Today, when all manner of experts attribute the Second Chechen War to Vladimir Putin, they are either simply wrong or they are being disingenuous. These experts have overrated Putin’s rather modest intellect and they flatter his vanity by crediting him with the planning and orchestration of the Second Chechen War. The fact is that preparations for the war were afoot before Putin appeared on the scene. As any member of the military knows, in the short period Putin was in office prior to the war it would have been impossible to prepare a military campaign of this magnitude.[38] Even if we go back to his appointment as head of the FSB, 25 July 1998, before which no one had heard of him, Putin would not have had time to plan the campaign. The entire territory of Chechnya had been reconnoitred and charted, right down to the finest detail, including footpaths and animal tracks, ruins and springs. Command-post exercises had been held where the fictional scenario was an imaginary enemy in Dagestan and Chechnya. Large sums were being lavished on destabilizing the republic. A huge number of agents had been planted throughout the entire Chechen infrastructure. This war was handed as a gift to Putin, to allow this unknown FSB colonel to ensconce himself in the Kremlin. Confirmation for this can be found in the careless slip – or perhaps it was a deliberate remark – in a television programme by the man who, until 9 August 1999, was Prime Minister of Russia, Sergey Stepashin. Referring to the war that had already begun, he said, ‘Of course we were a bit hasty with sending our troops into Chechnya. The operation had been planned for March 2000.’ That moment with Stepashin was only shown once; when the programme was rebroadcast the section had been cut by the censors.
For the Chechen people, who had ended the previous war close to breaking point, the second war came as a genuine national disaster. With her economic footing far too shaky for a war that in its degree of violence and number of civilian casualties would far outstrip even the 1994–6 war, the Chechen people, isolated and friendless, found themselves face to face in mortal combat with an ogre gone berserk. And against the backdrop of the grisly rampage in Chechnya, the leaders of the democratic world held friendly meetings with Putin, invested their capital in the Russian economy and took a sympathetic view of Russia’s ‘war on international terror’ taking place in Chechnya. The world community’s contribution to Russia’s so-called ‘war against international terrorism in the North Caucasus’ will be judged by history, as will the ‘danger of Russian territories being annexed with the aim of creating a united Islamic caliphate’ – what a joke! – by ‘international terrorists entrenched in the Chechen Republic’. But let’s not get too lost in the wilderness of politics.
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That autumn, despite the desperate resistance put up by the militiamen, the Russian Army stubbornly pushed on towards the capital. Armed with massive manpower, vastly superior military hardware and total air dominance, and with the advantage of the element of surprise, the Russian command spared neither money nor men (and their men were suffering heavy losses, despite Chechnya’s apparent weakness) in their bid to advance. The Chechens were not ready for war, and they did not have time to organize a proper defence at the border. They were forced to retreat, fighting a rearguard action. Their lack of preparation was compounded by Maskhadov’s diplomatic efforts to avert the outbreak of war and the belief that there would be no invasion. Nevertheless, by 15 October, I was setting out for the Tersky Ridge, around forty-five kilometres north of the capital, as part of the Almaz assault unit, 80 per cent of whom were veterans of the last war. That’s not to say I was a fighter in the unit; I was still doing the job of a journalist, but now in a military setting. The situation required that all journalists be embedded in a unit, where they came under the responsibility of a specific commander. Most of the men in this unit were people I’d known or been friends with since the first war. On the very next day we were withdrawn from these positions and sent back to base; another unit then dug in at this sector.
At the start of the war, the Defence Committee had held a meeting at general headquarters and decided to mount defences in the major towns such as Grozny, Gudermes and Urus-Martan. The strategic thinking behind this approach is a separate topic, but the key point was that the large towns should become the main hubs of the resistance. Yet despite the skilfully mounted defence, the only place that truly became an epicentre of resistance was the capital.
The Russian Army, of course, chose Grozny for their major assault, deploying vast numbers of forces there. According to the official Russian records, up to 25,000 soldiers advanced on Grozny against 7,000 defending the capital. This figure of 7,000 defenders includes all the logistical support, as well as the hidden pockets of ‘poseur fighters’, who, unbeknownst to the command, were trapped in the encirclement and sat out the entire battle holed up in basements, only emerging into the daylight to join the breakout from the city. In truth, there were never more than 3,000 Chechen defenders fighting on the front line. The figure of 25,000 attacking forces is also doubtful, if only because in one narrow defensive sector, where forty militiamen were dug in, an entire battalion of motorized infantry was advancing with all its attached forces – tanks, artillery and the like. It seems the Russians did not count their numerous logistical units, an essential component of any offensive or defence, and they conveniently forgot about the attached forces, which included both Interior Ministry and internal troops, as well as the Chechen Armed Opposition units, along with many others, to say nothing of the total dominance of the airspace and the stark superiority of their hardware. Generally, when the authorities announce that ‘such and such a battalion seized and held such and such a town’, the uninitiated will believe them. However, people who saw with their own eyes at least two battalions being used in the attack will at once think it’s a deliberate lie. In reality, though, the authorities are not lying; they’re simply not taking into account the number of units attached to a particular battalion. This system allows the Russian Army command to speak ‘truthfully’ about the modest number of troops involved in an operation, and also their modest combat losses (officers don’t get much stick for losses in the attached units), against a backdrop of enemy numbers expanding pro rata. And that’s just what they did with Grozny in the autumn of 1999.
38
Vladimir Putin was appointed Acting Prime Minister on 9 August 1999 and became Acting President on 31 December 1999.