When Russians attacked the Chechen capital of Grozny from December 1994 to January 1995, thousands of civilians died from a week-long series of air raids and artillery bombardment of the sealed-off city. After armored assaults failed, the Russian military set out to pulverize the city into submission. Russian aircraft bombarded Grozny while armored forces and artillery hammered the city from the ground. The Russian assault fell mainly on Grozny’s civilians, mostly ethnic Russians, as most of Chechen civilians manage to flee to Chechen country-side.
The first attack led to heavy Russian casualties and nearly a complete breakdown of morale. Estimated 1,000 to 2,000 soldiers died in the disastrous New Year’s Eve assault alone. All units of the Maikop Brigade sent into the city, numbering more than 1,000 men, were destroyed during the 60-hour fight for, and around, Grozny’s central railway station, leaving only few survivors. Several other Russian armored columns each lost hundreds of men during the first two days and nights of the siege.[3] Many soldiers were captured.
Despite the early Chechen defeat of the New Year assault and many further casualties, Grozny was eventually conquered by Russian forces amidst bitter urban warfare. On January 7, 1995, Russia’s Major-General Viktor Vorobyov was killed by mortar fire; he became the first on a long list of generals to be killed in Chechnya. On January 19, despite heavy casualties, Russian forces seized the ruins of the presidential palace, which had been heavily contested for more than three weeks as Chechens finally abandoned their positions in the destroyed downtown area. The battle for the southern part of the city continued until the official end on March 6, 1995.
By Sergey Kovalev’s estimates, about 27,000 civilians died in five weeks of fighting. Dmitri Volkogonov, the late Russian historian and general, said that Russian military’s bombardment of Grozny killed around 35,000 civilians, including 5,000 children and that the vast majority of those killed were ethnic Russians. Military casualties are not known exactly, though the Russian side admitted to having lost nearly 2,000 killed or missing.[4] International monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe described the scenes as nothing short of an “unimaginable catastrophe,” while German Chancellor Helmut Kohl described the events as “sheer madness.”
