The city of deferred death

The war continues in Grozny - much more terrible than ordinary military operations. Every bush, every stone can shoot here, and a landmine may be under each meter of the street.

Crossed out day

The war continues in Grozny - much more terrible than ordinary military operations. Every bush, every stone can shoot here, and a landmine may be under each meter of the street. The deleted day every Monday meeting of the commanders of the consolidated mobile detachment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia begins with a minute of silence. There is a real hunt for police officers in the city, and, according to the commander of the detachment of Colonel Anatoly Litovkin, this is very reminiscent of the end of the first war. The numbers of losses are comparable to the winter when there was a storm of the city. Then, in January and February, the detachment lost 30 people killed. I saw how police buy water in the market: one pays, and three, turning to the crowd, drive the trunks of machine guns in different directions. In only one week, four guys were killed on the market. We went for food for two, without cover. They simply approached them from behind and shot at the back of the head. Or here is another plot. At the checkpoint, the car is stopped to check. They ask to open the trunk - and a powerful explosion is heard immediately. All died, including the driver. His wife later said that one of his acquaintances asked her husband to overtake the car and even paid ahead a hundred rubles - money, according to the local concepts, considerable. Policeers say that the city is stuffed with high -explosives laid in advance. You can drive along the street a hundred times and blend in one hundred and the first - if the target seems to be a standing demolition. That is how Siberian riot police and a journalist from Tyumen came to them a month ago. Underground engineering communications are not controlled, which means that militants can not only freely move underground, but also minute roads without appearing on the surface. It is impossible to call the formidable liberated city - as a rule, there is no need to turn all the places of their stay into the fortresses. Terrible consists of ruins, checkpoints and several fortified buildings - islands of security, very, however, unreliable. “Let's go, show something,” the officer says. About twenty meters from the building where a mobile detachment was strengthened, a fence made of barbed wire, and on it a sign with the inscription "mines". The policeman calmly overcame the fence and went along the mountains of broken brick and glass. Despite his assurances that he knows the road, he really did not want to climb through the thorn, and each subsequent step was difficult. Twenty steps later - a tree in the branches of which is equipped with a position. From here, a sniper fired at the building from a silent rifle for several days in a row, until, finally, it was spotted. There are as many such positions around - the formidable was once a very green city. At 21.00, police leave the streets and go into a blank defense. The commandant hour continues until 6 in the morning - at this time, the fighters shoot at everything that is moving. At night, militants and police officers seem to change places: some attack, others shoot back. We were fired every night, often several times. It usually began at midnight. At first, a deafening roar of tearing mines and automatic lines were heard - in response, the fighters began to water from machine guns of the surroundings, most often at random. And when a sniper works, the feeling is as if someone jokingly throws a pebble into the walls. In response to the question of night patrolling, the colonel looked at me with some surprised interest: “You can, of course. True, at the same time there will be more than two orders of magnitude. But we do not have armored vehicles - the police are not supposed. And it would have been - on night streets they will be burned elementary. My main task is to save people, and that we will not achieve anything here - I know without you. ” The militants continue to penetrate into Grozny - to circumvent the checkpoints guarding themselves. If necessary, you will not even need a storm - all who needs it is already in Grozny. For comparison: in the summer of 1996, the personnel of the federal group in the city totaled 14 thousand people, now six and a half. The police say that today they cannot move freely in the factory and Kirov districts, and in the suburban Mayor, militants with machine guns pace the streets completely freely. In May Day, people with machine guns could not be met, but there I met Ahmed. “Normal guys are fighting” Ahmed feeds two families - he is engaged in breaking up on old “Lada”. His story makes sense to bring completely. “Different people are fighting. There are Arabs with Negro - the Khattabov team (curse) - because of them a new war began, all of our hate them. There are those who simply have nothing more to do, but I want to eat. But they and the Wahhabites are left, many were killed, and the new ones are not very coming to them. Maskhadov? He is nobody (curse). Previously, he was against the Arabs, but they scared him great. Before the war, everything spoke on TV, it was necessary, he said, to protect his homeland. As if we don’t know without him ... This war is worse than the first - more destroyed, more killed, which means that more money is charged. And here's another thing: it took this war to fight people ten times more than the first. Most of those who are fighting are normal guys. They went to take revenge - for their families, for their homes. Wahhabits came to our Katyr -Yurt - we began to ask them to leave, and they will call us: we will call the Russian fire on you, and your village is ended. And the Russians (curse) gave the corridor, and when people went, they hit the air. Answer, only honestly: if with you, God forbid, of course, it would happen, would you stay at home? Are you silent? That's the same ... ”Before the war, he built cowsheds in Russia and considers Soviet times the best in his life. Now his spine is damaged and hearing is disturbed. Ahmed says he did not fight. A conversation with a candle Summer Sun flows Grozny ruins with some particularly dazzling light. Rare passers -by try to walk the streets as little as possible, but life continues in the yards. Pats and teapots boil at the stake, in the sun on the surviving balconies heating water in basins. Water in the city is a deficit, it is delivered in barrels, gas is supplied to very rare houses, there is no electricity at all. This Stalinist house in the center was once elite. Even now, he stores traces of former grooming, and inscriptions on the walls (poems and phrases - entirely in English and without errors) indicate the level of former residents. Now about half has survived from the house, and you can live only in a few apartments in the extreme entrance. People live here, and even in the basement, in which fourteen people hid during the raids. Now only Aunt Galya remained in the basement. She is 74 years old, her legs refused, and her neighbor Aza Shamilev, from time to time, leads her to warm up in the sun. Together with Azu, we go down to the basement. The darkness is pitch, we go to the voice. On the occasion of the guests, Aunt Galya lights a candle and hardly sits in an iron bed. Galina Ivanovna Kavenchuk is a former teacher and a native thunderstorm. Her apartment was intact, but it goes out the street, and it is dangerous to live in it because of night shelling. “A cold basement with rats and a few rags - that’s all that I have left in the end. I thought that the bombing was the worst, but, as it turned out, there are more terrible things. When one of the neighbors shouted that Russian soldiers were walking on the ruins of the circus, we all rushed into the courtyard - to meet our own. And “their own” entered my apartment and all the furniture, TV and refrigerator were chopped off with an ax - why? We had three men at the entrance - they took everyone with them, said for two days, for verification. Sasha was taken away, my son, Chechens Magomed, the husband of Aza, and Ingush Bitsoev. It happened on February on February - since then we have not heard about them anymore. If they were taken as militants, then even if Aza and I would be taken away ... It was the 205th Budyonny brigade, I specially asked one soldier. Where to look for Sasha now, maybe you will help me? And you do not dare to leave the money - I have everything. " The riot police, with whom we came, hiding our eyes, muttered something like "they would figure it out and let go." I still left the money and quickly left. It was for some reason very ashamed.

Every Monday, a meeting of the commanders of the consolidated mobile detachment of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia begins with a minute of silence. There is a real hunt for police officers in the city, and, according to the commander of the detachment of Colonel Anatoly Litovkin, this is very reminiscent of the end of the first war. The numbers of losses are comparable to the winter when there was a storm of the city. Then, in January and February, the detachment lost 30 people killed.

I saw how police buy water in the market: one pays, and three, turning to the crowd, drive the trunks of machine guns in different directions. In only one week, four guys were killed on the market. We went for food for two, without cover. They simply approached them from behind and shot at the back of the head.

Or here is another plot. At the checkpoint, the car is stopped to check. They ask to open the trunk - and a powerful explosion is heard immediately. All died, including the driver. His wife later said that one of his acquaintances asked her husband to overtake the car and even paid ahead a hundred rubles - money, according to the local concepts, considerable.

Policeers say that the city is stuffed with high -explosives laid in advance. You can drive along the street a hundred times and blend in one hundred and the first - if the target seems to be a standing demolition. That is how Siberian riot police and a journalist from Tyumen came to them a month ago.

Underground engineering communications are not controlled, which means that militants can not only freely move underground, but also minute roads without appearing on the surface.

It is impossible to call the formidable liberated city - as a rule, there is no need to turn all the places of their stay into the fortresses. Terrible consists of ruins, checkpoints and several fortified buildings - islands of security, very, however, unreliable.

“Let's go, show something,” the officer says. About twenty meters from the building where a mobile detachment was strengthened, a fence made of barbed wire, and on it a sign with the inscription "mines". The policeman calmly overcame the fence and went along the mountains of broken brick and glass. Despite his assurances that he knows the road, he really did not want to climb through the thorn, and each subsequent step was difficult. Twenty steps later - a tree in the branches of which is equipped with a position. From here, a sniper fired at the building from a silent rifle for several days in a row, until, finally, it was spotted. There are as many such positions around - the formidable was once a very green city.

At 21.00, police leave the streets and go into a blank defense. The commandant hour continues until 6 in the morning - at this time, the fighters shoot at everything that is moving. At night, militants and police officers seem to change places: some attack, others shoot back.

We were fired every night, often several times. It usually began at midnight. At first, a deafening roar of tearing mines and automatic lines were heard - in response, the fighters began to water from machine guns of the surroundings, most often at random. And when a sniper works, the feeling is as if someone jokingly throws a pebble into the walls.

In response to the question of night patrolling, the colonel looked at me with some surprised interest: “You can, of course. True, at the same time there will be more than two orders of magnitude. But we do not have armored vehicles - the police are not supposed. And it would have been - on night streets they will be burned elementary. My main task is to save people, and that we will not achieve anything here - I know without you. ”

The militants continue to penetrate into Grozny - to circumvent the checkpoints guarding themselves. If necessary, you will not even need a storm - all who needs it is already in Grozny. For comparison: in the summer of 1996, the personnel of the federal group in the city totaled 14 thousand people, now six and a half.

The police say that today they cannot move freely in the factory and Kirov districts, and in the suburban Mayor, militants with machine guns pace the streets completely freely. In May Day, people with machine guns could not be met, but there I met Ahmed.

"Normal guys are fighting"

Ahmed feeds two families - he is engaged in breaking up on old "Lada". His story makes sense to bring completely.

“Different people are fighting. There are Arabs with Negro - the Khattabov team (curse) - because of them a new war began, all of our hate them. There are those who simply have nothing more to do, but I want to eat. But they and the Wahhabites are left, many were killed, and the new ones are not very coming to them.

Maskhadov? He is nobody (curse). Previously, he was against the Arabs, but they scared him great. Before the war, everything spoke on TV, it was necessary, he said, to protect his homeland. As if we don’t know without him ...

This war is worse than the first - more destroyed, more killed, which means that more money is charged. And here's another thing: it took this war to fight people ten times more than the first. Most of those who are fighting are normal guys. They went to take revenge - for their families, for their homes. Wahhabits came to our Katyr -Yurt - we began to ask them to leave, and they will call us: we will call the Russian fire on you, and your village is ended. And the Russians (curse) gave the corridor, and when people went, they hit the air. Answer, only honestly: if with you, God forbid, of course, it would happen, would you stay at home? Are you silent? That's the same ... "

Before the war, he built cowsheds in Russia and considers Soviet times the best in his life. Now his spine is damaged and hearing is disturbed. Ahmed says he did not fight.

A conversation with a candle

The summer sun flies Grozny ruins with some particularly dazzling light. Rare passers -by try to walk the streets as little as possible, but life continues in the yards. Pats and teapots boil at the stake, in the sun on the surviving balconies heating water in basins. Water in the city is a deficit, it is delivered in barrels, gas is supplied to very rare houses, there is no electricity at all.

This Stalinist house in the center was once elite. Even now, he stores traces of former grooming, and inscriptions on the walls (poems and phrases - entirely in English and without errors) indicate the level of former residents. Now about half has survived from the house, and you can live only in a few apartments in the extreme entrance. People live here, and even in the basement, in which fourteen people hid during the raids. Now only Aunt Galya remained in the basement.

She is 74 years old, her legs refused, and her neighbor Aza Shamilev, from time to time, leads her to warm up in the sun.

Together with Azu, we go down to the basement. The darkness is pitch, we go to the voice. On the occasion of the guests, Aunt Galya lights a candle and hardly sits in an iron bed. Galina Ivanovna Kavenchuk is a former teacher and a native thunderstorm. Her apartment was intact, but it goes out the street, and it is dangerous to live in it because of night shelling.

“A cold basement with rats and a few rags - that’s all that I have left in the end. I thought that the bombing was the worst, but, as it turned out, there are more terrible things. When one of the neighbors shouted that Russian soldiers were walking on the ruins of the circus, we all rushed into the courtyard - to meet our own. And “their own” entered my apartment and all the furniture, TV and refrigerator were chopped off with an ax - why? We had three men at the entrance - they took everyone with them, said for two days, for verification. Sasha was taken away, my son, Chechens Magomed, the husband of Aza, and Ingush Bitsoev. It happened on February on February - since then we have not heard about them anymore. If they were taken as militants, then even if Aza and I would be taken away ... It was the 205th Budyonny brigade, I specially asked one soldier. Where to look for Sasha now, maybe you will help me? And you do not dare to leave the money - I have everything. "

The riot police, with whom we came, hiding our eyes, muttered something like "they would figure it out and let go." I still left the money and quickly left. It was for some reason very ashamed.