in the campaign “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. 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[2].
Russian soldiers loaded exhibits of the National Museum onto armored personnel carriers[2]. 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[2].
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[3]. 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"[3]. 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'"[2].
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[4]. 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[2]. Seven months later, in February 1996, the removed paintings lay in the storerooms of the Russian ministry of culture awaiting restoration[3]. In July 2002, 43 works from the Grozny Museum of Fine Arts hung in Moscow at an exhibition of the Tretyakov Gallery[5].