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On December 31st, 1994, Russian armored columns casually drove into the city of Groznney.

No one could have even imagined that the next 60 hours would be pure hell and that almost every single one of them would end up dead, wounded, or captured.

We’re going to show you exactly what happened, why it happened, and how horribly far it went for everyone involved.

Okay, so to briefly guide you to that December 31st and the horror that was about to happen, just a bit of context so you’d understand why everything went the way it did.

Chchna was a small semi-autonomous republic inside the Russian Federation with a population of about a million people and its capital was the city of Grozni where a mix of ethnic Chetchens and Russians had lived side by side for decades.

But when the Soviet Union started falling apart in 1991, through years of complicated blurred politics that we’re not going to bother you with as they’re mostly all lies in any country anyway, it came to the point where Chetchna declared its independence.

They formed a national army, kept most of the weapons left over from the Soviet era and logically the Russian Federation didn’t really appreciate this.

There was a sort of standoff for three years between them until 1994 when Boris Yelten, the president of Russia at the time, decided that Dudaiv, the president of Chetchna, had to go.

So to prevent the conflict from escalating into an open full-scale war, they initially deployed a small proxy force intended to appear unofficial to enter Chetchna and remove Duda from power.

But this wasn’t the force that was about to enter Grozny on New Year’s Eve.

Somewhere around 2,000 fighters with about 40 T72 tanks rolled across the border, supported from the air by helicopter gunships and fighter jets.

However, the Chetchins really didn’t like the idea of their leader being overthrown.

So, they set up ambushes along the way and obliterated the Russian column.

Over 20 tanks were knocked out, 150 soldiers killed, and most embarrassingly, Russian soldiers were captured and paraded on television for the whole world to see what they tried to do.

The Russian leadership was far from pleased with this development.

So they assembled an emergency meeting and decided to launch a full-scale military operation against Cheschna.

Within 2 weeks of that decision, the invasion began on December 11th.

But it would take another 3 weeks of advancing through the country before the forces finally reached the outskirts of Grozny on December 31st.

Now, the majority of Russia’s highest ranking generals actually opposed this operation.

Hundreds of officers and special forces units outright refused to participate and were arrested.

But there was no going back now.

And the force that was going in was frantically assembled from whatever units were available at the time.

Soldiers were scraped together from a bunch of different units.

And the state of the Russian army was only a shadow of its Soviet might.

They were underfunded, undertrained, mostly young 18-year-old conscripts with just basic weapons training thrown together with whatever equipment they could get their hands on.

They mounted up on tanks and BMPs where they didn’t even have trained drivers in some cases, so [music] officers had to drive.

It was just a mess.

Some tanks weren’t issued ammo for their machine guns.

And not to mention that there was no formal plan for how they were supposed to quote unquote take the city in 2 hours, as the Russian president so confidently claimed.

So, fast forward to December 31st, 12 hours before New Year’s, the brigade approached the city and stopped.

They took up defensive positions and waited for further instructions.

Soldiers were talking among themselves, wondering what was about to happen, and no one really knew anything, but they could suspect it.

More experienced soldiers knew in their guts that something bad was coming, but no one could know just how bad.

After just half an hour, they got the order to enter the city.

The initial plan called for four armored columns to move into the city simultaneously from different directions and converge on the presidential palace in the center.

But when they were actually ordered to move, only two of them were available.

One brigade had been hit by friendly artillery fire and retreated while one parachute regiment simply refused the orders to attack the city.

So they were left with basically just the northern group commanded by General Pilikovski.

That was the main assault force.

Roughly 2,700 men, about 100 BMPs, around 50 tanks spread across the 131st MOP brigade and the 81st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment.

The whole idea was that a massive display of armored force rolling through the streets would make the Chetchin defenders give up and surrender.

But it turns out they had pretty different plans.

And these two Russian formations were advancing on separate routes into the city.

Meaning they were too far apart to support each other in case of something like say a well-prepared and coordinated ambush from all sides.

There were about 20 times more enemy fighters than intelligence had predicted.

What could possibly go wrong? Now, here’s where you need to keep track of who is who, because two separate things were happening at the same time on two different routes.

The 131st MCO Brigade entered from the north, moving toward the railway station in the city center.

They advanced in two assault groups about 20 minutes apart in long convoy formations, one vehicle behind the other, spaced just about 5 m apart.

Their objective, which they received over the radio, and keep in mind there were no written orders, was to take the [music] railway station.

On a separate parallel route along Peve Mysay Street, the 81st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment was also pushing into the center, heading for the square near the presidential palace.

But here’s the thing, the Chetchins were actually caught off guard.

They did expect the Russians to enter, but not in this outright suicidal way.

They were literally shocked by how they just casually drove into the city as if on parade.

At the city entrance, someone had spray painted a message in red on the sign, “Welcome to hell.

” However, for the first 2 hours, there was no resistance at all.

The streets were empty, no shots fired, no people anywhere.

The city appeared completely deserted.

But the strange thing was that everything else seemed normal.

Street lights were on, lights were glowing in apartment windows, and the deeper the columns went, the more confident the commanders became that this was going to be easy.

By about 1:00 in the afternoon, the lead elements of the 131st MOP Brigade, the first assault group, reached the Grozni Railway Station deep in the center of the city without encountering any [music] resistance.

However, unbeknownst to them for now, the station sat right between the outer and inner rings of the Chetchin defense around the presidential palace, meaning the 131st had literally driven straight into the middle of the enemy’s combat formations and parked there.

They had Chichchin fighters all around them in front, behind, and on both sides.

And they had absolutely no idea.

They parked their tanks and armored vehicles in neat rows around the station and waited for further orders.

Nobody secured the surrounding buildings.

Nobody set up defensive positions.

The infantry stayed inside their vehicles or went into the building of the railway station.

At some point before the attack began, and the exact timing is debated, so we can’t say for certain when, but it was shortly before everything went to hell.

A Chetchin commander, most widely identified as Turpal Ali Agarv, got on the Russian radio frequency and contacted Colonel Even Svin, the commander of the 131st Brigade directly.

He called him by his nickname Alec.

It said that they knew each other from their years in the Soviet military, and I’ll put you the link to the whole conversation that you can listen to later.

But at Gerv basically pleaded with Alec to give the order and get out of the city and that he didn’t want the bloodbath to happen.

The conversation was friendly with him trying to convince Alec to save his soldiers as no one wanted this to happen.

Colonel Svin said he understands, but that he couldn’t give that order.

He had his orders from above and he would follow them.

There was simply nothing he could do.

Fore speech.

Savin wouldn’t make it out of the city.

Aggerv survived the battle but was captured by Russian forces during the second Chetchin war and died in a Russian prison in 2002.

Shortly after this conversation, a new message came through the Russian radio frequency, the same one written on the sign at the city entrance.

Welcome to hell.

And then Grony exploded.

In a coordinated assault, Chetchin fighters who had been sitting silently in the buildings along Perverskaya Street opened fire on the 81st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment first.

As they were still driving toward the city center, RPGs destroyed the lead and rear vehicles of the column, boxing the remainder in between into a kill zone with no way out.

The streets were too narrow to turn around and tens of tanks and armored vehicles were stuck.

Everything erupted with such speed that the Russians couldn’t even respond.

It just went to chaos.

The 81st column was being wrecked by an enemy they couldn’t even see, let alone fire back at and organize some coherent defense.

They were desperately trying to push through and get out of the city, but they were broken into small groups, and many got confused and were driving just deeper into the city center.

The Chetchins had actually replaced the street signs to confuse them even further, and Russian soldiers weren’t even issued proper maps of the city.

They had no idea where to go.

The 81st was essentially destroyed on the streets within hours, while survivors scattered trying to fight their way out over the next days, but most of them got killed or captured.

At the same time, the 131st first assault group at the station came under attack as well.

The second assault group, following about 20 minutes behind, never made it to the station.

They were ambushed and annihilated along the way.

Among the forces that swarmed toward the station was the ABCian battalion, Chetchin fighters who were veterans of the war in abcasia.

These were battleh hardened men with real combat experience, not just local militia.

Given the station’s position between the two defense rings, vehicles just started exploding and fire erupted from all sides onto the 131st who tried to take cover in the station and nearby buildings.

The Chetchins set the buildings on fire.

The Chetchins had worked out a tactic designed around every single weakness of the Russian army.

After all, they were part of that very army just a few years earlier, and they knew exactly how every weapon worked, how to [music] defeat it, and how Russian doctrine and tactics operated.

They predicted every step the Russians made that day and were prepared to counter each one.

The T-72 and T80 tanks and even the BMPs couldn’t elevate their guns enough to hit the upper floors of buildings and they couldn’t depress them enough to hit RPG teams firing from basement.

The Chetchins knew this and that’s exactly why they positioned their small fire teams there.

At 50 m, the tank gun couldn’t hit anything above roughly the fourth floor and they were surrounded by tall buildings on all sides in narrow streets.

The side, rear, and top armor couldn’t stop even the older RPG7 warheads, especially not when showered by them, from all directions at almost pointblank range.

Tanks and vehicles brewed up.

And yeah, that infamous signature turret launch of the T72 series, the so-called Jack-in-the-Box effect that you’ve seen in Ukraine today, was no better back then.

Many of these tanks either didn’t have explosive reactive armor at all, or those that did, well, it didn’t actually work.

A lot of them were urgently deployed and the explosive inserts of the erra blocks were never put in.

And even the tanks that did have working reactive armor had the older Contact One, which can’t stop tandem warheads or repeated hits anyway.

Simply, there is no protection for a tank when it drives blindly in packet formation into a city without proper support, which is something that commanders tend to do in almost any war for some reason.

The infantry inside the BMPs was paralyzed by shock.

They were supposed to dismount and support the tanks, but they didn’t get out.

As we said, they were mostly young conscripts with zero urban warfare training.

No one even told them what to do, so their instinct was to stay behind the armor when the shooting started.

And horribly, many of them stayed inside forever.

Chetchin fighters walked up to buttoned up vehicles and blew them up with RPGs.

Those who tried to bail out of burning vehicles were cut down by machine guns and snipers.

The brigade commander Savin stayed in command despite being wounded himself, calling for any help they could get over the radio, but there was no help on the way.

The frantic fighting continued throughout the night.

Russian commanders inside the city tried to form some sort of defense, but the complete chaos, confusion, and lack of any plan whatsoever made this impossible.

They were communicating over old radios that were unencrypted.

And the Chetchins having the same radios could just listen to everything the Russians were saying in a language they spoke fluently themselves.

They could even talk to the Russian forces like you’ve seen.

There is that recording of a Chetchin fighter laughing over the Russian radio frequency that I came across while doing the research.

And it scared the life out of me, let alone the soldiers that were actively getting killed by them that listened to this.

On the other side, the Chetchin fighters were well organized.

They had at the time new Motorola handheld radios for almost each team.

They could communicate without Russians listening.

And given the fact that they were defending their own city, they were far more motivated.

Their defense was organized in three [music] concentric rings.

And the Russians didn’t have any idea about that when they drove in parade style.

It was just a mess and an impossible situation for Russian soldiers that were now fighting for their lives through the night.

Their present for New Year was a ceasefire 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after midnight.

Then the slaughter continued.

The 131st Support Battalion entered the city, but was immediately ambushed and wiped out before they could even reach the soldiers surrounded at the train station.

Through the night, wounded and dead were piling up.

Ammo was running out, and there was no way out of it.

On the morning of January 1st, Russian jets and helicopters [music] came in to help.

However, they helped by bombing their own Western group that was supposed to participate in the attack because no one told the pilots about them being there.

So they mistook them for the enemy and hit them with cluster munitions, creating a horrible friendly fire incident, taking out several vehicles and tens of friendly soldiers.

The chaos was so bad that it is estimated that friendly fire accounted for as high as 60% of all Russian casualties.

Even if they got that wrong by half, it is still more than horrible.

And if that wasn’t enough, some Chetchin fighters took Russian uniforms and as they fluently spoke the language, infiltrated the lines and caused even more chaos.

Two Russian units were fighting each other for six hours on January 1st because Chetchin fighters got in between them through the sewer system and fired on both sides then just left and let them fight each other.

Same goes for the radio communication and orders.

Reinforcements that tried to move into the city were not only taking fire from Chetchin fighters but also from Russian soldiers who were now in complete disarray and fired on everything that moved.

Both sides had the same equipment, vehicles, and weapons.

and there was no way to accurately identify friendlies before they were too close or too late to see the mistake.

By January 1st, the 131st had been trapped at the station for roughly 24 hours.

They had between 300 and 350 already killed.

They were going out of ammo and the wounded couldn’t be helped anymore.

Surrender was pretty much out of the question for most soldiers, as those who tried to surrender were mostly shot on the spot.

Some were captured and then had an even worse fate than that.

While some were captured, treated if wounded, and then released later, even without ransom for Chetchin prisoners.

It all depended on the unit they came across and their commander.

Now, it was obvious that no help was coming for them.

At sundown on January 1st, Savin was still in command and decided to try to evacuate the wounded.

He placed about 40 of the most critically injured onto the last three operational vehicles and dispatched them.

The vehicles drove out but went in the wrong direction toward the city center instead of away from it.

They eventually turned around and tried to retreat back the way they came but were immediately ambushed by Chetchin RPG teams.

None of the vehicles made it out of the city.

13 of them survived to be taken prisoner.

The command back at headquarters, desperate, told the surrounded soldiers to take civilian hostages to negotiate their extraction.

However, the Chetchins didn’t respond.

They also suggested the trapped troops try to sneak to friendly lines under cover of darkness.

Like if they couldn’t think of that themselves.

It is now January 2nd and surviving Russian soldiers were barely holding on fighting for their lives.

Buildings were shattered by RPGs and hand grenades were thrown in.

It was just close quarters fighting getting more desperate by each hour as the Russians were now almost completely out of ammo.

Colonel Savin, himself wounded since nearly the start of the battle, made the call on his own without waiting for orders from above to abandon the station and leave the city on foot under cover of darkness.

They left the station on January 2nd after dark, moving along the railroad ties.

They got about 70 m out and the Chetchins didn’t pursue them.

The order was total silence and no shooting, but nerves broke and discipline started falling apart.

People were shell shocked, exhausted, some barely functioning.

While moving through the city, they stumbled upon three BMPs from a different unit, the Samara Regiment.

Savin ordered the most critically wounded loaded onto these vehicles and sent them driving out.

The first BMP carrying Savin himself and the worst wounded was hit by a grenade launcher almost immediately.

Savin was mortally wounded and died shortly after beside his wrecked vehicle.

He was postumously awarded hero of the Russian Federation for trying to save what was left of his unit.

The second BMP with the wounded was also hit and destroyed while the third one managed to push through but was hit again just a bit down the road.

Those who had survived either ran out on foot or were captured later wandering around the city.

From the Chetchin side around 120 of their fighters were killed near the station alone.

The whole thing lasted 60 hours.

By January 3rd, from the 131st alone, there were 789 men killed, 75 captured, only about 60 reached safety.

20 of 26 tanks destroyed.

102 of 120 armored vehicles destroyed.

All Tonguska anti-aircraft systems destroyed.

24 officers dead, [music] including Savin.

The entire first battalion, roughly 300 men and 40 armored vehicles ceased to exist.

Across all units in the opening days, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 Russian soldiers were killed.

Around 100 of 120 tanks committed were destroyed.

Russia proportionally lost more tanks in Grozni than in the Battle of Berlin in 1945.

1,96 Russian soldiers from the first Chetchin war remain listed as missing in action.

In 2008, a mass grave containing roughly 800 bodies was uncovered in Grony.

After the disaster, they completely abandoned armored columns.

They shifted to massive artillery bombardment, firing an estimated 30,000 shells per day.

This was the heaviest bombardment campaign in Europe since the Second World War.

And this killed thousands of civilians, most of them Russian ethnics that had nowhere to go.

Through the next month, they horribly bombed the city and attacked with infantry until the Chetchin defenders retreated to the mountains and the Russians took the city.

It was taken back by the Chetchins in 1996 in a counterattack after which they began negotiations.

But the second Chichchan war would come in 1999 under Putin where they used the lessons learned and leaned over to heavy bombardments instead of driving in with tanks.

The city was yet again destroyed and Russia won this time installing their controlled government.

So there you go.

Another example of people dying because someone in their comfy offices disagreed over