Aggressors may guarantee their soldiers, police officers and officials impunity for crimes against the Indigenous people: hide the guilty, imitate investigations, pardon them through amnesties and reward them. This is how the colonizer drives the perpetrators to new crimes and shows the victims that the law does not protect them.
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. Throughout the war, Moscow shielded its soldiers, police officers and commanders of the occupation troops from responsibility for crimes against Chechens.
In Ichkeria, Shkirko, commander of the Internal Troops of the Russian Interior Ministry (MVD; predecessors of today's Rosgvardia), went by the surname "Shirokov", and Lvov, chief of their staff, by "General Yagodin". Romanov and Labunets, deputy commanders of the occupation troops, were called "Antonov" and "Alekseyev"[1][2].
Military prosecutors closed cases about people whom Russian soldiers had shot dead in cars at checkpoints, citing Articles 23 and 27 of the Russian law on the Internal Troops of the MVD[1].
On 17 December 1994, the Russian military shot up a column of refugees from Grozny near the stanitsa of Nesterovskaya in Russian-controlled Ingushetia. Russian prosecutors suspended the case without finding those responsible[1].
On 3 January 1995, Russian pilots bombed Arshty, a village in Ingushetia inhabited mostly by Chechens (see: "Collective Punishment"), and in a second bombing, on 18 April, killed three women there. Russian prosecutors closed both cases, finding no crime[1]. On 14 January 1995, Lobov, secretary of the Russian Security Council, said that a special commission should establish the truth about the bombings of Grozny. Russia created no such commission[1].
On 24 January 1995, the two sons of Khusein Khamidov disappeared in Grozny. On 2 April, the father dug up a pit in the yard of a house on Mayakovsky Street, where a unit of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD had previously been stationed, and found their bodies (see: "Killing of Prisoners and Detainees"). The prosecutor's office of the puppet government opened a case and gathered evidence. Russian military prosecutors suspended it without finding those responsible[1]. On 24 April 1996, Khusein Khamidov, who had been searching for missing people in Ichkeria since January 1995, told the public tribunal of the Russian Glasnost Foundation in Moscow: "There is not a single case that has been investigated and brought to court… when you hand them documents, hand them a statement about some crime that was committed, they say: 'You tell us who did it, soldiers of the Russian regular army, or of SOBR [the police special forces], or of the MVD'… But who knows who committed the crime — their uniform is one and the same. And on that basis they refuse us"[3].
Russian courts gave Polivtsev, a captain of the 81st regiment of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD, four years for the murder of four Chechens in Grozny on 25 January 1995[1].
On 7-8 April 1995, the Russian Internal Troops stormed Samashki, a village in the west of Ichkeria, and killed 103 Chechen civilians (see: "Mass Killings of Civilians"). On 12 April, a colonel of the Russian MVD at a post near the village introduced himself to human rights defenders as Oblomov, although the surname "Yelansky" was written on the strap of his assault rifle. On 19 April, the Russian prosecutor Dzhapov told Andrei Blinushov, an observer of the Russian human rights organization Memorial, that he did not know how to hold the fighters of the MVD special units to account. The observer wrote in his diary, from the prosecutor's words: "the MVD special units leaving Chechnya destroy all their documentation concerning their actions on the territory of this republic. These units often act in masks, without any insignia on their uniforms, and all the officers use two or three pseudonyms instead of their real surnames"[2]. On 27 April, Ilyushenko, acting prosecutor general of Russia, opened a case on the killings and arson in the village[2]. In mid-May, Russian military investigators questioned some of the victims and witnesses, but did not open the graves and never came to Samashki again. On 14 January 1997, the prosecutors closed the case. On 21 November 1997, Smirnov, deputy chief military prosecutor of Russia, named the reason to Memorial: "the servicemen acted in a state of extreme necessity and necessary defense"[1].
The Russian serviceman Vershinin received three years from a court for shooting dead the boy Zelimkhan Dediyev on 17 April 1995 in the stanitsa of Petropavlovskaya northeast of Grozny[1]. On 14 June 1995, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia, by directive No. 15-6-95, ordered the prosecutor of the puppet government in Grozny to hand cases of crimes by Russian soldiers over to Russian military prosecutors only if the facts had been established beyond dispute. On 4 July 1996, that government's prosecutor wrote to Skuratov, prosecutor general of Russia, that Russian prosecutors had returned 112 cases to him without investigation, having found no indisputable proof of guilt in them. The letter says that unnamed commanders ordered that investigators not be let into military units and onto checkpoints[1]. The soldiers Korovin, Shulin and Petrov received 14, six and three years for killing two Chechens on the night of 7 July 1995 in the settlement of Rodina near their unit[4][1]. The Russian military did not let into their units the investigators of the puppet prosecutor's office who were investigating the murder of seven Chechens of the Chapanov family in the village of Prigorodnoye near Grozny on 7 July 1995. In January 1996, the puppet prosecutor's office suspended the case[1]. On 17 December 1996, a court gave Permyakov, a fighter of the Russian police special forces, a suspended sentence of a year and a half for the "negligent killing" of Zaurbek Uzuyev, whom he had shot dead at a checkpoint on 8 September 1995 during a rally for the independence of Ichkeria[1]. Military prosecutors suspended the case on the bombing of Roshni-Chu, a village southwest of Grozny, in October 1995[1].
Military prosecutors closed the case on the murder of Sharip Batayev, a Chechen from Arshty, whom scouts of the 693rd regiment of the Russian 58th Army shot dead at the end of February 1996. According to the prosecutors' version, the commander of the scouts was defending himself[1]. In the spring of 1996, Russian prosecutors opened no criminal case on how the occupiers in March had burned Sernovodsk and destroyed Samashki, villages in the west of Ichkeria[3]. On 30 June 1996, the military prosecutor Saprunov wrote to the prosecutor's office of the puppet government that the occupiers had beaten, on the way to Pyatigorsk, a town in southern Russia, half of the 91 Chechens from Samashki whom the Russian military had unlawfully detained on 15 March (see: "Torture and Abuse")[5][6]. In March 1997, Russian prosecutors suspended the case without finding those responsible: those who made the detentions had been "wearing masks on their faces, so their identification is impossible"[1]. On 10 December 1996, Sinitsyn, a prosecutor of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia, replied to Memorial's request to investigate how soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD had shielded themselves with civilians in Samashki in March 1996 and with the patients of Grozny City Hospital No. 9 in August 1996 (see: "Use of People as "Human Shields""). Sinitsyn wrote that he had forwarded the human rights defenders' report to the prosecutors of the North Caucasus so that it could be attached to the press reports[5], and on 21 November 1997 Smirnov, deputy chief military prosecutor, replied that in Samashki people had been hiding behind armored vehicles from the shelling[1]. Military prosecutors suspended the cases on the bombings of Katyr-Yurt and Shalazhi, villages southwest of Grozny, in March and April 1996 (see: "Indiscriminate Attacks")[1]. Shevchenko, prosecutor of the occupation troops, without visiting the scene, stated that the soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Russian MVD who on 15 July 1996 had shot dead unarmed people in passenger cars on the outskirts of Grozny had used their weapons correctly[7][1]. In mid-July 1996, Russian soldiers held without charges two Chechens from the Vedeno district in the southeast of Ichkeria in an army cell in Khankala, the main base of the occupation troops on the eastern outskirts of Grozny, and released them at the demand of military prosecutors. The prosecutor's office of the occupation troops recognized only this detention as unlawful, but opened no case, because the culprit, the commandant of Khankala, had died in the fighting in August 1996[1].
On 8 August 1996, the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia replied to Yuli Rybakov, a deputy of the Russian parliament, that since 11 December 1994 prosecutors had opened 129 cases on crimes by the occupiers against civilians in Ichkeria. Of these, prosecutors had sent 21 cases to the courts, closed 21, left 26 unfinished and suspended 61 - 48 because they had not found those responsible, and 13 because they did not know where the accused were[1].
On 29 September 1997, the Directorate of Military Courts of Russia replied to Memorial's inquiry that over the whole war the courts had convicted 18 soldiers and officers, seven of them for murder[1].
On 26 July 1995, the UN Human Rights Committee expressed regret that no one had been held accountable for the ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees in Ichkeria[8]. The Human Rights Watch report of January 1997 says that Russia systematically violated human rights and just as systematically failed to hold those responsible to account[5]. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that over the whole war Russia held not a single senior commander to account. According to their data, Russian courts convicted no one for the bombings of the villages and towns of Ichkeria, the filtration camps, torture, hostage-taking and human shields[1].
According to Human Rights Watch, at the peace talks in August 1996 the Russian delegation objected to discussing responsibility for crimes[5]. After the peace agreements in Khasavyurt on 31 August 1996 (see: "Sham Treaties")[9], Russia moved the prosecutor's office of the occupation troops to Russian-controlled Dagestan. Human rights defenders of Memorial write that after this the prosecutors almost stopped investigating crimes by Russian servicemen and police officers[1]. On 12 March 1997, deputies in Moscow, by resolution No. 1199-II, declared an amnesty for crimes connected with the war in Ichkeria[10]. Under this amnesty, Russian prosecutors terminated unfinished cases on crimes by the occupiers[1].