From the beginning the Chechen conflict has in essence been an armed revolt against the Russian Federal authorities by one of the country's ethnically based autonomous republics, which in 1991 declared unilaterally that it was seceding from Russia and setting up an independent state. Similar armed conflicts in the form of ‘wars for self-determination’ emerged at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s in several regions of the former USSR (in Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, in the Transdniestria region in Moldova). Almost all of these ended in a victory of sorts for the separatists, but not one of these conflicts has produced an independent state, nor has a political solution to them yet been found.

Context

The federal authorities' attempt to put an end to the separatist regime in Chechnya by force spilled over into the drawn-out and destructive military campaign of 1994–96, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from the republic and the signing of peace agreements in August 1996 and in May 1997. According to official figures, in the first Chechen campaign the federal forces and police alone lost around 4,000 dead. The 1994–96 war in Chechnya led to enormous human and material losses: around 35,000 people were killed, more than one third of the republic's population (almost 450,000, including those who had left before the war) became forced migrants and refugees, while Grozny and many other places suffered severe destruction.