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 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[1].
Russian guards of the filtration camps and of the pits at military units demanded money from detained Chechens for their release (see: "Hostage-Taking")[2][3].
Russian troops surrounded villages and took money from Chechens in exchange for not bombing them and for letting the Chechens leave[1][4]. 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[1].
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")[5]. 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[6].
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[7][6]. 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[7]. 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[8].
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[1].
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")[6]. 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[1]. 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[9]. 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[6][4].
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[3].
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[6].