Translated material
The militants are divided into small groups
Alexander Golts
The organized resistance of the Chechen separatists appears to have been broken. Now it will be organized differently
The organized resistance of the Chechen separatists appears to have been broken. Now it will be organized differently
The capture of Salman Raduev is, of course, and this must be admitted without any reservations, a brilliant operation of the FSB. Workers of domestic special services know from a young age: an “operational event” is not important in itself, the main thing is the political resonance that it caused. In this case, the political significance of the action is difficult to overestimate. Raduev was taken just when even those who were accustomed to unconditionally believe everything the generals said began to have legitimate doubts about the imminent and final victory of the federal forces in Chechnya, and, therefore, about the effectiveness of the acting Supreme Commander-in-Chief.
No matter how much Vladimir Putin strives to distance himself from Chechnya during the current election campaign, in this situation he had no choice but to engage in a very unpleasant matter for a presidential candidate: explaining to voters why the riot police near Moscow died, why for more than a week the military command tried to hide the death of 84 Pskov paratroopers, why Basayev and Khattab once again managed to break out of the ring of our troops and leave the Argun Gorge for the Vedeno region. After all, this means that the feat of the paratroopers, who fought to the death not to let Basayev and Khattab out of encirclement, was in vain.
But the successful FSB operation allowed the acting president to take a breath: Raduev’s captivity temporarily turned the attention of the public to himself. Vladimir Putin, so that his figure would not be associated with coffins, did not even go to Pskov to bury the dead paratroopers and, like the Chief of the General Staff, limited himself to participating in the funeral ceremony in Moscow. By the way, according to Itogi, it was Anatoly Kvashnin who ordered not to rush into publishing the figures for paratrooper losses. Apparently, he did not want to spoil his upcoming holiday - receiving the title of honorary citizen of Makhachkala.
Salman Raduev, of course, is a well-known terrorist, but there is no reason to believe that his capture indicates a turning point in the war. Experts agree that for militants he is more a marginal figure than an influential one. Famous for the capture of Kizlyar and Pervomaisky in the last war, during the current war Raduev practically did not participate in hostilities. Moreover, in this campaign, the Russian special services apparently even tried to use him to cause a split in the camp of the militants. At the end of January, Nezavisimaya Gazeta published a facsimile of a letter that Raduev allegedly sent to the commander of the united group, General Kazantsev. In it, he offers to extradite Basayev in exchange for one million dollars and the opportunity to travel abroad. Sources in law enforcement agencies do not rule out that Raduev, who, according to investigators, “has mice running around in his head,” was constantly in the field of view of the FSB. At the right moment, he was offered to organize transportation abroad, and during this “transport,” when the terrorist found himself without security, he was arrested.
As for the other militant commanders, judging by the way they are fighting, unfortunately, everything is in order with their heads, and they will not be easy prey for the federals. The notorious “second phase of the third stage” of the anti-terrorist operation, during which it was supposed to put an end to organized armed resistance in Chechnya, is clearly being delayed. At the end of January, General Gennady Troshev promised to completely defeat the gangs by February 26. A little later, the deputy chief of staff of the joint group, Major General Vadim Timchenko, said that everything would be over by March 8. Now they don’t give exact dates, they only say that the separatists “bleed from the nose” must be destroyed before the trees in the mountains become covered with leaves.
At first glance, all the trump cards are now in the hands of the federal forces. The militants, if you believe the statements of the command, are reliably blocked in the Argun Gorge. Gelayev’s detachment was defeated in the village of Komsomolskoye. And the formations of Khattab and Basayev, even though the leaders themselves managed to escape, are scattered, and now they are being finished off in the area of the villages of Ulus-Kert and Selmentauzen.
But all this talk about “reliable blocking” raises serious doubts. If the militants had not constantly replenished their ranks, if they had not been supplied with ammunition, it is unlikely that they would have been able to hold out in Komsomolskoye for more than a week under the fire of heavy Buratino rocket-propelled flamethrowers, capable of destroying all life in an area of three square kilometers in one salvo. The fact that a tight ring around Komsomolskoye could not be created until last Monday was admitted by the federal command itself. Internal troops unsuccessfully stormed the village for a week, and only on March 13, when a parachute regiment arrived, Gelayev’s militants were finally surrounded.
But since the besieged received outside help for so long, it means that fairly large separatist formations are moving relatively freely around Chechnya. It is significant that Raduev’s detachment, numbering a hundred fighters, is based in the Gudermes region, which was liberated a long time ago and cleared many times.
The trouble is that, as General Vladimir Shamanov, who recently defended his PhD thesis in sociology, emphasized in one of his interviews, among the militants there are practically no people with a serious military education (in the language of a sociology candidate, they are simply “sheep”). Unlike Shamanov, they were not taught at the Academy of the General Staff that as soon as the enemy occupied the commanding heights, the battle was lost. Instead of stopping resistance, the militants break up into groups of 10-15 people and disperse. The Russian command reports to Moscow that the military have finished their work - the gangs have dispersed. The militants, who, in the words of the same Troshev, “are still running through the mountains,” come to the rear of our troops and hit, and, as the defeat of the riot police column in the Staropromyslovsky district showed, very painfully.
The generals, who claimed that they had learned lessons from the defeat in the first Chechen campaign, apparently did not understand the main thing: as long as there is organized resistance, the advantage of the federals is indisputable. But as soon as it is possible to break it, the strategic initiative, paradoxically, passes to the militants who, having lost the “correct” war, are not at all going to lay down their arms. Now the very concept of “enemy concentration area” largely loses its meaning, which means that the advance transfer of troops to such areas becomes impossible. Chechens, divided into small detachments, can appear at any time in any populated area, in any region of Chechnya. In such conditions, the factors that provide the advantage of the federals - aviation and artillery - mean little.
At the new stage, the command will have to deploy a unit in each populated area, which leads to an inevitable dispersion of forces. Here a lot depends on the reliability of the connection. But Russian units are still armed with radio stations created 20-30 years ago. They are practically useless in the mountains. The re-equipment of the army with new radio stations has just begun. In this situation, it is hardly advisable to continue the promised withdrawal of troops from the republic. The forces that should be there on a permanent basis - an 18,000-strong motorized rifle division, two divisions of internal troops and special police units - will clearly not be enough to cover the entire territory of Chechnya. If this is not done, we will most likely end up with the same situation as in the first Chechen war: army and police units sit in their strongholds, and the rest of the territory is controlled by militants.
Amazingly, with each new stage of the second Chechen war, the Russian military, as if in a time machine, moves further into the depths of military history. It all started as a parody of NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia: missile and bomb attacks were carried out on the rebellious territory. Then they began to organize a security “zone,” which vividly recalled the experience of Israel, which created such a zone in Southern Lebanon in the seventies. The assault on Grozny took us back a good fifty years ago, to 1945, when the Soviet army took Berlin. Finally, what we see now in the Caucasus is very reminiscent of the times of General Ermolov. As in the first half of the last century, the military decided to start building fortresses.
Deputy Defense Minister Colonel General Alexander Kosovan said that fortresses would be built in Shali and Itum-Kale, the most important strategic points in Chechnya, and two of the five regiments of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division would be based there. Everything is leading to the fact that we will judge the nature of the current war by the works of Lermontov and Tolstoy: “lines” of fortresses, secrets, raids, shots in the back, and so on for decades.
The other day, one of the high-ranking military men, in a conversation with an Itogi correspondent, noted that in order to fight the separatists it is necessary to make clearings in forest areas. It's time to re-read "Cutting Woods."