Medical and Humanitarian Blockade

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][2].

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^[3]. 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")^[4]. 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^[5].

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^[6][7]. 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"^[8]. On 9 April, Dzeki Musayeva, born in 1920, died of a hypertensive attack without medical help^[6]. 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^[6][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][9]. 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^[3]. 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^[10].

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^[11]. 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"^[11]. 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^[12].

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^[11]. 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^[13].

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^[2]. 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^[11]. 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^[13][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^[13]. 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][13]. 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^[14]. 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^[3].

In August 1996, the Armed Forces of Ichkeria liberated Grozny from the occupiers, forcing Russia to the negotiating table^[15]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")^[16]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic^[1].