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"Yeah, this is known.. During 2nd Chechnya war there were instances that russian military choppers allowed "chechen" troops to leave even protecting them from Russian ground forces."

Quite interesting. In his book, The Perestroika Deception, Anatoly Golitsyn, former high-ranking member of the KGB who defected in 1961, analyzed the news coverage from Chechnya from the perspective that major conflicts being reported appeared to be fake conflicts---that is to say, not really happening at all or happening on a much smaller scale than reported.

p.225:

'"...why, given the vast military and secret police experience at their disposal, did the Russians choose to dispatch to Chechnya in the first place, inexperienced young Soviet army draftees who put up a poor performance in front of Western television cameras? Why were the Russian special forces who, for example, captured general Pal Maleter during the Hungarian upheaval of 1956, too inept to capture any of the Chechen leaders? How did the Chechen fighters come to be so well armed? Why did the army and Ministry of the Interior troops not take immediate action to surround the city of Grozny and cut off the one route which remained available for the movement of Chechen fighters and supplies in an out of the city center?

"Why, with their huge preponderance of firepower, did it take the Russians so long to capture the Presidential Palace, the symbolic center of Chechen resistance? Why, before the palace fell, were Chechen defenders, according to their own accounts, allowed to leave, taking their Russian prisoners with them, so that they were free to continue struggle elsewhere? Why was the bombardment of buildings in the center of Grozny conducted with what Chancellor Kohl described as "senseless madness"? And why, as the Chechen fighters took to the hills, was a local guerrilla leader willing to receive a Western journalists in his own home in a mountain village without disguise, providing his full name and a history of his family? [The New York Times, 20 January, 1995].

"...The important general point is that Western press and TV representatives reported the events as Westerners observing what they took to be a real conflict and a free society. It is not their own fault that they were not briefed concerning the possibilities of provocation long communist lines. Hence they were not looking for evidence of mock confrontations, faked casualties, or planted information. The prominent Western reporters themselves, though courageous, appeared young and lacking in experience as war correspondents.

"Nevertheless, some revealing items surfaced in the coverage. For example, the New York Times reported on 15 January that "some of the least serious" of the Chechen fighters "would parade before the cameras" at the The Minutka traffic circle. That report prompted questions as to how many serious Chechen fighters were actually involved an action against Russian troops. Another report insisted that the "last Western reporters" had left the area of the Presidential Palace, where the "murdererous fighting" was concentrated and the Chechen fighters were no longer able to move easily to the south of the city in order to briefed journalists about what was happening. It seems therefore that there were no Western eyewitnesses to the "final battle" for the Palace, and did much of the evidence of the fighting was derived from Chechen fighters, whose reliability reporters were in no position to assess.

Two Western reporters were killed during these events. Though these deaths were reported as accidental, the fact is that Russians would have no compunction about eliminating Western journalist if they thought they might be liable to expose their provocation. It was no coincidence that 40 Russian rockets were targeted at and hit, the Minutka circle, which up to that moment had been favored for meetings between journalists and fighters. Almost certainly, Russian officers who told journalists that they had arrived in Grozny without maps were briefed to tell this tall story. A Russian General who was shown on television going through photographs taken by reporters, said the pictures they had taken were useful because they helped him to assess what was going on in Grozny. In all likelihood, he was checking to make sure that the photographs taken by reporters conveyed the images the Russians wanted conveyed for international public consumption.

The spectacular and continuous bombardment of buildings in the center of Grozny, many of them probably empty, struck me as deliberately designed to monopolize television cameras, replicating in many ways the "Reichstag Fire" bombardment of the "White House", in Moscow in October 1993."'

Golitsyn goes on to say that he believes the casualty figures were faked.