Morning fam
I ran a poll in our facebook group and the results were interesting. I have found out that most of you want to check out these First Chechen War military photos. At the same time, it is very understudied – the material presented on the web is very limited. I have spent some time diggin up new military photos.
Brief history of First Chechen war
The Chechen conflict is a very complicated geopolitical matter with it’s history going back in centuries. We will cover it in more detail in future posts. Talking about the First Chechen War it would be fair to state that the armed conflict started on 11th of December 1994. Russian government has hoped for a super quick conflict, more of a police operation. Having full air superiority, Russian Air Force have destroyed what was left of the Ichkeria air force and civilian air fleet.
The ground part of the operation was not as simple. In the first days a number of soldiers and officers refused to participate in the conflict. They felt like this was an internal conflict and they did not want to participate in a civil war. Anyhow, Russian Federation had big enough army to start the full scale war.
Grozny assault
The siege of Chechen capital started with weeks long air strikes and artillery bombardments. The destruction was devastating – it is usually compared with WW2 affect on Dresden. However, this did not break the spirit of the city defenders. The initial ground assault of Grozny started at the New Year eve and ended with horrendous losses on Russian side. Because of bad organization the actual numbers of losses are uncertain, but it is believed that up to 2000 Russian soldiers died during the assault. The estimated number of civilians killed during the battle is rounded up to 35000.
First Chechen war a brutal wake up call for the RusFed armed forces. Almost all branches of russian military and police units had to participate in the operations – infantry, paratroopers, specialized police units, internal troops and even marines. A thorough research on all these branches required a great deal of material from the time, which are yet to be found.
For today I have prepared you a yet unsorted bunch of photos. Internal troops, infantry and special forces folders can be found here.
Both Chechen wars are very interesting from the historical point of view. For now I have uploaded photos from First Chechen Campaign. Later on I will dig up more photos from this period, but also will create folders for Second Chechen war.
As always, if you want to share photos with the community, please contact us at miliphot@gmail.com
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