On the casualties in the Chechen wars according to Norbert Strade (list moderator of the Yahoo mailing list on Chechnya)

[From a personal letter to the webauthor updated to December 2002]
 
The casualty numbers are tricky, and it depends on *which* numbers you speak about. The numbers of civilian casualties differ widely. The Russians almost give no numbers at all (and if they do, they speak about very few), while they try and describe the post-1991 situation as a "genocide of ethnic Russians", in which thousands were kidnapped or killed and even more made refugees. This is obviously nonsense, since there was no kidnapping in Chechya before CW1 (when the Russian troops introduced this wonderful idea), and there was no persecution along ethnic or religious lines. What happened then was the same type of ethnic Russian exodus as happened in other newly independent countries (from the Baltics to Central Asia). The people who previously had the leading functions in the colonies and felt like a "master race", suddenly ended up as disfunctional minorities, a situation in which  many preferred to "go home". But the Russian propaganda has become very effective on this point in the current war.

The civilian war casusalties are difficult to count too. The Chechen government was the only one which tried to keep an account during the first war, which was possible because of Chechen familiy structures. Very few people went missing without anybody noticing (contrary to the Russians who usually had no family clans). The number of civilian casualties during the first war as given by the Chechen authorities was about 100,000, with several thousands still missing (mostly people taken to concentration camps inside Russia, where they disappeared). Some Russian human rights bodies counted about 80,000 victims. One or the other Western news agency started with *guessing* about 40,000, which then in the usual way became *the official* Western press count ("up to 40,000 killed, blah blah..."). I think there is no reason not to  believe the Chechen numbers, when they come from the Maskhadov government. Kavkaz-Tsentr is a different cup of tea, one shouldn't trust their stuff.

Also, since the Chechen civilian losses of 100,000 during CW1 count the victims in the whole republic, and numbers have been given for Grozny alone of 100,000, there is a high number of ethnic Russian civilian victims of the Russian carpet bombings included here. Since Russians were concentrated in the capital, there must have been a very high casualty number among them, I guess several ten thousands, mainly poor and elderly people who had no network.

In CW2, the civilian losses in Grozny alone were counted as at least 40,000 civilians during the Russian bomb and missile war. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in other parts of the republic, so the overall number for both wars must at least be around 200,000 people. The Maskhadov government today counts about 250,000 civilians killed during military action or murdered or disappeared later.

The military losses are of course difficult to assess, too. The Russian numbers are obviously faked (they are also quite funny, since the official losses of all the different armed formations haven't changed substantially since early 2000). A good starting point is the number given by the soldiers mothers, who only count regular troops (i.e., not the mercenaries/kontraktniki and special service forces). Their number of about 10,000 killed consists of cases *documented* by them. There are various ways in which one can extrapolate from this, adding killed mercenaries and killed regular troops whose bodies have been destroyed or concealed by the military (a common practice). The most conservative guess would say that there are about 3 times the given number, i.e. 30,000+ at this point. Others say the number is even higher. The complete number of Russian casualties, including the injured, must be around 120-150,000 now. - The regular "hunting expeditions" in Russian cities, where the army simply kidnaps youths in order to enroll them, is a sign that they have substantial difficulties to fill the ranks. The mercenaries already now consist mainly of prison inmates who buy their freedom through a term in the "army". The whole Russian military system thus reveals itself as being fundamentally medieval. A more "unscientific" method that worked well during CW1 was to multiply the official Russian numbers by 10. This would give about 40,000 killed Russians.

The Russian numbers of Chechen military losses are also obvious nonsense, because if you put them together, they have already killed all availabe armed Chechens many times over. A realistic number, given by the Chechens themselves, says about 10,000 casualties during the first war, and about the same number during this one - so far. This is also consistent with the count mentioned above, since it can be taken as a valid rule, given the partizan character of the war and the different effectiveness, that 1 killed Chechen corresponds to 3 killed Russians.

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