15 years ago Russian troops entered Chechnya

On December 11, 1994, under the decree of the then president of Russia Boris Yeltsin, federal troops were brought to the territory of the Chechen Republic, and the first military campaign, called "restoration of the constitutional order" began.

According to the official data, the losses of the federal forces in the first Chechen War made over four thousand casualties and about two thousand missing persons. According to other sources, during these years in Chechnya up to 30,000 Russian servicemen were lost and some 60-100,000 local residents, including members of armed formations.

When recollecting the events of those days, residents of the republic say that the war could and should have been avoided.

"I find Yeltsin and his retinue guilty of the first war in Chechnya. Whoever said whatever, Dzhohar Dudaev was President, and he should have been negotiated with. Instead, the Kremlin fabricated a puppet 'opposition' led by Avturkhanov and unleashed a massacre," Ruslan Sugaipov, a resident of Grozny, told to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

"Dudaev didn't want this war, it's obvious. Many times he tried to contact Boris Yeltsin, but the latter's retinue would not admit it," said one of former Chechen MPs.

"That very Yeltsin, who in 1991 invited autonomies to take 'as much the sovereignty as they would,' behaved in this case as a real despot and sent troops against his own people," he has added.

An activist of a local NGO named Adam said that when the first war burst out, many people did not take it seriously. "We all thought here that today-tomorrow it would be over; that negotiations would start, and the United Nations and Council of Europe would interfere. However, nothing happened. Everybody felt pity for regular soldiers, as they were ordered to go to war, but at the same time hated the contracted ones, calling them mercenaries, who came to kill for money," he said.

He noted that hatred to militaries came later, after bloody "zachistkas" (clean-ups) in Grozny, and massacre in Samashki in spring of 1995. "But all the same, there was no such mutual exasperation and hatred like during the present military campaign. Then, neither militants nor militaries committed the atrocities typical for 1999-2000," said Adam.