Twenty years ago, as Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin launched a military operation in Chechnya that would come to define his rule and haunt it.
1. A man waving a separatist Chechen flag in Grozny, the region’s capital, in 1995. Many buildings were destroyed by Russian bombs and other weaponry in the 1994-96 war between federal troops and Chechen rebels, which ended with de facto independence for Chechnya.
2. A Chechen man in 1994. The Kremlin has a centuries-long history of conflict and near-genocidal repression of Chechens, who have been seen by many in Russia as particularly defiant. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described Chechen fellow prisoners in the Soviet gulag as the one ethnic group whose members "refused to accept the psychology of submission."
