Are these good chechens? It’s hard keeping track.
“...good chechens?”
Chechens are a real good group to be proud of and proud to support. In 1995, four years after they separated from Russia and armed conflicts continued, Shamil Basayev and around 200 separatists attacked the southern Russian city of Budyonnovsk (pop. 60,000, often spelled Budennovsk), some 110 kilometers (70 mi) north of the border with the de facto independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
Basayev’s men crossed into Stavropol Krai concealed in a column of military trucks. At about noon on 14 June, they stormed the main police station and the city hall, where they raised Chechen flags over government offices.
After several hours, in the face of Russian reinforcements, the Chechens retreated to the residential district and regrouped in the city hospital. There they took hostage between 1,500 and 1,800 people (some estimates reaching as high as 2,000 or even 2,500), most of them civilians (including about 150 children and a number of women with newborn infants). On their way to the hospital, they shot 100 civilians that refused to cooperate. Basayev issued an ultimatum, threatening to kill the hostages unless his demands were met.
After three days of siege, the Russian authorities ordered the security forces to retake the hospital compound. The forces employed were MVD police (”militsiya”) and Internal Troops, along with spetsnaz (special forces) from the Federal Security Service (FSB), including the elite Alpha Group. The strike force attacked the hospital compound at dawn on the fourth day, meeting fierce resistance. After several hours of fighting in which many hostages were killed, a local ceasefire was agreed on and 227 hostages were released; 61 others were freed by the Russian troops.
The Russian authorities accused the Chechens of using the hostages as human shields. Yeltsin’s human rights advisor Sergey Kovalyov described the scene: “In half an hour the hospital was burning, and it was not until the next morning that we found out what happened there as a result of this shooting. I saw with my own eyes pieces of human flesh stuck to the walls and the ceiling and burned corpses”.
That’s not war, that’s slaughter. And these are the guys they are happy to have join them as the ones now act the same and use the same tactics. You won’t see their work on the 11 o’clock news. And we have sent millions of dollars of military support and toys for them to do this type of work? And everyone hates a terrorists. Not the US. The Ukrainians chose to separate from Soviet Russia in 1991 as did Chechnya. The war to get the Ukraine back has been in existence full scale since 2014. That’s only eight years ago and is no difference than a state openly defying the US with armed conflict. We never should have been there.
Wy69