Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

The Russian forces also used “Tochka” and “Tochka-U” ballistic missiles. These missiles have a radius of 120 km and on impact can cover up to 7 hectares with cluster shrapnel. According to Felgenhauer, “the use of such mass-destruction weapons as aerosol (fuel) munitions and ballistic missiles against civilian targets was undoubtedly authorized by Moscow and may implicate the President Putin personally, as well as his top military chiefs, in war crimes.”^[4] According to Jacob Kipp, an expert on the Russian army at the University of Kansas, the Russian army has certain peculiarities that make it more prone to commit war crimes than Western armies. “The Russians have a tradition in which every war is a ‘total war.’ . . . When the decision has been taken to start a war, there is no feeling for the fact that there can be limits and should be limits how this war is conducted.”^[5] The Russians call this situation bespredel, which literally means “without limits.” It implies torture, cruelty, and gratuitous acts of violence which remain, as a rule, unpunished.

The civilian death toll in Grozny was not as massive as in the winter of 1994–1995. This was due to the fact that many inhabitants, remembering what happened in the first war, fled to the neighboring republics, especially to Ingushetia. During the bombing campaign 250,000 civilians, more than a quarter of the total Chechen population, crossed the border. However, restricting the civilian death toll seemed not to be a top priority for the Russian government. Emma Gilligan has given an extremely precise and horrifying account of the failure of the Russian government to provide safe evacuation routes out of the war zone. “The failure to evacuate the capital,” she wrote, “became the most symbolic event. This was the decisive moment when the Russian government unashamedly revealed that it was prepared to subject the civilian population of Chechnya to a massive bombing campaign in order to take back the capital.”^[6] On December 6, 1999, the Russian armed forces dropped leaflets on the city, demanding that civilians still remaining in Grozny leave within five days or face destruction. At that moment fifteen to forty thousand civilians were still trapped in the city. “The crude logic was that fifteen to forty thousand civilians, if unable to move out of fear for their personal safety, or because of age, physical illness, or lack of financial means, might well be sacrificed for the defeat of several thousand separatist fighters.”^[7] The imminent bombing campaign on the most vulnerable citizens led to an international outcry, which put enough pressure on the Russian authorities to open—although belatedly and reluctantly—two evacuation routes. “The failure to evacuate the civilian population,” wrote Gilligan, “constituted one of Russia’s deepest failures of principle and leadership, in both the first and the second wars in Chechnya. This failure . . . reaffirmed a growing consensus among many civilians that they were being targeted as part of a larger campaign of racial destruction.”^[8]

Kontraktniki

: The Criminal Volunteers

The First Chechen War was fought with badly trained conscript soldiers with low morale, who, despite the superiority of their weapons, were often no match for the highly motivated Chechen fighters. For this reason the Russian army introduced—alongside the conscript soldiers—a new kind of soldier, the contract soldier or kontraktnik (plural: kontraktniki). These kontraktniki had, as a rule, a contract for six months and were very well paid by Russian standards, receiving 800 rubles, or approximately $25 per day.^[9] Most of them were demobilized soldiers from the former Soviet armed forces, who joined Private Security Companies (of which over twelve thousand were registered). The most well-known of these was the Moscow-based Alpha firm, founded by former KGB Spetsnaz (Special Forces) personnel, which is connected to the international ArmorGroup firm.^[10] What interests governments is the fact that