Putin's Wars (32 page)

The Second Chechen War was “Putin’s War.” This fact was immediately recognized by
Sergey Kovalyov, who chose it as the title of an article for the
New York Review of Books
in February 2000.
^[1]
Putin’s war would surpass the First Chechen War in cruelty, lawlessness, cynicism,
and murderous violence. It would, additionally, become the longest war that was fought
in Europe after the Second World War. There were, however, five important differences
with the First Chechen War.

1. Unlike the First Chechen War, the Second Chechen War consisted of two phases, the
   first of which was the detonator of the second. The first phase was a secret war against
   the Russian population; the second phase was an open war against the Chechen population.
   The first phase consisted of an incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan in Russia
   proper and a series of apartment bombings in the Russian Federation of which Chechen
   militias were accused. However, soon allegations hinted at a possible implication
   of the FSB, the Russian secret service.
   

2. The war was given another ideological justification
   .
   The First Chechen War was still presented as a war against Chechen “separatists” or
   “bandits.” The Second Chechen War was presented as a war against “international Islamist
   terrorism.”
   

3. In the First Chechen War the Russian soldiers were almost exclusively conscripts.
   In the Second Chechen War, alongside conscripts, contract soldiers (
   kontraktniki
   ) also were engaged. This could explain the increased ferocity of the violence against
   the civilian population.
   

4. The First Chechen War was, on the Russian side, fought mainly by ethnic Russian soldiers.
   In the Second Chechen War, however, the Kremlin, after some time, went over to a
   Chechenization
   of the conflict, in which Chechens fought Chechens. This policy of divide and rule
   not only secured Russia a “victory”—albeit provisional and still fragile—but it was
   an additional factor that contributed to the growth in violence against the civilian
   population.
   

5. When the First Chechen War started, Russia was not a member of the Council of Europe.
   It became a member only on February 28, 1996—one month before Yeltsin presented his
   peace plan that ended the First Chechen War. During the Second Chechen War, however,
   Russia was a fully fledged member of the Council and there was a flagrant contradiction
   between the humanitarian obligations required by the membership of this organization
   and the situation on the ground in Chechnya.
   

The official reason, given in September 1999 by the Russian government, which, at
that time, was headed by prime minister Vladimir Putin, for starting the second war
in Chechnya was a series of events. These events started with an incursion by the
radical Chechen leader Shamil Basayev with two thousand armed men into the neighboring
republic of Dagestan on August 8, 1999. This attack was followed by a series of terrorist
explosions in apartment buildings in Buikansk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September.
These explosions were immediately ascribed to Chechen terrorists. There remain, however,
many unanswered questions concerning the Chechen incursion into Dagestan, as well
as the apartment explosions, that cast doubt on the official version. From different
sides, the Russian authorities have been accused of presenting an official version
of the events that was, in effect, a smokescreen behind which another, darker and
murkier reality was hidden. The Second Chechen War was presented by the Russian authorities
as a spontaneous Russian response to an unexpected Chechen attack. However, the facts
do not completely fit this narrative. Different authors suggest that, as in the case
of the First Chechen War, the military attack was carefully planned within the Kremlin
walls—only this time better.

When Yeltsin started the First Chechen War he had two objectives: first, to end the
political instability in this region, and, second, to safeguard his reelection. The
purpose of the Second Chechen War was to defend the interests of the Kremlin, especially
of the “Family,” the group around Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. This group
included oligarchs, such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, but also Aleksandr
Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration, and his two predecessors Valentin
Yumashev (who would marry Tatyana in 2002) and Anatoly Chubais. On May 25, 1998, Vladimir
Putin was appointed first deputy head of the presidential administration. Three months
later, on July 25, 1998, he became director of the FSB, the secret service. Putin
was considered by the members of the Family to be one of them. He certainly
was
one of them, although he had his personal agenda.

In the spring of 1999 the Family had a sense of urgency that was bordering on panic.
This time the situation was even more pressing than in 1994—before the start of the
First Chechen War. Soon, in December 1999, there would be elections for the State
Duma, followed by the presidential election in the spring of 2000. According to the
constitution, Boris Yeltsin, having served two terms, would have to leave the Kremlin.
This imminent change of the country’s leadership was extremely threatening. Yevgeny
Primakov, who was appointed prime minister in September 1998 under the pressure of
a hostile Duma, was working closely together with Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow.
Both men had a good chance of winning the parliamentary elections in December. And
one of them could become the next president. Primakov had already threatened to sue
all oligarchs who illegally had enriched themselves. This happened at the same time
as the Swiss authorities had opened an investigation into the so-called Mabetex affair.
Mabetex was a construction company that was said to have paid $15 million in kickbacks
to Yeltsin, his two daughters, and senior Kremlin officials, in order to receive a
renovation contract for the Kremlin buildings. At the same time US investigators alleged
that $10 billion in funds from Russia had been illegally deposited in the Bank of
New York. It was suspected that part of it came from a $20 billion loan the IMF had
paid to Russia since 1992 to stabilize the economy. Members of the Family were not
only afraid that the new leadership would strip them of their newly acquired wealth,
but—even worse—they feared that they could end up in prison. There were ominous signs
on the wall. Russia’s highest investigator, Procurator General Yury Skuratov, had
already begun a series of investigations that included the Mabetex affair and irregularities
at Aeroflot and the Russian Central Bank, which were all connected with the Family.
^[2]
It was in this context of a regime in panic that felt itself increasingly cornered,
that the search for a suitable successor to Yeltsin began.

In his memoirs Yeltsin wrote about his attempts to find a suitable successor, where
“suitable” meant a person who was capable and strong-willed, and at the same time
trustworthy enough to give the Family a guarantee that its members would not be persecuted
in the courts after Yeltsin would have left office. However, whether or not such a
successor could be found in time was very uncertain. Therefore Yeltsin and the Family
also prepared for a second option: to declare a state of emergency, disband the Duma,
ban the Communist Party, and postpone the elections. On May 16, 1999, however, the
option of such a Bonapartist coup d’état was dropped. On this day the Communist opposition
in the State Duma failed to muster enough votes to start an impeachment procedure
against Yeltsin. (One of the five charges against Yeltsin was, ironically, that he
had started the first war against Chechnya.)
^[3]
Immediately after the vote Yeltsin sacked Primakov as prime minister and appointed
Sergey Stepashin, minister of the interior and former FSB chief, in his place. It
seemed at first that Stepashin was Yeltsin’s ultimate choice for “Operation Successor.”
But Yeltsin soon had doubts about the new man. “Stepashin was soft,” Yeltsin wrote
in his memoirs, “and he liked to pose a bit. He loved theatrical gestures. I wasn’t
certain he could hold out to the end or display that tremendous will and resolve needed
in a fierce political battle. I couldn’t imagine a president of Russia without these
tough character traits.”
^[4]
Within three months Stepashin was sacked and, on August 9, 1999, he was replaced
by the reserved and uncharismatic
apparatchik
Vladimir Putin.

Whatever option the Family would choose: a Bonapartist coup d’état or “Operation Successor”—in
both
cases an appropriate climate would have to be created in Russia: in the first case
to justify a state of emergency, in the second case to boost the popularity of the
Family’s presidential candidate.
^[5]
And again—as in 1994—the Chechen option was chosen. At the end of March 1999 a
meeting of the “power ministers” was held in which Sergey Stepashin, at that time
still minister of the interior, Igor Sergeyev, minister of defense, Anatoly Kvashnin,
head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and Vladimir Putin, director
of the FSB, participated.
^[6]
They adopted a plan to intervene militarily in Chechnya. The original plan, considered
in March 1999, was more modest than the one that would ultimately be chosen. It intended
just “to seal Chechnya off” by creating a
cordon sanitaire
around the republic. The plan included the occupation of about one third of the Chechen
territory north of the river Terek—but it did not include the capture of the capital,
Grozny. Additionally, the border zone of Chechnya with Georgia would be occupied.
In April the Russian Security Council approved this plan. At that point, this council
had, for only a few days, been headed by Putin.

However, in May 1999—after the dismissal of Prime Minister Primakov, who had been
critical of an intervention in Chechnya—this moderate plan would be changed and another,
more radical plan adopted. This was a plan to reconquer the
whole
Chechen republic and bring it back into the Russian Federation. It is unclear how
far these changes were affected by developments on the ground in Chechnya. Radical
Wahhabists within the Chechen government, led by Shamil Basayev, convened, in April
1999 in Grozny, a Congress of the Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan to discuss the
unification of the two republics into a caliphate. In May a group of about sixty radicals
crossed the border into Dagestan and wounded eleven servicemen and two policemen before
retreating. This led to the first attacks by the Russian air force against radical
positions in Chechnya since the first Chechen War.
^[7]
However, it was clear that, in order to start an all-out war, a more serious
casus belli
had to be found.

This
casus belli
was a second and more important incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan. A Chechen
attack on another Caucasian republic that was—unlike Chechnya itself—an undisputed
part of the Russian Federation, could not be accepted, and clearly justified a counterattack.
On August 8, 1999, an incursion took place involving about one thousand Chechen fighters,
led by the jihadist rebel leader Shamil Basayev and his Saudi ally, Umar Ibn al-Khattab,
leader of the foreign mujahideen in Chechnya. The Kremlin immediately declared Russia
to be under attack by international terrorism. Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Stepashin
and, on August 9, appointed Putin as his successor. He indicated that he considered
Putin a worthy successor to become the next Russian president. The Chechen attack
on Dagestan was presented by the Russian authorities as a complete surprise. But how
spontaneous and “unexpected” was this Chechen attack? In early August 1999, just after
the incursion took place, the investigative Russian weekly
Versiya
published a report alleging that, some time before the incursion into Dagestan,
^[8]
the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had purportedly
met in France with Shamil Basayev. The meeting allegedly took place in a villa on
the Côte d’Azur, which belonged to a Saudi citizen, Adnan Khashoggi, a rich international
arms dealer with a dubious reputation. The meeting was, allegedly, arranged by a middleman,
Anton Surikov, a retired officer of the GRU (
Glavnoe Razvedivatelnoe Upravlenie
), the intelligence service of the Russian army. Surikov and Basayev would have known
each other and would even have been on friendly terms since 1992, when they fought
together on the side of Abkhazia in the war against Georgia. In this period Shamil
Basayev, his brother Shirvani Basayev, and their Chechen fighters worked closely together
with the GRU. They were even trained by this organization. “There is little doubt,”
wrote Martin Malek, “that Basayev worked together well with [the] Russian secret services
in Abkhazia (where Basayev’s men are said to have played soccer with the heads of
killed Georgians).”
^[9]

The reason behind this secret meeting on the French Riviera would seem to have been
that—however implausible this might seem at first sight—the Kremlin and Shamil Basayev
shared parallel interests. Basayev was a Wahhabi jihadist who wanted to establish
a Caucasian emirate in the North Caucasus. He was a fierce opponent of the Chechen
President Aslan Maskhadov, a moderate Chechen nationalist, who considered Basayev’s
expansionist jihadism a danger to Chechnya’s independence. A small war was in Basayev’s
interests, because it would destabilize Mashkadov and at the same time enhance Basayev’s
status inside Chechnya, opening up political prospects. The Kremlin equally urgently
needed a small victorious war in its “Operation Successor.” In the alleged meeting
on the French Riviera the Russian side is thought to have promised that there would
be no real resistance in Dagestan (as a matter of fact some weeks before the conflict
the Russian border troops would be withdrawn from Dagestan’s borders—to the great
surprise of the local authorities). It would be a “Potemkin war,” a quasi-war, a theatrical,
hardly serious armed exchange, so that in the end both sides could claim victory.
^[10]
Are these allegations of a secret understanding between Basayev and the Kremlin
true? We don’t know, because until today definitive evidence is lacking. It is clear,
however, that if Basayev had trusted a Russian promise that the conflict would remain
restricted to a theatrical skirmish, he would have fulfilled for the Kremlin the role
of a “useful idiot.” After the Chechen incursion into Dagestan Putin immediately declared
an all-out war as an answer to the Chechen provocation.