The battle for the Chechen capital may have been primarily symbolic — if particularly bloody — but the for the city's residents it has been devastating. Many have sheltered for months in freezing cellars with little to eat or drink, enduring daily pounding by Russian artillery and aircraft. Now hardly a building is left intact, and Russian officials have indicated that Moscow is unlikely to cough up the $1 billion that would be required to start rebuilding the city. (For one thing, if the history of the last war is anything to go by, Moscow's tenure there may be far from eternal.) Instead, Moscow appears set to simply leave Grozny in ruins as a warning to Chechens and other peoples in the restive Caucasus of the price of trying to secede. Of course that would make the shattered city also symbolize Russia's political failure in the region.
Why Russia May Keep Chechen Capital in Ruins
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Russia may have claimed to be following NATO's Kosovo playbook in Chechnya, but its "liberation" of Grozny appears more in line with General William Westmoreland's Vietnam War dictum of destroying a village in order to save it. Acting president Vladimir Putin announced Sunday that Russian forces were in full control of the capital, and had managed to find an administrative building still standing amid the rubble on which to hoist the Russian flag. But with the bulk of the city's two to three thousand Chechen defenders having broken through Russian lines — at a considerable cost in casualties — and made it to the rebel strongholds in the mountains to the south, the war's focus has simply shifted elsewhere.