Battle for Height 776

Battle for Height 776
Part of Second Chechen War
Date February 29 – March 1 or 3, 2000 Location Height 776, Argun Gorge, Chechnya Result Chechen separatist victory
Belligerents
VDV and Spetsnaz	Chechen separatists Foreign fighters
Commanders and leaders
Mark Yevtyukhin †	Abu al-Walid
Strength
91	70-75
Casualties and losses
84 killed	12 killed
Note: Their respective official figures according to the both sides involved in direct combat at Height 776 (not the entire operation of the breakthrough from the Argun Gorge).

The Battle for Height 776, the best known part of the larger Battle of Ulus-Kert (there was also fighting over the small town of Ulus-Kert, the village of Selmentausen, the Heights 705.6 and 787, and elsewhere in area), was a controversial engagement in the Second Chechen War during fierce fighting over control of the Argun River gorge in the highland Shatoysky District of central Chechnya, where the Russian military forces unsuccesfully attempted to surround and destroy a large Chechen separatist force withdrawing from the Chechen capital Grozny to Shatoy and Vedeno in the southern mountains of Chechnya following the 1999–2000 siege and capture of Grozny.

On February 29, 2000, just hours after the Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev had assured his government that the Chechen War was over, an isolated Russian force based around a company of paratroopers of the 76th Airborne Division from the city of Pskov found itself cut off at a hill top in the way of a retreating Chechen column led by Ibn Al-Khattab, commander of foreign fighters in Chechnya. After by all accounts heavy close-quarters fighting, the Russians dug-in on the hill were overrun and almost entirely wiped-out.

Uncertainty continues to surround many aspects of the engagement, including how many people were in fact engaged in the battle on both sides, how many casualties the Russians suffered and inflicted, how much artillery support and close air support were provided, and even how long fighting for the hill raged - with time spans ranging (according to conflicting Russian official statements) from just a six-hour overnight fighting to even a four-day battle.

Battle

The goal of a regimental task force of the Russian Airborne Troops (VDV) tactical group in the area, based out of the 104th Guards Airborne Regiment of the 76th Division (including Spetsnaz subunits and the elite Vympel FSB OSNAZ groups), was to block an exit from the gorge while other Russian forces attempted to encircle a large Chechen force which had been dislodged from the area of the village of Ulus Kert. The 6th Company was part of the 2nd Airborne Battalion which participated in this blocking force. The company, whose nominal commander was Major Sergey Molodov, was actually led in the field by the 2nd Battalion's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Yevtyukhin. Attached to it were also two small reconnaissance Spetsnaz teams and a forward observer team led by Captain Viktor Romanov. On the dawn of 29 February, the Russians were caught by surprise by a large-scale Chechen breakthrough. After suffering heavy losses from the initial contact, when they were attacked from their rear, the rest of Russians retreated to the hilltop where they made some hastily dug defensive positions. The only Russian force that made it to Height 776 in the thick of the battle was the 4th Company's third platoon, personally led by Major Aleksandr Dostovalov, who was the battalion's deputy commander. Desperate attempts from other Russian units to rescue the grouping were unsuccessful and the badly wounded Captain Romanov eventually resorted to calling in fire support on his own position. According to official Russian data, 84 soldiers were killed in the fighting on the hill, including all officers. Only seven (or six, according to some sources) Russian rank-and-file soldiers survived the battle, four of them injured.

The battle caused embarrassment for Russian military officials who attempted to conceal their loss of an entire unit. Russia's high commanders, including Marshal of the Russian Federation Sergeyev, VDV commander General Georgy Shpak, and the commander of federal forces in Chechnya, General Gennady Troshev, initially insisted that only 31 of their men died in the battle and denied the unofficial reports claiming 86 soldiers were killed; the Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman on Chechnya, Sergey Yastrzhembsky, also claimed the 31 dead were "the total losses of that company for several days". After days of government denials, top Russian officials eventually admitted 84 fatalities, some of them apparently from the friendly fire of their own artillery. Russian newspapers reported that Sergeyev had ordered the losses to be covered up, as the loss of this unit came just a week after 25 men from the 76th Division were killed in an another battle in Chechnya. According to one source, "unofficially the losses sustained by Russian paratroopers on 1 March are blamed [by the Russian command] on the decision of the Eastern group's commander Gen. Sergey Makarov and the VDV tactical group's commander Aleksandr Lentsov." The total Russian strength and the losses among the other Russian units operating in the area of Ulus-Kert were never officially disclosed. In the first days after the battle, Gen. Troshev said 1,000 rebel fighters were involved. This figure was soon revised to 1,500-2,000 by Yastrzhembsky, and raised to 2,500 by Troshev later. (At the same time, Colonel General Valery Manilov, first deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, claimed there were only 2,500 to 3,500 separatist fighters left in all of Chechnya.) According to Yastrzhembsky's statement, 70 rebels surrendered at what he called a "pocket" at Selmentausen, while "up to 1,000 might have succeeded in escaping". According to 2001 the article in Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star"), the official newspaper of the Russian Ministry of Defense, separatist casualties in the Argun Gorge area totaled approximately 400 dead, including 200 bodies allegedly found on Height 776. However, as of 2008, the official federal estimate rose to about 500 enemy dead according to the Russian government website, while the state-controlled English language TV station Russia Today referred to even over 700 fighters killed.

According to one interview with a Chechen fighter, there were some 1,600 fighters in the slow-moving column, weighed down by their remaining-crew-operated weapons, ammunition and wounded they were transporting, but not mentioning how many of them spearheaded the withdrawal, how many were in the main caravan, and how many consisted of the rear guard. On their Kavkaz Center website, the separatists officially admitted losing only 12 men in combat at the Height 776, 13 more in other fighting at that time in the area between the villages of Ulus-Kert and Duba-Yurt (where the mostly-positional warfare continued since the late 1999), and about 50 killed during their march to the Shatoy and Vedeno districts; in addition to these losses, 30 wounded fighters left behind at Selmentausen were claimed to be captured and allegedly executed by Russians after being turned in by a traitor. Among the fighters who were killed while storming the hill were three Turks. At first, Chechen rebel spokesman Movladi Udugov told AFP that up to 30 soldiers and officers were killed in the attack by 65 Chechen fighters (this figure of Russian losses from the initial ambush is consistant with the official Russian version). Later, the Chechen separatist sources estimated Russian losses at up to 200 killed, including about 100 "so-called Pskov commandos." Several days later the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov announced a general order "to start an all-out partisan war", and his forces then scattered to launch a long guerrilla war. The Russians thus lost their last chance to destroy a bulk of the pro-independence Chechen forces in a concentrated position, althrough later in March they managed to inflict devastating losses on an another large separatist force of some 1,000-1,500 fighters, who were successfully surroundered in the village of Komsomolskoye, killing several hundred of them in a three-week battle.

While there were no civilians in the immediate proximity of the clashes at the unhabitated Height 776, there were severe civilian casualties during the struggle for the broader Argun Gorge area, in particular from the artillery and air attacks on Ulus-Kert, Yaryshmardy and the other Chechen-held villages, where thousands of locals and refugees from Grozny were trapped. Furthermore, there were many credible reports of a direct atrocities against the population. For example, on March 6, a group of refugees was detained by soldiers at the notorious Russian checkpoint on the road between Ulus-Kert and Duba-Yurt; the four women in the group were soon released, but the 12 men "disappeared" (the bodies of three of them were unhearted at the nearby village of Tangi-Chu in May, while the rest of them remained "missing" one year later). In an infamous incident later in March, a local Tangi-Chu girl Elza Kungayeva was abducted from her home and strangled by the ground forces officer Yuri Budanov.

Aftermath

Russian president Vladimir Putin at a speech in Pskov at the ceremony unveiling a memorial stone erected on the site of a future monument to paratroopers of the 6th Company

Milestone in Pskov in honor of the 6th Company

The battle was viewed in Russia in two ways: at first as a shameful defeat for the Russian military, and then increasingly as a glorious last stand made by the paratroopers, confirming the VDV's reputation in the same way that the Battle of Camarón did for the French Foreign Legion, and the events have been quickly enshrined in heroic myth. Even though some in the Russian army view it as a defeat that could have been avoided, it is officially seen in Russia as an example of bravery and sacrifice. In 2001, Putin flew to Chechnya to personally visit the former battlefield. In 2008, a day before Russia's Defender of the Fatherland Day, a street in Grozny was officially renamed as "84 Pskov Paratroopers Street", a move that sparked further controversy in Chechnya.

Awards

On March 12, 2000, President Putin signed an ukaz conferring Russian state awards upon members of the 6th Company, of whom 63 received the Order of Courage. Twenty-two of the soldiers (all 13 officers and nine enlisted men) were awarded the highest medal and title of the Hero of the Russian Federation (for comparison, only 65 medals of the Hero of the Soviet Union medals were awarded for the entire duration of the 10-year Soviet War in Afghanistan, in which more than 14,000 Red Army soldiers died):

• Mark Yevtyukhin †
• Sergey Molodov †
• Alexander Dostavalov †
• Roman Sokolov †
• Viktor Romanov †
• Alexey Vorobyov †
• Andrey Sherstyannikov †
• Andrey Panov †
• Dmitry Petrov †
• Alexander Kolgatin †
• Oleg Yermakov †
• Alexander Ryazantsev †
• Dmitry Kozhemyakin †
• Sergey Medvedev †
• Alexander Komyagin †
• Dmitry Grigoriyev †
• Sergey Vasilyov †
• Vladislav Dukhin †
• Alexander Lebedev †
• Alexander Gerdt †
• Alexey Rasskaza †
• Alexander Suponinsky

In popular culture

A series of productions loosely based on these events, were produced in the next few years after the battle, including the 2004 theatrical musical show, the 2004 television series Chest imeyu ("I Have the Honour"), the 2006 four-part television film Grozovye vorota ("The Storm Gate") and the 2006 movie Proriv ("Breakthrough"). Some of them were supported by the Russian government.

See also

• Battle for Hill 3234

External links

• "ULUS-KERT: An Airborne Company's Last Stand" (July 2001 U.S. Army Combined Arms Center paper based on the article in Red Star)
• Template:Ru icon Photos of members of the 6th Company