Grozny Falls: Chechnya's Separatists Exiled by Russia

Russia took Grozny on February 6, 2000, after four months of sustained bombardment. The city that had survived the first Chechen war from 1994 to 1996 barely existed anymore. Ninety percent of the buildings were damaged or destroyed, and an estimated 5,000 civilians had been killed in the siege, though independent estimates run higher. The separatist government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria fled to the southern mountains and continued fighting for another nine years. Vladimir Putin, who had been prime minister for five months when the second war began in September 1999, built his presidency on the promise of bringing Chechnya to heel. The casus belli was a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people. Russian authorities blamed Chechen militants, though the bombings were surrounded by questions that were never satisfactorily answered, including a suspicious incident in Ryazan where FSB agents were caught placing what appeared to be explosives in a residential building. The military campaign that followed was far more brutal than the first war, employing indiscriminate artillery bombardment, filtration camps where detainees were tortured, and disappearances of Chechen men that human rights organizations documented extensively. Putin promised order after the chaos of the 1990s, and the Chechen war gave it to him. His approval ratings surged from single digits to over seventy percent during the campaign. Chechnya stayed part of Russia, but the insurgency spread across the North Caucasus and eventually morphed into an Islamist movement with connections to global jihadist networks.