A Brief History
On May 27, 1996, President Boris Yeltsin of Russia met with Chechen rebels to negotiate a cease fire in what is known as The First Chechen War. The Chechen Republic is an almost autonomous region within the Russian Federation, which fought a war for independence from December of 1994 to August of 1996.
Digging Deeper
The Chechen people lost as many as 14,000 fighters killed in the war, and another 80,000 to 100,000 civilians slain. The Russians lost about 3,000 to 5,000 killed. A second Chechen War was fought from 1999 to 2009.
Chechnya is part of Russia, and the people are mainly Muslims of the Caucasian ethnic group, about 1.5 million strong with an area of about 6,700 square miles. Chechnya was first absorbed by Russia around 1723.
Since 2005, Ramzan Kadyrov has run Chechnya, and has been allied to Vladimir Putin, dictator of Russia, despite the history of fighting the Russians. Kadyrov is not only supporting the Russian War on Ukraine, he even suggested using nukes on the Ukrainians!
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Milyukov, Ilya. Chronicles of The First and Second Chechen Wars. Academica Press, 2020.
Oliker, Olga. Russia’s Chechen Wars 1994-2000: Lessons from the Urban Combat. RAND Corporation, 2000.
The featured image in this article, a map by Rr016 showing the Russian military’s attack routes in Grozny, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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