Russia’s first Chechen war mastermind Grachev dies at 64

MOSCOW, Russia – Russia’s brutal 1994-1996 Chechen campaign mastermind and former defense minister Pavel Grachev died Sunday, September 23, at a military hospital in Moscow at the age of 64.

The Afghan war veteran became a hated figure by human rights groups for convincing the late Boris Yeltsin to unleash what he had promised would be a “victorious Blitzkrieg in Chechnya” meant to stamp out a growing separatist insurgency.

Grachev’s tanks ended up going up in flames in the first offensive on the capital Grozny — a humiliation that prompted him to order carpet bombings that subsequently claimed the lives of tens of thousands and displaced many more.

“We just received a call from the Vishnevsky hospital confirming that Pavel Sergeyevich (Grachev) is dead,” his colleague Nikolai Deryabin told the Interfax-AVN military news agency.

Grachev had been resting at the military hospital’s emergency ward since September 12 with an unspecified medical condition.

The tough-talking minister headed defense from Russia’s first full year of post-Soviet independence in 1992 until the summer of 1996.

He was removed during a heated political power struggle that was almost immediately followed by a truce agreement with Chechnya that handed the tiny Muslim region de-facto independence within a sovereign Russia.

Federal troops rumbled back into the area in 1999 in the final months of Yeltsin’s presidency under the leadership of then prime minister Vladimir Putin. – Agence France-Presse