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 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[2][3]. 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[4][5]. On 23 November pilots fired at a poultry farm in Shali and wounded seven Chechen civilians[6]. 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[7][8]. 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[9][10][11]. 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[12][13]. On 30 November Russian aircraft bombed Grozny twice and, according to an adviser to the president of Ichkeria, killed up to 80 people[7][14]. 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[2]. On 12 December Russian pilots in helicopters and aircraft bombed the residential districts of Dolinsky, a settlement to the northwest of Grozny[15][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][2].
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"[2]. 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[16]. On that day Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs on the bazaar, the hospital and the car market of Shali[1][2]. 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[2]. 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[17]. 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[17]. 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][18]. 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[18][19]. 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[20]. 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[21][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][22].
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"[3]. 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[23][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"[3]. 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"[3]. 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[23][3].
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][3]. On 3 and 4 April 1996 pilots bombed Shalazhi, a village to the southwest of Grozny, and killed three Chechens[1][3]. On 25 April 1996 pilots bombed Shali, surrounded by Russian troops, where about 50 thousand civilians remained[24]. 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][25]. On 10 and 12 May helicopter crews fired at the town again and killed one person each time[1][3].
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][26]. 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][23][26]. On 15 July the crews of seven Russian helicopters destroyed six houses in Starye Atagi with missiles (see: "Collective Punishment")[23][27]. In July 1996, while shelling Dargo, Belgatoy, Vedeno and other villages of the Vedeno district, Russian troops killed at least 30 Chechens[23]. 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[28]. On that day Russian pilots bombed Komsomolskoye, a village to the northeast of Grozny, and killed nine Chechens[29]. 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[30]. From 19 to 21 August Russian artillerymen shelled Chernorechye, the southern district of the city[1], Griboyedov Street[1] and Minutka Square[23] in Grozny, and on 20 August fired 60 Grad rockets at the city[1][23]. 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[23][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[18]. 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[23]. On 31 August 1996, peace agreements were signed in Khasavyurt (see: "Sham Treaties")[31]. On 31 December 1996, the last Russian troops left the republic[1].