Grozny 2000: the Start of Putin’s 25 Years of War
This post is an extract from an article published earlier this week by The New European . I wrote it to mark the 25th anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s first victory in a Russian presidential election. The day of the vote, I was reporting for the BBC from Grozny, a city in ruins from the war that had been the platform from which Putin launched his political career.
In the ruins of a bombed-out city lay the foundations of a triumphant political career – and one that would destroy peace in Europe.
On Sunday, March 26, 2000, I was in Grozny, the main city of Chechnya. Separatists were fighting their second war in five years to try to break free from Moscow’s rule. After sustained and intense bombardment – the second Chechen war had started the previous October – not a single building within a couple of kilometres of the city centre was still in one piece. In some streets, shops, apartments, and offices were indistinct, all of them reduced to piles of cracked concrete.
The civilians still there lived in cellars, the entrances covered by broken doors or planks. “People live here” had sometimes been scrawled on a nearby wall: both a public information message, and a cry of despair. These underground dwellers emerged only during daylight hours to buy what they could at makeshift market stalls by the side of roads, scarred by shells.
Food and water were scarce. Shelter, such as it was, hardly afforded safety or comfort. As the temperature rose with the approach of spring, dust filled the warming air. What it might have contained, with countless decomposing bodies beneath the broken buildings, it was better not to imagine.
Yet there was one part of democratic civilization that the Kremlin was especially keen to offer to these distressed and traumatised citizens at the southern edge of its territory: a vote. That Sunday in late March, Russia was due to go to the polls in only the second presidential election of its post-Soviet history, and only its third ever.
That Sunday in late March, Russia was due to go to the polls in only the second presidential election of its post-Soviet history, and only its third ever.
You can read the rest of the article here .
A ruined cinema in Grozny, Chechnya, Russian Federation, June 2000 © James Rodgers