Reeling from its embarrassing defeat in Grozny, the Kremlin regrouped and plotted a second, devastating and decisive attack on the separatists
The First Chechen War left Chechnya in chaos. The region fell into the hands of warlords and former separatist fighters, many of whom now turned to crime. By 1996, this instability had spread to the neighbouring Russian Republic of Dagestan where a bomb blew up an apartment block killing 68 people, mainly Russian border guards. More attacks occurred the following year, by which time Chechnya had declared itself an Islamic republic and was attracting jihadist groups from across Central Asia.
Things came to a head in 1999 when a 4,000 -strong army crossed the border from Chechnya into Dagestan in support of separatists there. Dagestan was also proclaimed an Islamic state and war was declared on Russia. It was to prove a short-lived incident, with local forces combining with the Russian military to drive back the Chechens.
With Russia under new management, however, the stage was now set for the events that would lead to the Second Chechen War.
Vladimir Putin’s rise to the top of Russian politics had been meteoric. Backed by a group of corrupt oligarchs, he’d gone from an assistant to the mayor of St Petersburg to Russia’s prime minister in three years. The oligarchs, who had grown rich from the privatisation of state assets in the post-Soviet era, fancied themselves as kingmakers.
Fearing a return to communism, they’d helped facilitate Yeltsin’s victory in the 1996 election. His deepening alcoholism had made him a liability, so they had selected the sober, quiet, apparently pliable Putin to be his successor.
Putin, however, was closely associated with the Yeltsin government and victory for him in the fast-approaching election was not assured. In fact, to stand any chance of winning something significant would need to happen.
In September 1999, as if by a miracle, he got exactly what he needed.
Over the course of two weeks, a series of explosions rocked apar tment buildings and shopping malls throughout Russia, killing over 300 people. Investigations quickly revealed that Chechen rebels were behind what became known as the Russian apar tment bombings. As the shockwaves reverberated and public support for a war against Chechnya grew, Putin seized the political oppor tunity presented to him. Within weeks he’d declared the Chechen government illegal and had ordered a second invasion.
Not everybody, however, was convinced that things were quite what they seemed. On 25 August, just days before the first blast, Russian journalist Aleksandr Zhilin had written an article in Moskovskaya Pravda claiming that a plan codenamed Storm in Moscow was being hatched in the Kremlin. Citing a leaked government document, he
