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. 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][2].
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][3][4].
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"[5]. 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"[4]. 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[3]. 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")[2]. 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[2][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[3][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][4]. 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[6][7]. 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[8][9][4].
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")[8][9]. 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[4]. 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[10].
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[11]. 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][2]. 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"[12].
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[13]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")[14]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic[1].