnin, commander of the Russian troops in the North Caucasus, declared that all Chechen civilians had left the settlement through two "corridors", and refugees from Novogroznensky denied this. According to the French agency Agence France-Presse, the occupiers killed at least 50 Chechen civilians in the settlement^[1]. On 4 March 1996, on the second day of the assault on Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria, the occupiers opened a "corridor" and for two hours let vehicles of the International Organization for Migration into the village, and on 5 March they closed the way out. Russian artillerymen and pilots resumed shelling the village, where about 7,000 people remained, and by 9 March, when the occupiers captured Sernovodsk, they had killed at least 45 Chechen civilians there (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[1][135].

On the night of 14 March 1996, the occupiers surrounded Samashki, where about 12,000 people lived. On 14 March, the command of the occupation forces demanded 10 thousand dollars for a "corridor" for the Chechens to leave the village. Chechens from Samashki told human rights defenders of Memorial that the head of the village took this sum to the checkpoint in rubles - 50 million, collected from the villagers (see: "Administrative Corruption and Extortion")^[24]. On 15 March at six in the morning, the Russian military at the checkpoint announced to the head of the village that from eight to ten in the morning they would let the Chechens out toward Russian-controlled Ingushetia, and then would begin the assault. Some families went south along another road, but there the occupiers let no one out, and the families returned to the village^[1][24]. Zaynap Baysaeva, a Chechen woman from Samashki, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow on 22 April: "Everyone who learned about the corridor — some on a tractor… some in a car, drove up to the checkpoint. But the road was already blocked — the mercenaries [Russian servicemen] were standing there and detaining males from children in the 6th-9th grades to men of 65"^[24]. At the checkpoint, Russian soldiers took 91 Chechens off the buses and unlawfully detained them from among those who were leaving through the "corridor". Five weeks later, on 19 April, Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs released them without charges (see: "Filtration Camp System")^[31][1]. Sixteen minutes after the end of the "corridor", Russian troops began shelling the village from tanks and howitzers, helicopters and aircraft. About half of the village had not managed to leave (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1].

On 16 March, Russian soldiers at the checkpoint fired on a column of up to 500 Chechens who were trying to get out of Samashki, and the column returned to the village. On 18 March, several thousand Chechens approached the Russian positions on the southern edge of the village and demanded to be let out. The Russian military allowed women with children to leave and threatened to send the men to a filtration camp, and the women refused to leave without their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. On the morning of 19 March, the crew of a Russian helicopter fired on the Chechens near the Russian positions, killed one Chechen and wounded six or seven (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). Only after this, at noon, did the occupiers open a "corridor", and the Chechens began to leave the encirclement, while a doctor from Samashki took the wounded to the hospital in Achkhoy-Martan, a village in the west of Ichkeria^[1]. That day, at another Russian checkpoint, soldiers fired an automatic grenade launcher at women who had been promised a "corridor" to collect their children from the village and return by five in the evening. The occupiers wounded eight to ten women, and the wounded ended up in the hospital in Sleptsovskaya, a stanitsa in Russian-controlled Ingushetia^[1][24]. During the assault that began on 15 March, the occupiers killed at least 35 Chechen civilians in Samashki^[1].

On 6 May 1996, Russian troops surrounded Komsomolskoye, a village in the Urus-Martan district south-west of Grozny, and demanded that the defenders lay down their arms by nightfall, otherwise shelling would begin at two in the morning. Russian artillerymen opened fire at about three in the afternoon, 11 hours before the deadline, when the Chechens in the village were still preparing to take the children out, and killed Chechen civilians^[24]. On 9 July 1996, Russian troops surrounded Gekhi, a village south-west of Grozny, and on 11 July opened a "corridor" only for women, children and the elderly and closed it the same day. The Russian military declared that only men remained in the village, although about 8,000 Chechens had not managed to get out, and from 9 to 12 July the occupiers' artillerymen and pilots killed 19 Chechen civilians in Gekhi^[1][9][83].

On 19 August 1996, when the Armed Forces of Ichkeria had surrounded the occupiers in Grozny, Pulikovsky, acting commander of the occupation forces, gave the townspeople 48 hours to leave through the only "corridor", via the suburb of Staraya Sunzha in the east, and threatened to bomb the city afterwards^[186]. On the night of 20 August, before the deadline, the occupiers began bombing Grozny and shelling it with artillery, and in the daytime they closed the "corridor"^[1][187]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that no one counted the civilian townspeople whom the occupiers killed in Grozny from 6 to 22 August, and journalists gave the figure of 2,000^[1]. On 20 August, the crew of a Russian helicopter near the village of Goyty south of Grozny fired on Chechen refugees from the city who were traveling in buses and cars, and killed ten to twelve people^[1].

Human rights defenders of Memorial write that throughout the war the Russian military informed Chechens about the "corridors" poorly or not at all, gave little time to get out before the shelling, and killed Chechen civilians even as they were leaving through the "corridors"^[1].

On 21 August 1996, Lebed, secretary of Russia's Security Council, flew to Ichkeria and cancelled the threat to bomb Grozny made by Pulikovsky, acting commander of the occupation forces^[9].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Russian president Yeltsin, Russian ministers and generals scheduled negotiations, meetings and peace signings with Ichkeria having already decided to attack, and Russian troops attacked during the negotiations or immediately after them.

Russian ministers and commanders of the occupation forces scheduled meetings with Ichkeria in Russian-controlled Ingushetia and North Ossetia. Later the negotiations took place in Grozny through the mediation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)^[1][188]. Russian delegations demanded that the Armed Forces of Ichkeria hand over their weapons and that the republic recognize itself as part of Russia (see: "Deprivation of Agency")^[1].

On 29 November 1994, Russia's Security Council decided to start a war against Ichkeria. In the secret report "Military Aspects of the Operation in Chechnya. Aims, Means and Results", the Russian defense ministry ordered army units and the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs (predecessors of today's Rosgvardia) to assemble by 6 December, surround Grozny on 7-9 December and capture the city on 10-13 December^[1]. On 6 December, two members of the Security Council, Russian defense minister Grachev and Russian interior minister Yerin, met Dzhokhar Dudayev, president of Ichkeria, in the stanitsa of Ordzhonikidzevskaya in Russian-controlled Ingushetia^[189][1]. After the meeting, asked by journalists whether there would be a war, Dzhokhar Dudayev replied: "Of course there won't be a war. Why war? For now we have agreed on a peaceful solution…"^[190].

Russia scheduled the next negotiations for 12 December in Vladikavkaz, the capital of Russian-controlled North Ossetia, and the day before them the Russian army openly invaded Ichkeria^[1]. On the day of the invasion, Russian president Yeltsin said in an address to the citizens of Russia: "Negotiations between representatives of Russia and Chechnya are scheduled for 12 December 1994. We must prevent their disruption"^[191]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write about the invasion on the eve of the negotiations: "Actions that were bound to disrupt the negotiations were declared to be aimed at preventing their disruption"^[1]. On 12 December, the Russian military detained the delegation of Ichkeria headed by Taymaz Abubakarov, minister of economy and finance, on the border of North Ossetia and Ingushetia in order to let a column of their own troops through into Ichkeria^[1][82]. On all three days of the negotiations, 12-14 December, Russian troops advanced on Grozny^[192][1], and on the first day the occupiers shelled with artillery and bombed the stanitsa of Assinovskaya in the west of Ichkeria^[82]. On 14 December, the delegation of Ichkeria broke off the negotiations over the demand to recognize the republic as part of Russia and left. The delegations never met in Vladikavkaz again^[193][1][82].

From December 1994 to April 1996, Russian president Yeltsin and Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin announced negotiations to Ichkeria, and in 1995-1996 Kulikov, Tikhomirov, Kvashnin and Pulikovsky, commanders of the occupation forces, scheduled meetings with the army of Ichkeria, while Russian troops advanced on the days of the meetings.

On 27 December 1994, Yeltsin entrusted the negotiations to Yegorov, minister for nationalities, Stepashin, director of the FSK (the predecessor of today's FSB), and Kvashnin, commander of the occupation forces^[47]. The next day, FSK director Stepashin told the leaders of Krasnodar krai that what should be discussed was not negotiations but an ultimatum to Ichkeria, and on 31 December the Russian army began storming Grozny^[194][1].

On 18 January 1995, Taymaz Abubakarov and Usman Imayev, ministers of Ichkeria, waited in Nazran, a town in Russian-controlled Ingushetia, for two Russian generals whom Chernomyrdin had entrusted with ceasefire negotiations. The generals did not come, and on the night of 19 January Russian pilots dropped concrete-piercing bombs on the presidential palace in Grozny^[1]. On 21 February 1995, the Russian military near Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, did not let the delegation of Ichkeria through to a meeting with General Kulikov in Sleptsovskaya, a stanitsa in Russian-controlled Ingushetia. The crews of Russian helicopters fired rockets and machine guns at the road in front of the delegation's cars, and Kulikov refused Ichkeria a meeting^[1]. On 22 May 1995, Semyonov, the Russian government's representative in Ichkeria, announced to journalists that negotiations mediated by the OSCE would begin in three days^[188], and on 24 May the occupation forces launched an offensive in the mountains in the south of Ichkeria. On 25 May, the delegations of Russia and Ichkeria sat down at the negotiating table in Grozny, and by 12 June the occupiers had captured the mountain district centers of Vedeno, Shatoy and Nozhay-Yurt (see: "Military Intervention")^[1].

From 30 September 1995, the Internal Troops of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Russian police kept Sernovodsk, a village in the west of Ichkeria on the border with Russian-controlled Ingushetia, encircled (see: "Transport Blockade")^[1]. Viktor Kurochkin, a deputy of the Russian parliament, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow in April 1996: "The order to begin large-scale actions of the federal [Russian] troops came in February, precisely when we were agreeing that the checkpoints near Sernovodsk would be removed... But when we arrived to resolve this problem concretely, we were told that an order had come to begin combat operations and to destroy all the bandit formations by 1 April" (this is what Russians called the Armed Forces of Ichkeria)^[24]. On the evening of 2 March 1996, the leaders of Sernovodsk agreed on peace for the village with the puppet government in Grozny and with the command of the occupation forces in the south-west of Ichkeria and scheduled the signing for the morning of 3 March. After the agreement, most of the defenders left the village^[1]. Sadyt Gisatova, a Chechen woman from Sernovodsk, told the Glasnost tribunal in Prague in May 1996 about the night of 3 March: "That night, for the first time in a long while, my children went to bed undressed. We believed the Russian government and our newly created [puppet government in Grozny] — they promised us peace"^[24].

At 5:45 in the morning of 3 March 1996, more than four hours before the signing, the occupiers began storming Sernovodsk in three columns^[1]. The defenders of the village killed a Russian colonel in the fighting and captured from him a detailed map of the attack^[24]. At 7:30, the defenders repelled the attack. After this, the occupiers shelled the village with artillery, and Russian pilots fired rockets at it from helicopters (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks"). On 9 March, six days after the start of the assault, Russian troops captured Sernovodsk. From 3 to 9 March, the occupiers killed at least 45 Chechen civilians in the village and wounded 68 (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians")^[1].

On 21 April 1996, while Dzhokhar Dudayev, president of Ichkeria, was talking by satellite telephone with Konstantin Borovoy, a mediator in the peace negotiations between Russia and Ichkeria, the Russian military struck a clearing near the village of Gekhi-Chu south-west of Grozny with missiles and killed him (see: "Neutralization of the Opposition")^[15][1]. Two days later, Russian prime minister Chernomyrdin announced that Russia would follow "the tactic of expanding peace combined with tough forceful methods"^[1].

On 3 July 1996, in Novye Atagi, a village south of Grozny, the Russian members of the Russia-Ichkeria working group on military questions, headed by General Tikhomirov, declared that they were removing the checkpoints and withdrawing military units from Ichkeria^[16]. On 9 July, while Mikhailov, head of the Russian delegation, was assuring Tim Guldimann, head of the OSCE mission in Ichkeria, that Russia wanted to continue the negotiations, Tikhomirov's troops surrounded Gekhi, a village south-west of Grozny, and by 12 July had killed 19 Chechen civilians there (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1][83]. On 19 July, Kvashnin, commander of the Russian troops in the North Caucasus, announced that he was ready to meet Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, and to discuss, among other things, "the future of Aslan Maskhadov himself", and the next day the occupiers launched an offensive in the mountains south-west of Shatoy, a district center in the south of Ichkeria (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[195][1]. On 31 July, Ichkeria declined the meeting^[196]. From 13 to 17 August 1996, General Pulikovsky, acting commander of the occupation forces, met three times with Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, at ceasefire negotiations (see: "Sham Ceasefire")^[9]. On the evening of 19 August, Pulikovsky gave the people of Grozny 48 hours to leave, and on the night of 20 August, before the deadline, Russian artillerymen and pilots began shelling and bombing the city (see: "Collective Punishment")^[186][1]. According to journalists' estimates, from 6 to 22 August the occupiers killed about 2,000 civilian townspeople in Grozny. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that no one kept an exact count^[1].

On 1 May 1995, Sergei Kovalyov, a deputy of the Russian parliament, wrote in his testimony to the Helsinki Commission of the US Congress that all attempts to settle the question of Ichkeria's independence by political means, before the war and after it began, were systematically and deliberately torpedoed by the military high command and by others in the government in Moscow^[38].

On 22 August 1996, Lebed, secretary of Russia's Security Council, and Aslan Maskhadov, chief of the Main Staff of the Armed Forces of Ichkeria, agreed on a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops^[1].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[9]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].

In the autumn of 1994, Russia attacked the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria under the name of a puppet opposition, and on 11 December 1994 the Russian army openly invaded the republic. Throughout the war, Moscow shielded its soldiers, police officers and commanders of the occupation troops from responsibility for crimes against Chechens.

In Ichkeria, Shkirko, commander of the Internal Troops of the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD; predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), went by the surname "Shirokov", and Lvov, chief of their staff, by "General Yagodin". Romanov and Labunets, deputy commanders of the occupation troops, were called "Antonov" and "Alekseyev"^[1][48].

Military prosecutors closed cases about people whom Russian soldiers had shot dead in cars at checkpoints, citing Articles 23 and 27 of the Russian law on the Internal Troops of the MVD^[1].

On 17 December 1994, the Russian military shot up a column of refugees from Grozny near the stanitsa of Nesterovskaya in Russian-controlled Ingushetia. Russian prosecutors suspended the case without finding those responsible^[1].

On 3 January 1995, Russian pilots bombed Arshty, a village in Ingushetia inhabited mostly by Chechens (see: "Collective Punishment"), and in a second bombing, on 18 April, killed three women there. Russian prosecutors closed both cases, finding no crime^[1]. On 14 January 1995, Lobov, secretary of the Russian Security Council, said that a special commission should establish the truth about the bombings of Grozny. Russia created no such commission^[1].

On 24 January 1995, the two sons of Khusein Khamidov disappeared in Grozny. On 2 April, the father dug up a pit in the yard of a house on Mayakovsky Street, where a unit of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD had previously been stationed, and found their bodies (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees"). The prosecutor's office of the puppet government opened a case and gathered evidence. Russian military prosecutors suspended it without finding those responsible^[1]. On 24 April 1996, Khusein Khamidov, who had been searching for missing people in Ichkeria since January 1995, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow: "There is not a single case that has been investigated and brought to court… when you hand them documents, hand them a statement about some crime that was committed, they say: 'You tell us who did it, soldiers of the Russian regular army, or of SOBR [the police special forces], or of the MVD'… But who knows who committed the crime — their uniform is one and the same. And on that basis they refuse us"^[24].

Russian courts gave Polivtsev, a captain of the 81st regiment of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD, four years for the murder of four Chechens in Grozny on 25 January 1995^[1].

On 7-8 April 1995, the Russian Internal Troops stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and killed 103 Chechen civilians (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). On 12 April, a colonel of the Russian MVD at a post near the village introduced himself to human rights defenders as Oblomov, although the surname "Yelansky" was written on the strap of his assault rifle. On 19 April, the Russian prosecutor Dzhapov told Andrei Blinushov, an observer of the Russian human rights organization Memorial, that he did not know how to hold the fighters of the MVD special units to account. The observer wrote in his diary, from the prosecutor's words: "the MVD special units leaving Chechnya destroy all their documentation concerning their actions on the territory of this republic. These units often act in masks, without any insignia on their uniforms, and all the officers use two or three pseudonyms instead of their real surnames"^[48]. On 27 April, Ilyushenko, acting prosecutor general of Russia, opened a case on the killings and arson in the village^[48]. In mid-May, Russian military investigators questioned some of the victims and witnesses, but did not open the graves and never came to Samashki again. On 14 January 1997, the prosecutors closed the case. On 21 November 1997, Smirnov, deputy chief military prosecutor of Russia, named the reason to Memorial: "the servicemen acted in a state of extreme necessity and necessary defense"^[1].

The Russian serviceman Vershinin received three years from a court for shooting dead the boy Zelimkhan Dediyev on 17 April 1995 in the stanitsa of Petropavlovskaya northeast of Grozny^[1]. On 14 June 1995, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, by directive No. 15-6-95, ordered the prosecutor of the puppet government in Grozny to hand cases of crimes by Russian soldiers over to Russian military prosecutors only if the facts had been established beyond dispute. On 4 July 1996, that government's prosecutor wrote to Skuratov, prosecutor general of Russia, that Russian prosecutors had returned 112 cases to him without investigation, having found no indisputable proof of guilt in them. The letter says that unnamed commanders ordered that investigators not be let into military units and onto checkpoints^[1]. The soldiers Korovin, Shulin and Petrov received 14, six and three years for killing two Chechens on the night of 7 July 1995 in the settlement of Rodina near their unit^[171][1]. The Russian military did not let into their units the investigators of the puppet prosecutor's office who were investigating the murder of seven Chechens of the Chapanov family in the village of Prigorodnoye near Grozny on 7 July 1995. In January 1996, the puppet prosecutor's office suspended the case^[1]. On 17 December 1996, a court gave Permyakov, a fighter of the Russian police special forces, a suspended sentence of a year and a half for the "negligent killing" of Zaurbek Uzuyev, whom he had shot dead at a checkpoint on 8 September 1995 during a rally for the independence of Ichkeria^[1]. Military prosecutors suspended the case on the bombing of Roshni-Chu, a village southwest of Grozny, in October 1995^[1].

Military prosecutors closed the case on the murder of Sharip Batayev, a Chechen from Arshty, whom scouts of the 693rd regiment of the Russian 58th Army shot dead at the end of February 1996. According to the prosecutors' version, the commander of the scouts was defending himself^[1]. In the spring of 1996, Russian prosecutors opened no criminal case on how the occupiers in March had burned Sernovodsk and destroyed Samashki, villages in the west of Ichkeria^[24]. On 30 June 1996, the military prosecutor Saprunov wrote to the prosecutor's office of the puppet government that the occupiers had beaten, on the way to Pyatigorsk, a town in southern Russia, half of the 91 Chechens from Samashki whom the Russian military had unlawfully detained on 15 March (see: "Torture and Abuse")^[31][107]. In March 1997, Russian prosecutors suspended the case without finding those responsible: those who made the detentions had been "wearing masks on their faces, so their identification is impossible"^[1]. On 10 December 1996, Sinitsyn, a prosecutor of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia, replied to Memorial's request to investigate how soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD had shielded themselves with civilians in Samashki in March 1996 and with the patients of Grozny City Hospital No. 9 in August 1996 (see: "Use of People as "Human Shields""). Sinitsyn wrote that he had forwarded the human rights defenders' report to the prosecutors of the North Caucasus so that it could be attached to the press reports^[31], and on 21 November 1997 Smirnov, deputy chief military prosecutor, replied that in Samashki people had been hiding behind armored vehicles from the shelling^[1]. Military prosecutors suspended the cases on the bombings of Katyr-Yurt and Shalazhi, villages southwest of Grozny, in March and April 1996 (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")^[1]. Shevchenko, prosecutor of the occupation troops, without visiting the scene, stated that the soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD who on 15 July 1996 had shot dead unarmed people in passenger cars on the outskirts of Grozny had used their weapons correctly^[83][1]. In mid-July 1996, Russian soldiers held without charges two Chechens from the Vedeno district in the southeast of Ichkeria in an army cell in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, and released them at the demand of military prosecutors. The prosecutor's office of the occupation troops recognized only this detention as unlawful, but opened no case, because the culprit, the commandant of Khankala, had died in the fighting in August 1996^[1].

On 8 August 1996, the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia replied to Yuli Rybakov, a deputy of the Russian parliament, that since 11 December 1994 prosecutors had opened 129 cases on crimes by the occupiers against civilians in Ichkeria. Of these, prosecutors had sent 21 cases to the courts, closed 21, left 26 unfinished and suspended 61 - 48 because they had not found those responsible, and 13 because they did not know where the accused were^[1].

On 29 September 1997, the Directorate of Military Courts of Russia replied to Memorial's inquiry that over the whole war the courts had convicted 18 soldiers and officers, seven of them for murder^[1].

On 26 July 1995, the UN Human Rights Committee expressed regret that no one had been held accountable for the ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees in Ichkeria^[102]. The Human Rights Watch report of January 1997 says that Russia systematically violated human rights and just as systematically failed to hold those responsible to account^[31]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that over the whole war Russia held not a single senior commander to account. According to their data, Russian courts convicted no one for the bombings of the villages and towns of Ichkeria, the filtration camps, torture, hostage-taking and human shields^[1].

According to Human Rights Watch, at the peace talks in August 1996 the Russian delegation objected to discussing responsibility for crimes^[31]. After the peace agreements in Khasavyurt on 31 August 1996 (see: "Sham Treaties")^[33], Russia moved the prosecutor's office of the occupation troops to Russian-controlled Dagestan. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that after this the prosecutors almost stopped investigating crimes by Russian servicemen and police officers^[1]. On 12 March 1997, deputies in Moscow, by resolution No. 1199-II, declared an amnesty for crimes connected with the war in Ichkeria^[32]. Under this amnesty, Russian prosecutors terminated unfinished cases on crimes by the occupiers^[1].