My heart bleeds for Chechnya. The behaviour of Russia’s forces is downright shocking, and with report of abuse and atrocity after abuse and atrocity, there is precious little evidence that the Kremlin is taking anything beyond show measure to prevent these activities being carried out by its forces.
Dusk was falling on the farm in the Chechen hills. Four men and a woman cowered in the freezing mud of a ditch. Above them were a group of Russia’s elite troops who had mistakenly shot up a civilian bus, killing one man, headmaster Said Alaskhanov, during a bungled stop-and-search operation.
Over the static of their radio, the order allegedly came to clean up the mess. The five were pulled from the ditch and told to run. They were shot as they fled.
In the second high-profile case of its kind, the Russian military have opened the trial of four soldiers for murder, in a bid to show troops are accountable for atrocities committed in the separatist republic - where murders are perpetrated daily.
The last such case was that of Yuri Budanov, jailed for 10 years for the rape and murder of an 18-year old Chechen girl. His imprisonment was seen as a token gesture from the Kremlin.
The Observer has spoken to key sources in Moscow and Grozny who paint a picture of horrifying military practices and brutality.
On 11 January 2002, GRU Unit 641 was dispatched to the Shatoi region in pursuit of the rebel leader Khattab. The Saudi-Jordanian citizen was considered key to the support from international radicals that the separatist movement had began to gather, and Moscow ordered that he be ‘neutralised’.
Captain Eduard Ulman, Lieutenant Alexander Kalagansky, warrant officer Vladimir Voevodin, and seven other soldiers, were dropped by helicopter at a disused farmhouse near the village of Dai, and told to check all vehicles for the rebel commander. As they set up a checkpoint, perhaps a dozen other groups of special forces, or spetznaz, combed the surrounding forest, coordinated by a commanding officer by radio from a nearby hilltop.
The calm was broken when a bus approached Ulman’s roadblock. The unit became edgy when it did not slow down. The troops heard a noise. Ulman said he thought he saw a weapon. They opened fire.
‘One woman then came out injured, and a man, who had been hit in the arm,’ said a source close to the investigation of the crime by Russian military prosecutors. ‘One was dead already. They checked their documents and realised they had made a mistake, and these people were civilians.’
The team, led by Ulman, allegedly held the terrified civilians for hours, before receiving the orders to ‘clean up’ the evidence.
Ulman claims he radioed command and reported an ‘emergency situation’ with ‘one frozen and five warm’. He was told to wait for orders. The troops moved the bus from the road, and the passengers into the ditch. They were ordered to give them medical attention. During the day a major passed the bus twice, noting soldiers interrogating the occupants. By sundown the five were dead, allegedly shot in the back.
Troops in Chechnya are believed to have standing orders to ‘leave no trace’ of action, even if that means killing witnesses.
Ulman apparently blames his superiors. A GRU colonel told the court that Ulman had said on his return to base his orders to kill came from the Khankala base commander, Major Alexei Perelevsky, the fourth man on trial.
‘Who concretely gave them the order to kill the Chechens, nobody knows,’ said the source. ‘Everybody is blaming the officer above them.’
A Russian officer who had passed the scene called in prosecutors who are believed to have collected 36 hours of videotape evidence. Abdulah Hamzayev, lawyer for the victims’ families, said: 'Military law prohibits the execution of a criminal order and does not lessen the responsibility of the person who executes it.
‘Even if Ulman does prove in court he was following orders from Perelevsky, it will not change anything for him. There will just be one more criminal to sentence.’
For Koka Tuburova, the sister of the dead bus driver Hamzat Tuburova, the nature of Ulman’s orders makes little difference. ‘Federal troops usually work according to their own initiatives, knowing they will be unanswerable for their actions,’ she said.
