Blowing Up Russia (3 page)
Authors: Alexander Litvinenko
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Political Science, #General, #Intelligence & Espionage, #Terrorism, #World, #Russian & Former Soviet Union, #Social Science, #Violence in Society, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Murder
Dudaev started refusing to pay. The financial conflict gradually developed into a political standoff, and then a contest of strength between the Russian and Chechen leaderships.
The threat of war hung heavily in the air. Dudaev requested a personal meeting with Yeltsin, perhaps even intending to tell him what had been going on. But the threesome, who controlled access to Yeltsin, demanded a bribe of several million dollars for organizing a meeting between the two presidents. Dudaev refused to pay and demanded that the meeting with Yeltsin take place without any money changing hands in advance.
Furthermore, for the first time, he threatened the people who had been helping him strictly for payment with the disclosure of documents in his possession, which contained compromising information about the functionaries self-serving dealings with the Chechens. Dudaev believed that possession of these documents was his insurance against arrest. He could not be arrested; he could only be killed, since he was an eyewitness to crimes committed by members of Yeltsin s entourage. Dudaev had miscalculated. His blackmail failed, and the meeting he wanted never took place. The president of Chechnya was now a dangerous witness who had to be removed. So a cruel and senseless war was deliberately provoked. Let us trace the sequence of events.
On November 22, 1994, the State Defense Committee of the Chechen Republic, which Dudaev had founded by decree the previous day, accused Russia of launching a war against Chechnya. As far as the journalists could see, there was no war, but Dudaev knew
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15
that the party of war had already made its decision to commence military action. The Chechen State Defense Committee which, in addition to Dudaev, included the leaders of the military and other agencies of coercion, as well as a number of key governmental departments and ministries, held an emergency session in response to the threat of military incursion into Chechnya. A statement by the State Defense Committee which was distributed in Grozny, claimed that Russian regular units are occupying the Nadterechny district, part of the territory of the Chechen Republic, adding that in the days immediately ahead, it was planned to occupy the territory of the Naursk and Shelkovsk districts. For this purpose, use is being made of regular units of the North Caucasus Military District, special subunits of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, and army aircraft from the North Caucasus Military District. According to information received by the State Defense Council, special subunits of the Russian FSK are also taking part in the operation.
The Central Armed Forces HQ of Chechnya confirmed that military units were being concentrated on the border with Chechnya s Naursk district, in the village of Veselaia, in the Stavropol Region: there were heavy tanks, artillery and as many as six battalions of infantry. It later became known that the backbone of the forces, drawn up for the storming of Grozny, consisted of a column of Russian armored vehicles assembled on the initiative of the FSK, which paid for it and also hired soldiers and officers on contract, including members of the elite armed forces from the armored Taman and Kantemirov divisions.
On November 23, nine Russian army helicopters, presumably MI-8s, from the North Caucasus Military District, launched a rocket attack on the town of Shali, located approximately forty kilometers from Grozny, in an attempt to destroy the armored vehicles of a tank regiment located there, and were met with anti-aircraft artillery fire.
There were wounded on the Chechen side, which announced that it had a video recording showing helicopters bearing Russian identification markings.
On November 25, seven Russian helicopters from a military base in the Stavropol Region fired several rocket salvoes at the airport in Grozny and at nearby apartment buildings, damaging the landing strip and the civilian aircraft standing on it. Six people were killed and about twenty-five were injured. In response to this raid, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chechnya forwarded a statement to the authorities of the Stavropol Region pointing out, among other things, that the region s leaders bear responsibility for such acts, and in the case of appropriate measures being taken by the Chechen side, all complaints should be directed to Moscow.
On November 26, the forces of the Provisional Council of Chechnya (the Chechen opposition), supported by Russian helicopters and armored vehicles, attacked Grozny from all four sides. More than 1,200 men, fifty tanks, eighty armored personnel carriers, and six SU-27 planes from the opposition took part in the operation. An announcement, made by the Moscow center of the puppet Provisional Council of Chechnya, claimed that the demoralized forces of Dudaev s supporters are offering virtually no resistance, and everything will probably be over by the morning.
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16
In fact, the operation was a total failure. The attackers lost about 500 men and more than twenty tanks, and another twenty tanks were captured by Dudaev s forces. About 200 members of the armed forces were taken prisoner. On November 28, a column of prisoners was marched through the streets of Grozny to mark the victory over the forces of opposition. At the same time, the Chechen leadership disclosed a list of fourteen captured soldiers and officers who were members of the Russian armed forces. The prisoners confessed in front of television cameras that most of them served in military units 43162 and 01451 based outside Moscow. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation replied that the individuals concerned were not serving members of the Russian armed forces. In response to an inquiry concerning prisoners Captain Andrei Kriukov and Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Zhukov, the Ministry of Defense stated that these officers had indeed been serving in army unit 01451, but they had not reported to the unit since October 20,1994, and an order for their discharge from the armed forces was being drawn up. In other words, the Russian Ministry of Defense declared the captured soldiers to be deserters. The following day, Yevgeny Zhukov s father refuted the ministry s statement. In an interview with the Russian Information Agency Novosti, he said that his son had left his unit on November 9, telling his parents that he had been assigned for ten days to Nizhny Tagil. The next time Yevgeny s parents had seen him was in a group of captured Russian soldiers in Grozny on the weekly television news program Itogi on November 27. When he was asked how their son came to be in Chechnya, Unit Commander Zhukov refused to answer.
A little later the following colorful account of the events of November 26 was given by Major Valery Ivanov, following his release in a group of seven members of the Russian armed forces on December 8: By unit order of the day, all those who had been recruited were granted compassionate leave due to family circumstances. For the most part, they took officers without any settled domestic arrangements. Half of them had no apartments-you were supposed to be able to refuse, but if you did refuse, when they started handing out apartments you d find yourself left out. On November 10, we arrived in Mozdok in northern Ossetia. In two weeks we made ready fourteen tanks with Chechen crews and twenty-six tanks for Russian servicemen. On November 25, we advanced on Grozny& I personally was in a group of three tanks which took control of the Grozny television center at mid-day on the 26th. There was no resistance from the Interior Ministry forces defending the tower. But three hours later, in the absence of communications with our command, we came under attack by the famous Abkhazian battalion. We were surrounded by tanks and infantry and decided it was pointless to return fire, since the [anti-Dudaev] opposition forces had immediately run off and abandoned us, and two of our three tanks were burnt out. The crews managed to bail out and surrender to the guards of the television center, who handed us over to President Dudaev s personal bodyguard. They treated us well, in the last few days they hardly guarded us at all, but then there was nowhere we could run off to.
16
17
The impression given by all this was that the armored column had been deliberately introduced into Grozny on November 26, so that it would be destroyed. The column was not capable of disarming Dudaev and his army, or of taking the city and holding it.
Dudaev s army was at full strength and well-armed. The column could not possibly have been anything more than a moving target.
Russian Minister of Defense Grachyov hinted that he had not been involved in the irresponsible attempt to take Grozny. From a military point of view, Grachyov declared at a press conference on November 28, 1996, it would be entirely possible to take Grozny in two hours with a single regiment of paratroopers. However, all military conflicts are ultimately settled at the negotiating table by political methods. Introducing tanks into the city without infantry cover was really quite pointless. But why then were they sent in?
General Gennady Troshev would later tell us about Grachyov s doubts concerning the Chechen campaign: He tried to do something about it. He tried to extract a clear assessment of the situation from Stepashin and his special service, he tried to delay the initial introduction of troops until the spring, he even tried to reach a personal agreement with Dudaev. We know now that such a meeting did take place. They didn t come to any agreement. General Troshev, who at this stage was in control of the second war in Chechnya, could not understand how Grachyov had failed to reach an understanding with Dudaev. The reason, of course, was that Dudaev insisted on a personal meeting with Yeltsin, and Korzhakov refused to set up the meeting unless he was paid.
The brilliant military operation in which a Russian armored column was burnt out was, indeed, not organized by Grachyov, but by director of the FSK Stepashin and head of the Moscow UFSB Savostyanov, who was responsible for handling questions relating to the overthrow of Dudaev s regime and the introduction of troops into Chechnya. Those who expatiated at great length on the crude miscalculations of the Russian military leaders, who had sent the armored column into the city only for it to be destroyed, failed to understand the subtle political calculations of the provocateurs who organized the war in Chechnya. The people who planned the introduction of troops into Grozny wanted the column to be wiped out in spectacular fashion by the Chechens. It was the only way they could provoke Yeltsin into launching a full-scale war against Dudaev.
Immediately after the rout of the armored column in Grozny, President Yeltsin made a public appeal to Russian participants in the conflict in the Chechen Republic, and the Kremlin began preparing public opinion for imminent full-scale war. In an interview for the Russian Information Agency Novosti, Arkady Popov, a consultant with the president s analytical center, announced that Russia could take on the role of a compulsory peacemaker in Chechnya, and that all the indications were that the Russian president intended to take decisive action. If the president were to declare a state of emergency in Chechnya, the Russian authorities could employ a form of limited intervention, which would take the form of disarming both sides to the conflict by introducing a limited contingent of Russian troops into Grozny -exactly what had been tried in Afghanistan. So, having provoked a conflict in Chechnya by providing political
17
18
and military support to the Chechen opposition, the FSK now intended to launch a war against Dudaev under cover of peacemaking operations.
The Chechen side took Yeltsin s statement to be an ultimatum and a declaration of war. A statement issued by the Chechen government confirmed that this statement, and any attempt to put it into effect, were in contravention of the norms of international law, and gave the government of Chechnya the right to respond by taking adequate measures for the protection of its independence and the territorial integrity of its state. In the opinion of the government of the Chechen Republic, the threat of a Russian declaration of a state of emergency on Chechen territory expressed an undisguised desire to continue military operations and interfere in the internal affairs of another state.
On November 30, Grozny was subjected to air strikes by the Russian air force. On December 1, the Russian military command refused to allow into Grozny an aircraft carrying a delegation of members of the Russian State Duma. The delegation landed in the Ingushetian capital of Nazran and set out overland to Grozny for a meeting with Dudaev. While they were traveling to the Chechen capital, on December 1, at about 14.00 hours, eight SU-27 planes carried out a second raid on the Chechen capital, encountering dense anti-aircraft fire in the process. The planes specifically shelled the district of the city where Dudaev lived. According to the Chechen side, one plane was shot down by anti-aircraft defense forces.
On December 2, the chairman of the Duma Defense Committee and head of the delegation that had arrived in Grozny, Sergei Yushenkov, declared that reliance on force in Russian-Chechen relations was doomed to failure. Yushenkov also stated that familiarization with the situation on the ground had convinced him that negotiation was the only possible way to resolve the situation that had arisen, and claimed that the Chechen side had not set any preconditions for negotiations.
Public opinion was still on the side of the Chechens, but the leadership of the FSB had become absolutely convinced that it could be manipulated by the use of acts of terrorism blamed on the Chechens. On December 5, the FSK informed journalists that foreign mercenaries had surged across the state border into Chechnya and, therefore, activity by the terrorist groups being infiltrated into Russia today cannot be ruled out in other regions of the country as well. This was the first undisguised announcement by the FSK that acts of terrorism with a trail leading back to Chechnya would soon begin in Russia.
At this point, however, they still spoke of Russia being infiltrated by foreign agents, a ploy drawn, no doubt, from the pages of the old Soviet KGB handbooks.
On December 6, Dudaev declared in an interview that Russia s policy was creating a rising tide of Islamic sentiment in Chechnya: Playing the Chechen card may bring into play the global interests of foreign Islamic states, who could make it impossible to control the development of events. A third force has now emerged in Chechnya, the Islamists, and the initiative is gradually shifting over to them. Dudaev characterized the mood of the new arrivals in Grozny with the words: We are no longer your soldiers, Mr.
The threat of war hung heavily in the air. Dudaev requested a personal meeting with Yeltsin, perhaps even intending to tell him what had been going on. But the threesome, who controlled access to Yeltsin, demanded a bribe of several million dollars for organizing a meeting between the two presidents. Dudaev refused to pay and demanded that the meeting with Yeltsin take place without any money changing hands in advance.
Furthermore, for the first time, he threatened the people who had been helping him strictly for payment with the disclosure of documents in his possession, which contained compromising information about the functionaries self-serving dealings with the Chechens. Dudaev believed that possession of these documents was his insurance against arrest. He could not be arrested; he could only be killed, since he was an eyewitness to crimes committed by members of Yeltsin s entourage. Dudaev had miscalculated. His blackmail failed, and the meeting he wanted never took place. The president of Chechnya was now a dangerous witness who had to be removed. So a cruel and senseless war was deliberately provoked. Let us trace the sequence of events.
On November 22, 1994, the State Defense Committee of the Chechen Republic, which Dudaev had founded by decree the previous day, accused Russia of launching a war against Chechnya. As far as the journalists could see, there was no war, but Dudaev knew
14
15
that the party of war had already made its decision to commence military action. The Chechen State Defense Committee which, in addition to Dudaev, included the leaders of the military and other agencies of coercion, as well as a number of key governmental departments and ministries, held an emergency session in response to the threat of military incursion into Chechnya. A statement by the State Defense Committee which was distributed in Grozny, claimed that Russian regular units are occupying the Nadterechny district, part of the territory of the Chechen Republic, adding that in the days immediately ahead, it was planned to occupy the territory of the Naursk and Shelkovsk districts. For this purpose, use is being made of regular units of the North Caucasus Military District, special subunits of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, and army aircraft from the North Caucasus Military District. According to information received by the State Defense Council, special subunits of the Russian FSK are also taking part in the operation.
The Central Armed Forces HQ of Chechnya confirmed that military units were being concentrated on the border with Chechnya s Naursk district, in the village of Veselaia, in the Stavropol Region: there were heavy tanks, artillery and as many as six battalions of infantry. It later became known that the backbone of the forces, drawn up for the storming of Grozny, consisted of a column of Russian armored vehicles assembled on the initiative of the FSK, which paid for it and also hired soldiers and officers on contract, including members of the elite armed forces from the armored Taman and Kantemirov divisions.
On November 23, nine Russian army helicopters, presumably MI-8s, from the North Caucasus Military District, launched a rocket attack on the town of Shali, located approximately forty kilometers from Grozny, in an attempt to destroy the armored vehicles of a tank regiment located there, and were met with anti-aircraft artillery fire.
There were wounded on the Chechen side, which announced that it had a video recording showing helicopters bearing Russian identification markings.
On November 25, seven Russian helicopters from a military base in the Stavropol Region fired several rocket salvoes at the airport in Grozny and at nearby apartment buildings, damaging the landing strip and the civilian aircraft standing on it. Six people were killed and about twenty-five were injured. In response to this raid, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chechnya forwarded a statement to the authorities of the Stavropol Region pointing out, among other things, that the region s leaders bear responsibility for such acts, and in the case of appropriate measures being taken by the Chechen side, all complaints should be directed to Moscow.
On November 26, the forces of the Provisional Council of Chechnya (the Chechen opposition), supported by Russian helicopters and armored vehicles, attacked Grozny from all four sides. More than 1,200 men, fifty tanks, eighty armored personnel carriers, and six SU-27 planes from the opposition took part in the operation. An announcement, made by the Moscow center of the puppet Provisional Council of Chechnya, claimed that the demoralized forces of Dudaev s supporters are offering virtually no resistance, and everything will probably be over by the morning.
15
16
In fact, the operation was a total failure. The attackers lost about 500 men and more than twenty tanks, and another twenty tanks were captured by Dudaev s forces. About 200 members of the armed forces were taken prisoner. On November 28, a column of prisoners was marched through the streets of Grozny to mark the victory over the forces of opposition. At the same time, the Chechen leadership disclosed a list of fourteen captured soldiers and officers who were members of the Russian armed forces. The prisoners confessed in front of television cameras that most of them served in military units 43162 and 01451 based outside Moscow. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation replied that the individuals concerned were not serving members of the Russian armed forces. In response to an inquiry concerning prisoners Captain Andrei Kriukov and Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Zhukov, the Ministry of Defense stated that these officers had indeed been serving in army unit 01451, but they had not reported to the unit since October 20,1994, and an order for their discharge from the armed forces was being drawn up. In other words, the Russian Ministry of Defense declared the captured soldiers to be deserters. The following day, Yevgeny Zhukov s father refuted the ministry s statement. In an interview with the Russian Information Agency Novosti, he said that his son had left his unit on November 9, telling his parents that he had been assigned for ten days to Nizhny Tagil. The next time Yevgeny s parents had seen him was in a group of captured Russian soldiers in Grozny on the weekly television news program Itogi on November 27. When he was asked how their son came to be in Chechnya, Unit Commander Zhukov refused to answer.
A little later the following colorful account of the events of November 26 was given by Major Valery Ivanov, following his release in a group of seven members of the Russian armed forces on December 8: By unit order of the day, all those who had been recruited were granted compassionate leave due to family circumstances. For the most part, they took officers without any settled domestic arrangements. Half of them had no apartments-you were supposed to be able to refuse, but if you did refuse, when they started handing out apartments you d find yourself left out. On November 10, we arrived in Mozdok in northern Ossetia. In two weeks we made ready fourteen tanks with Chechen crews and twenty-six tanks for Russian servicemen. On November 25, we advanced on Grozny& I personally was in a group of three tanks which took control of the Grozny television center at mid-day on the 26th. There was no resistance from the Interior Ministry forces defending the tower. But three hours later, in the absence of communications with our command, we came under attack by the famous Abkhazian battalion. We were surrounded by tanks and infantry and decided it was pointless to return fire, since the [anti-Dudaev] opposition forces had immediately run off and abandoned us, and two of our three tanks were burnt out. The crews managed to bail out and surrender to the guards of the television center, who handed us over to President Dudaev s personal bodyguard. They treated us well, in the last few days they hardly guarded us at all, but then there was nowhere we could run off to.
16
17
The impression given by all this was that the armored column had been deliberately introduced into Grozny on November 26, so that it would be destroyed. The column was not capable of disarming Dudaev and his army, or of taking the city and holding it.
Dudaev s army was at full strength and well-armed. The column could not possibly have been anything more than a moving target.
Russian Minister of Defense Grachyov hinted that he had not been involved in the irresponsible attempt to take Grozny. From a military point of view, Grachyov declared at a press conference on November 28, 1996, it would be entirely possible to take Grozny in two hours with a single regiment of paratroopers. However, all military conflicts are ultimately settled at the negotiating table by political methods. Introducing tanks into the city without infantry cover was really quite pointless. But why then were they sent in?
General Gennady Troshev would later tell us about Grachyov s doubts concerning the Chechen campaign: He tried to do something about it. He tried to extract a clear assessment of the situation from Stepashin and his special service, he tried to delay the initial introduction of troops until the spring, he even tried to reach a personal agreement with Dudaev. We know now that such a meeting did take place. They didn t come to any agreement. General Troshev, who at this stage was in control of the second war in Chechnya, could not understand how Grachyov had failed to reach an understanding with Dudaev. The reason, of course, was that Dudaev insisted on a personal meeting with Yeltsin, and Korzhakov refused to set up the meeting unless he was paid.
The brilliant military operation in which a Russian armored column was burnt out was, indeed, not organized by Grachyov, but by director of the FSK Stepashin and head of the Moscow UFSB Savostyanov, who was responsible for handling questions relating to the overthrow of Dudaev s regime and the introduction of troops into Chechnya. Those who expatiated at great length on the crude miscalculations of the Russian military leaders, who had sent the armored column into the city only for it to be destroyed, failed to understand the subtle political calculations of the provocateurs who organized the war in Chechnya. The people who planned the introduction of troops into Grozny wanted the column to be wiped out in spectacular fashion by the Chechens. It was the only way they could provoke Yeltsin into launching a full-scale war against Dudaev.
Immediately after the rout of the armored column in Grozny, President Yeltsin made a public appeal to Russian participants in the conflict in the Chechen Republic, and the Kremlin began preparing public opinion for imminent full-scale war. In an interview for the Russian Information Agency Novosti, Arkady Popov, a consultant with the president s analytical center, announced that Russia could take on the role of a compulsory peacemaker in Chechnya, and that all the indications were that the Russian president intended to take decisive action. If the president were to declare a state of emergency in Chechnya, the Russian authorities could employ a form of limited intervention, which would take the form of disarming both sides to the conflict by introducing a limited contingent of Russian troops into Grozny -exactly what had been tried in Afghanistan. So, having provoked a conflict in Chechnya by providing political
17
18
and military support to the Chechen opposition, the FSK now intended to launch a war against Dudaev under cover of peacemaking operations.
The Chechen side took Yeltsin s statement to be an ultimatum and a declaration of war. A statement issued by the Chechen government confirmed that this statement, and any attempt to put it into effect, were in contravention of the norms of international law, and gave the government of Chechnya the right to respond by taking adequate measures for the protection of its independence and the territorial integrity of its state. In the opinion of the government of the Chechen Republic, the threat of a Russian declaration of a state of emergency on Chechen territory expressed an undisguised desire to continue military operations and interfere in the internal affairs of another state.
On November 30, Grozny was subjected to air strikes by the Russian air force. On December 1, the Russian military command refused to allow into Grozny an aircraft carrying a delegation of members of the Russian State Duma. The delegation landed in the Ingushetian capital of Nazran and set out overland to Grozny for a meeting with Dudaev. While they were traveling to the Chechen capital, on December 1, at about 14.00 hours, eight SU-27 planes carried out a second raid on the Chechen capital, encountering dense anti-aircraft fire in the process. The planes specifically shelled the district of the city where Dudaev lived. According to the Chechen side, one plane was shot down by anti-aircraft defense forces.
On December 2, the chairman of the Duma Defense Committee and head of the delegation that had arrived in Grozny, Sergei Yushenkov, declared that reliance on force in Russian-Chechen relations was doomed to failure. Yushenkov also stated that familiarization with the situation on the ground had convinced him that negotiation was the only possible way to resolve the situation that had arisen, and claimed that the Chechen side had not set any preconditions for negotiations.
Public opinion was still on the side of the Chechens, but the leadership of the FSB had become absolutely convinced that it could be manipulated by the use of acts of terrorism blamed on the Chechens. On December 5, the FSK informed journalists that foreign mercenaries had surged across the state border into Chechnya and, therefore, activity by the terrorist groups being infiltrated into Russia today cannot be ruled out in other regions of the country as well. This was the first undisguised announcement by the FSK that acts of terrorism with a trail leading back to Chechnya would soon begin in Russia.
At this point, however, they still spoke of Russia being infiltrated by foreign agents, a ploy drawn, no doubt, from the pages of the old Soviet KGB handbooks.
On December 6, Dudaev declared in an interview that Russia s policy was creating a rising tide of Islamic sentiment in Chechnya: Playing the Chechen card may bring into play the global interests of foreign Islamic states, who could make it impossible to control the development of events. A third force has now emerged in Chechnya, the Islamists, and the initiative is gradually shifting over to them. Dudaev characterized the mood of the new arrivals in Grozny with the words: We are no longer your soldiers, Mr.
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