It is interesting that according to the official data of the same Defense Ministry (the data of Radio Svoboda on 21.10.03, two years before the numbers given above) 4 572 Russian military have died during the second Chechen campaign from October 1st 1999 to December 23rd 2002. Another 15,5 thousand military were wounded. No comments needed here. Let the Defense Ministry explain such a discrepancy in numbers; its striking lie. On the same Radio Svoboda program on 21.10.2003, the Novaya Gazeta military correspondent mayor Vyacheslav Izmailov mentioned his own data: “The first Chechen campaign lasted two years, from the end of 1994 to the end of 1996; about 6 thousand military have died. And about the same number have died during the 4 years of the actual Chechen campaign. In whole it makes about 12 thousand military. About 30 thousand wounded.”
And here is the data of the human rights center Memorial on 02.07.05: “During the first war in Chechnya in 1994-96 up to 50 thousand civilians have died… The quantity of civilians who died during the actual war in Chechnya from 1999 is from 10 to 20 thousand, without counting the 3 to 5 thousand who have disappeared.”
Valentina Melnikova from the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers said in an interview to BBC on 02.18.03: “Our estimations show that over 11 thousand soldiers have died in combat or from wounds and another 25 thousand were wounded during the war”. The same BBC said: “According to the Russian authorities about 15 thousand Chechen militants were killed in the war.”
In Novaya Gazeta on 08.15.05 the same military analyst Vyacheslav Izmailov sums up the quantity of Russian military losses during the second (Putin’s) Chechen campaign: “There was over 7 700 military dead during the second Chechen campaign.” (I remind that Izmailov gave the previous number of losses, 6 thousand, in 2003.)
If we are to resume this data, it turns out that during Putin’s presidential term 7 700 RF military, 7,5 thousand militants and about (let us take an average number without counting the disappeared) 15 thousand civilians lost their lives in Chechnya. Over 30 thousand people in total. Concerning the total quantity of wounded, we have Izmailov’s data only about the military: 30 thousand for both campaigns, divided by two makes 15 thousand. This is what the second Chechen war brought us because of Putin. Try to imagine thirty thousand dead bodies on the ground – it is an awful lot. What did we get in exchange for these lives? The hatred of the Chechens and the grief of our mothers. There is no other benefit. The mythical Chechen oil exists in a quantity sufficient for the personal enrichment of a few generals and militants but its supplies and output are absolutely miserable, in order to lose so much lives.
I foresee an opposing argument: after all Basayev entered Dagestan with two thousand militants. Yes, that is right. However he was beaten out after combats in August-September 1999. Only 500 Russian military died during that period until October 1st 1999. They should have beaten him out of Dagestan and stop. Or get to Terek River and stop and begin to build a real State border. But it was decided otherwise. Putin was the prime minister and successor.
Let us try to reconstruct the development of events during the second Chechen war. So:
August 1999 – Shamil Basayev invaded Dagestan.
August 31st 1999 – Explosion in the capital city’s downtown, 1 dead, 40 wounded.
September 4th 1999 - a five-stories home was blown up in Dagestan’s city of Buynaxk. 64 dead, including 23 children, 146 wounded.
September 8th – Explosion of a house in Moscow. Over ninety dead, about 200 wounded.
September 13th – A violent explosion in an eight-stories house on Kashirskoe road. Over 120 dead including 13 children.
September 16th – A violent explosion in downtown of Volgodonsk of the Rostov region, in the yard of a nine-stories house. 18 people died, including two children; 310 were injured.
September 22nd 1999 – An event worth mentioning here happened in Ryazan. On September 22nd at 9PM the bus driver Alexey Kartofelnikov noticed that suspicious people were dragging bags from a white car to the basement of the house where he was living. Kartofelnikov got worried and called the police.
The police arrived and discovered bags with wires in the basement. They evacuated the people from the house.
At 10:30PM on the same day the explosive device was put off (the timer was set at 5:30AM on September 23rd). The chief of the police’s technical department Yuri Tkachenko found that there was hexogen in the mix taken from the bags.
September 23rd 5:30-6AM. After the bags were brought out of the basement, the residents were allowed to go back in.
On September 23rd 1999 an information group of Ryazan’s police said that three bags of hexogen were found in the basement of a residential house and a terrorist act was prevented and that the employees of a FSB laboratory in Moscow will be able to say if this was a provocation or an attempted terrorist act after the expertise. On the same day the police press center said that hexogen was found during the analysis of the substance in the bags. At the same time the head of Ryazan’s FSB, the general-major Sergeev congratulated the residents with their second birth. The head of Ryazan’s police, the lieutenant-colonel Kabashov said in an interview to the Versia program that the expertise confirmed the presence of hexogen.
Vladimir Putin has also spoken – at that time he was prime minister. In the Vesti program he said: “Concerning the events in Ryazan I don’t think that this was a failure. If these explosive bags were noticed, it means that at least the population reacts the right way. /…/ No panic, no mercy to the bandits.”
On September 24th on a conference on the fight with organized crime the police head Rushaylo said that a terrorist act was prevented in Ryazan.
And suddenly after all these declarations of high ranked officials – the prime minister, the interior minister, analysts and FSB officers – on September 24th the head of the FSB Center of public relations Zdanovich made a surprising declaration that there was no hexogen in the bags and there was no detonator but that there were “some elements of a detonator” and “similar devices”. On the same day at noon the FSB director Patrushev said in an interview to NTV: “The incident in Ryazan was not a bombing. This was a training exercise. There was sugar in those bags”.
Even Patrushev’s subordinates in Ryazan could not agree with such a turn. Maybe they would have agreed but their professional honor was at stake. Ryazan’s FSB published a surprising declaration, surprising if we take in account the habit of FSB employees to keep silence and not to argue with the management publicly. “As it became known, the imitation of an explosive device discovered on 09.22.99 was part of a training exercise. We were surprised to hear this information in a moment when the FSB has identified the place of residence of the individuals implicated in the installation of the explosive device and their arrest was being prepared…”