my days in chechenya

the start of it all

the times were tough i was a russian boy in middle school my country the soviet union had collapsed under its own weight on 26th december 1991 my country was broken up into 15 parts we had become a weak nation now. at that time i was just 13 when the chechen rebels declared independence in 1991 By late 1994 the First Chechen War broke out and after two years of fighting the Russian forces withdrew from the region in December 1996.

the year 1999 had started i turned 19 the second chechen war started i was conscripted into the army i was sent to the frontlines of the war along with my other conscript friends, our unit of conscripts and other units were sent to liberate the city of grozny.

it was a grueling battle we were hardly advancing further but we kept trying ,what we lacked the most was a good network of informants in order to build a informant network we needed to be friendly with locals so we started giving free food and new clothes to the locals one day while distributing food and clothes i came across a young chechen social worker she approached me and said that she has some information about the place where rebels are hiding, upon hearing this i quickly called my senior lieutenant vladmir balenkov then she gave him the details of the rebels hideout to senior lieutenant vladimir then he called captain Dmitri petrov and discussed the matter with him , after giving the information about the rebels she went away. then after distributing food and new clothes among the locals we came back to our base and started to plan the raid on the hideout of rebels and after making a plan we showed it to our major victor ivanov and he gave us a green flag to conduct the raid, the decision was made that we will attack tomorrow at night .