Battle of Komsomolskoye

Siege of Komsomolskoye
Part of the Second Chechen War
Date March 6, 2000 to ~March 24, 2000 Location Komsomolskoye, Chechnya Result Russian strategic victory
Belligerents
Russian Federation Chechen loyalists	Republic of Ichkeria
Commanders and leaders
Vladimir Gerasimov Mikhail Labunets Mikhail Revenko † Magomed Kakiyev	Ruslan Gelayev
Strength
1,000 (assault groups)	1,000-1,500
Casualties and losses
50+ killed 300+ wounded	About 800 killed (Russian estimate) 70+ captured
Unknown civilian losses

The Battle of Komsomolskoye took place in March 2000 between Russian forces and separatists in Chechnya in the village of Komsomolskoye (Saadi-Kotar).

The battle

Komsomolskoye, a village of some 5,000 people, was a southern suburb of the Chechen capital Grozny, (not to be confused with Komsomolskoye in the Gudermessky District, near the border with Dagestan) and a hometown of the autonomous Chechen separatist commander Ruslan Gelayev operating in Shatoysky and Itum-Kalinsky Districts. A large column of exhausted and hungry fighters from Gelayev's Wolf (Borz) Regiment entered the village on March 4, 2000. The fighters were attempting to break through the cordon set up by Russian forces around the Argun river gorge, following the fall of Grozny in February. Gelayev's forces left the city earlier. They were apparently deceived by Arbi Barayev who had promised to evacuate their wounded with buses that were supposed to be waiting there, luring Gelayev and his troops into a well-prepared federal ambush.

Once in Komsomolskoye, the column were blocked by the Russian Internal Troops and SOBR police commandos from Voronezh and Kursk, soon joined by the military. The village was then subjected to heavy shelling and aerial bombing.

At first, Russian spokesmen said only 25-30 fighters were in the village, asserting that the guerrillas could no longer field large units, but they soon said it was a group of about 1,000-1,500. Up to 600 of them managed to break out of the encirclement through the positions of the 503rd Infantry Regiment on March 5. More fighters succeeded in getting out of Komsomolskoye in small groups, including some 100 led by Gelayev on March 10; however only a handful of those who remained in the village survived the battle or the captivity. About 350 were also reportedly killed in the minefields around the village.

After four days of shelling and bombing, including the use of thermobaric weapons (TOS-1 multiple rocket launchers), the storming of Komsomolskoye began with Russian special forces spearheading two dozen tanks and infantry on foot and in fighting vehicles. On April 8, General Gennady Troshev, the acting commander of the federal forces in Chechnya, said that Gelayev's forces would be completely destroyed by the next day. By March 10, the Russians said they were still confronting determined resistance from between 300 and 700 Chechens. Five days later, the deputy commander of the Western Group of Interior Ministry forces, Colonel Mikhail Revenko, was killed when his tank was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

By March 17, Chechen resistance drove back Russian forces sent in to "mop up" the now-flattened village and the Russians reverted to a further artillery bombardment. The BBC noted that the Russian high command said the rebels "will be definitively destroyed today", a pledge its local commanders made a week before. On the night of March 19-20, the Russians claimed 46 fighters, including a field commander, were killed during the last reported break-out attempt in which the head of the search and rescue service of the North Caucasian Military District and Hero of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Zhukov, had been rescued from Chechen captivity (already injured, he was wounded by four more bullets when caught in crossfire). By this time, according to Interfax, more than 50 federal servicemembers were killed and more than 300 wounded in Komsomolskoye.

The next day, the Russians said they had raised their flag over what was left of the village and 76 fighters were captured, leaving some 150 rebels thought to remain, holed up with no escape route. On March 24, Russian defence minister, Marshal Igor Sergeyev, said the Russian troops "cleared" Komsomolskoye and only 20 to 50 fighters were still fighting in the ruins.

Aftermath

The outcome of the siege was considered a major disaster for the Chechen rebels, of which hundreds were killed in or near the village. Even though Gelayev and part of his Wolf Regiment escaped the town, his ability to influence events in Chechnya had been severely undermined; he spent most of the rest of his life across the border in neighbouring Georgia. After the incident, Gelayev conducted a bloody campaign of revenge against Barayev and his troops.

Komsomolskoye had been completely destroyed by the bombardment, ferocious even by the standards of the Chechen conflict. On March 29 territorial forces of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Chechnya announced they had found and buried the bodies of 552 people and 628 large animals, and also found and defused 4,677 pieces of unexploded ordnance. As of 2004, most former residents lived outside the village, especially in the Urus-Martanovsky District, waiting for compensation for their destroyed houses.

According to Human Rights Watch and Memorial, during the battle in the war zone, more than 2,000 civilians were left stranded in no man's land for three days, apparently serving as human shields for the federal forces dug-in on the outskirsts of Komsomolskoye during the days-long initial artillery barrage, which resulted in civilian casualties. Furthermore, up to 100 civilians, mainly elderly, disabled, or wounded, were left trapped in the village itself and may well have been killed in the course of the battle.

Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya compared the events in Komsomolskoye to Khatyn and called it "a village that no longer exists" as the battle left behind "a monstrous conglomerate of burnt houses, ruins, and new graves at the cemetery." Close to 150 families remained in the village, but they were practically all homeless and lived in self-made huts. Politkovskaya talked with a man "thin as a Buchenwald prisoner", ill from tuberculosis, whose teenage son angrily confronted her and asked: "Why was the whole country stirred when the Kursk sailors were dying, but when they were shooting people leaving Komsomolskoe right on the field for several days, you kept silent?"

See also

• Komsomolskoye massacre

External links

• Four Days In Hell, Newsweek, April 03, 2000
• War in Chechnya: a Chechen militiaman tells his story, Memorial, 23/4/2003
• The bloodiest battle of the second Chechen war, Prague Watchdog, March 5, 2008