The Russo-Chechen war, remembering what it was like

. A carelessly dropped phrase, "Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow", coupled with depleted foreign exchange reserves, and hence the inability to buy the loyalty of the regions and national republics, has resulted in thousands of casualties. This landmine was laid literally during the first days of the new Russia: in November 1991, when Chechnya declared its independence, and Moscow imposed a state of emergency there. As a result, in March 1992, on the orders of the president of the republic, General Dzhokhar Dudayev, the Chechen armed forces seized the garrisons of the federal troops, and found themselves in possession of huge stocks of weapons. But the war might have been avoided if it were not for the interests of people in Moscow and Grozny, for whom war was their mother and also a means of uncontrolled personal enrichment. The picture from the helicopter, familiar to many journalists: an oil pipeline running across Chechnya, but on both sides of it tens of metres away are fields ploughed over by bombs and villages burnt to ashes. A journalist from The New Times in the mid-1990s consistently went round all the country's highest institutions - the Kremlin, the Security Council, the government - searching for an answer to the same question: "What are Russia's national interests in the North Caucasus, and why all these sacrifices? Only the Ministry of Fuel and Energy found the answer: "The shelf of Dagestan is our strategic oil reserves. If Chechnya goes, so goes Dagestan. The shelf has been saved. For the time being. The price has been countless human lives, ruined lives, and cities turned into ghosts by air raids. Ultimately - paid with the future. Economic reforms came to a halt in March 1992; the financial collapse of 1998 was predetermined by multi-billion dollar spending on the war. And "pissing in the toilet", the destruction of democratic institutions, the de facto abolition of elections, the propaganda on TV channels are also the inevitable consequence of the carpet bombing.