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Radio War Nerd #332 — Chechen Wars, Pt. 4: The Second Chechen War (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-31 22:49:01
Imported:
2026-06
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Recorded: May 26, 2022

Part 4 in our series on the Chechen Wars. This episode, following Shamil Basayev and Khattab's invasion into Chechnya, Vladimir Putin is named Prime Minister, and apartment buildings start blowing up.

First - We discuss recent mass shootings in the US.

At 24:23 - We discuss the Second Chechen War and background...

Maps:

*Chechnya

*Khattab (l) and Basayev (r)

*Aslan Maskhadov

Previous episodes on the Chechen Wars:*EP #321 - Intro to Chechen Wars*EP #322 - Chechen Wars, Part 2: 1722-1991*EP #324 - Chechen Wars, Part 3: First Chechen War, 1994-96 

Book mentioned:

The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to Jihad, by Robert Schaefer

Total time: 1:37:03

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Files

Comments

Y

Could you add the Chechen war series to the "collections"?

Sean

RWN is on a tear right now 😮‍💨

James Whale

Gary and Mark have you thought about releasing exile articles into a compilation book ? I would love to read. I was 1 years old in 1991 so I missed it !

CR

LOL. The 2022 war nerd summer offensive.

CR

That would be nice. I can think of one big obstacle to that, though.

CR

The bullies become cops.

CR

Which is 1:1 correlation to that bullies are cowards shit. But cops are just the lowest forms of life on earth. They are beneath contempt.

CR

Didn’t the cops stand outside Steven Paddocks’s suite for like an hour, too? I’m sure that was reassuring to the 600 people he wounded and 60 he murdered. Cops are the fucking worst.

Ander Pierce

Needling as an 'adolescent ego control measure' is an interesting framework, I like it

William

So police budgets are for harassing poor and homeless people while buying expensive props and costumes for cops to cosplay with

William

Getting to the bombing part and FSB conspiracy - what I usually come back to is that you will likely never know if a conspiracy is true. The best you can do, then, is ask yourself, "what are the implications of it, if the conspiracy IS true?" That often gives you a maximal position to start evaluating from

CR

🌎🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀

Lionel Boyd Johnson

Haven't listened yet, but really enjoying this series, thanks for the latest installment!

Ossi Tapio

The company I work for is having this program to improve worker efficiency. What do they call it? The "phoenix program". Yikes. Seems like some people have not read enough history (or they have read too much).

mt

A paper book with all War Nerd articles and news letters would be great too! I would place a order immediately.

mt

The militarized US police is there to kill and oppress you not to protect you. Should be obvious now.

Andrew Tait

wah wah about bullying. I don't think you can blame us gun crime on it. I'm from NZ, the home of anti-bullying - and death rates in construction from very woke mother fuckers. bullying is part and parcel of every class society surely. fine balance is. a great book about that ay

Andrew Tait

also, i wasn't shocked or disturbed by sandy hook or columbine but i was by fallujah and gaza cast lead. the first two made no sense other than adolescent nihilistic idiocy - which i can vaguely remember - but the others are just fucking tragedies. i mean they are heroic not just stupid. surprised ames is cut up about sandy hook. I am a long way from uvale or buffalo (but not from christchurch) .

Benjamin Cheney

I take it you don’t have any children in elementary school?

Benjamin Cheney

I’ve spent less than a year cumulatively in the US over the past decade. Certainly a lot of great places and people to visit but it gets more unfamiliar and frightening each time. So I can deeply relate to John/Gary in that respect

Alex

Another major benefit of having assault weapons everywhere is that it'll be that much easier to organize the right-wing street gangs/paramilitaries/death squads who will be responsible for crushing any socialist challenge to the established order. American financial capitalism isn't that far away from having to violently defend itself at home.

Gordon Schmidt

If there was an inside job element to 9/11 it was well-hidden. If elements in the US government did something like that, they would *never* have used controlled demolitions, a cruise missile, etc. That would leave FAR too much evidence behind, too many potential witnesses, too many conflicts with what the stated story was. Why take that risk when you it would be so, so easy to just get 19 highjackers onto planes? It doesn't make sense. So what is plausible? Remember; the best coverups include as much of the truth as possible. The planes really were highjacked and flown into buildings or terrain by 19 people. But did anyone in the government know about it beforehand? There is evidence that some in the US security state (Tom Wilshire and Richard Blee, among others) may have taken steps to prevent one or more of the highjackers from being caught in the year leading up to the attacks, as well as well-established connections between the highjackers and Saudi intelligence. I take this more seriously than controlled demolition theories because, if this is what happened, it would be relatively simple to cover up. This could be very easily compartmentalized to the point where even the top echelons of the executive branch didn't know about it. So is that what happened? Unfortunately we'll probably never know, but it might be worth thinking about. For the record, I think the apartment bombings were most likely an inside job- I once read an interview with Putin held right after he came to power, and the interviewer asked him about it. Putin's response was incredulous, but not in a way that came across as genuine. Sort of hard to take him seriously when he says "Bomb apartments? Who would do that!?" given the events of the past two decades.

Gordon Schmidt

Also while it's pretty obvious that the Russians are performing much better in this stage of the war, it also seems like that isn't enough to make a difference. Maybe it would be a different story if they hadn't lost so much momentum (to say nothing of men and materiel) in Kyiv and Mariupol, but they did, and now even if they manage to cut off Ukrainian forces in Lysychansk (by no means a certainty) they will still have to grind through the rest of Donetsk province. Will the Russians manage to take the remainder of the province without turning Bakhmut, Sloviansk, and Kramatorsk into Mariupol? Anything is possible, but I have my doubts, and I would be surprised if the Russians don't pay a heavy price for each of those cities.

Andrew Tait

Anti-bullying is the latest neoliberal trend. It will never get rid of workplace bullying. Neoliberalism loves to hide its hierarchies (you're not an employee, you're an equal opportunity non discriminatory contractor) but they are as savage as ever. If the unions ever get strong enough again we will be the target of sanctimonious PMC anti-bullying crusades.

a clash of purple

There's plenty of evidence that the official story about 9/11 is just a lie. You're overlooking the more important detail that nobody cares and nobody will do anything. No one anywhere is going to challenge the U.S. empire on its crimes, whether they blow up a couple buildings full of Americans in New York, a big chunk of their own Pentagon, or millions of people overseas. Plenty of regular Americans, probably more than half, believe 9/11 was an inside job in some capacity or another. But a majority of Americans also still believe in the legitimacy and integrity of U.S. institutions and still support all the wars, abrogations of civil rights, and foreign interventions that were justified by 9/11. I don't know why they even bother covering anything up anymore, except that it keeps someone somewhere employed. It's a matter of public record that the George W. Bush administration launched two illegal wars under false pretenses which got millions of people killed and funneled over a trillion dollars to corrupt war profiteers around the world (which is much worse than engineering 9/11), and no one even noticed. At this point half of American voters believe the government has been hijacked by the deep state and a cabal of liberal Jewish pedophiles and the other half believe the government has been hijacked by Vladimir Putin and some hackers, but none of them do anything besides vote in elections that they don't even believe are valid and post about it on-line. I don't know if it's fear or just, as I heard someone say once, this idiotic refusal to let go of what people learned in elementary school social studies class. Anyway, yeah, the government did 9/11. Why not? On the list of American crimes, blowing up some buildings full of innocent people and then half-assedly covering it up is actually not that big a deal.

a clash of purple

If they're willing to pay the price, they'll be able to occupy as much territory as they want, given time. Then the war turns into a guerrilla war and Ukraine turns into Afghanistan, with psychos like the Azov Batallion playing the role of the mujahideen. Then the Russians get to keep whatever land they took as long as they're willing to put up with the insurgency, and then they'll leave, and Ukraine will be a devastated basket case. After that, who knows?

Zafar

I am following the war in Ukraine on a YouTube channel called Military Summary - which breaks down what’s happening each day using maps. It seems pretty good to me, but what do I know? If anybody actually does know I’d value some assessment of the channel.

Connor Francis

I disagree with Mark that it could be chalked up to anti Slavic sentiment to believe those bombings were a false flag if the fsb was literally caught planting explosive in an apartment. The question becomes if it really was explosive material. I don't believe that 911 wasn't an inside job not because I believe that the US deep State is moral I don't believe it because there's no proof if a bunch of Cia agent were caught painting thermite onto the wtc I'D start believing.

Joe Bowden

Ok you dont have proof that cia agents painted the walls with thermite but there is story after story of intelligence fuck ups and incompetence, completely irrational and suspicious behaviour from cheney and rumsfeld and strange coincidences and business links. You dont have to believe that jet fuel cant melt steel beams to believe there was some sort of complicity of some faction of the deep state. We will never know for sure because its impossible for a single believeable account either way to emerge, much like JFK to this day, but for me i agnostically believe it was an 'inside job' if you have to use that term.

David Andrews

Bullying is a part of life and this will probably never change. These mass shootings are not caused by bullying, racism, poor parenting, poverty, heavy metal, violent video games etc because these phenomenon are not unique to America. The problem is guns. No guns, no gun violence. I live in Hong Kong but grew up in the US and am American so speak from experience. We don't have gun violence here because it's illegal to own a gun. Another informative episode, by the way.

Connor Francis

Oh for sure. I think that at every point the global war on terror has been ratcheted up and especially the fact that 11 out of the 18 highjackers or thereabouts were Saudi and I believe there were some Saudi intelligence assets among them. The fact that we've also allowed Saudi Arabia to freely export solophism. I think all these details fit nicely into the gladio 2 theory. You stay grounded in what you know for sure but we all have our theories. My point was that you're not doing racism to believe the fsb would do that if they were literally caught doing it. The intelligence agency of any country is almost always a siv for the worst psychos and strivers in that country. The Cia has been caught doing any number of worse or comparable things the Iran contra cochise operation comes to mind. I just listened to chaos by Tom O'Neil and it made my brain vibrate. So to be clear I was not defending the honor of the Cia I was just saying the thermite paint thing would be a lot more founded if the police caught two guys in a van full of thermite paint and they both were suicided.

Connor Francis

I'm 22 my senior year was when the Stoneman Douglas shooting I think I was in middle school for Sandyhook. At that time I was anti gun but have you thought about what it would entail? Say you ban all semi auto rifles and pistols that can hold more than 10 rounds then that needs to be enforced. While a lot of people who own all of those AR 15s and AKs and hi cap glocks are right wing fundamentalists there are also a lot of minorities who rightly don't trust the government native Americans, African Americans and Latinos. Now if that is enforced what that would mean is police or FBI going in to those communities and taking them by force because lots of these people sill not give them up willingly. the amount of police shootings would skyrocket and more places in America would become a domestic warzone. The guns for the most part are here to stay unfortunately. As someone relatively recently out of high-school I can tell you the dull horror of learning about climate change and then learning in your bones that you're powerless to stop it because people who will be dead when we see it's major effects are doing it to us. The fact that more and more people literally have no friends in high-school. It is a prevailing lack of purpose and the knowledge that the future is only getting worse all the time. We can't get rid of guns but hopefully we could do something about that.

etienne

those like Corruption Index Survey things are always talking about a specific type of low-level corruption that boils down to like, having to give small bribes to civil servants to keep your business running. It's a neat rhetorical trick to separate this type of daily nuisance corruption from the more common western forms, such as, regulatory capture, pork barrel, lobbying, financial engineering, industry revolving doors, tax loopholes, stuff like that.

Ander Pierce

What about hosting a federal buyback, imposing strict gun control similar to what New Zealand has, while allowing all the AR15s and RPGs already on the streets to stay there, but making transfer of those weapons illegal. Sure there would be illegal transfers and some people arrested and fined for those transfers, but it would no longer be possible for miscreants to get their hands on weaponry without turning to the black market.

Ander Pierce

"even if they manage to cut off Ukrainian forces in Lysychansk" I don't see Russia failing to take Lysychansk. Ukrainian troops can't be reinforced or withdraw without driving on roads within 10km of Russian lines. And I wouldn't want to be the guy driving that truck. What Purple says about a lingering insurgency and a devastated basked-case Ukraine ring true.

Ander Pierce

9/11 is a story about laughably incompetent or malignant intelligence services failing to prevent an attack on US soil, after funding and arming the wahhabis who would conspire to commit the attack in the first place.

Connor Francis

Really losing the thread here was really only using 9-11 as a comparison as an event that was used as fuel for a public support of military with questionable intelligence ties. The topic is the apartment bombings.

Connor Francis

New Zealand had one of the largest mass shootings in history like three years ago. Especially with the advent of 3d printed ghost guns and the fact that I'm pretty sure that there are more registered firearms in America than there are people. We can't get nationalized Healthcare but we will be able to do a national gun buyback program. I would argue that nationalized Healthcare would do more to curtail mass shooting than any half baked buyback programs would. A deep obsession with gun ownership as an axis of freedom is part of the American psychology in a way it is not for new Zealanders

Ross Kiro-Ward

I know it might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s probably more productive at this point in the conflict to not concentrate so much on territory, and instead look at morale and troop numbers. The Ukrainians depend almost entirely on outside western support, and unfortunately for them it’s beginning to cycle out of ‘our’ attention spans and news cycles. Believe it or not the Depp/Heard case got six times more coverage than Ukraine last month. They are losing ‘our’ interest, which means less future materiel support. Likewise, foreign mercenary support, which I don’t believe made any real difference but is a good indicator non the less is also waning. Young men are no longer able to go and pretend they’re in call of duty, but are instead being asked to sit in a trench or basement to get shelled 24/7 - the romance is fading away. Also, perhaps the most important factor is manpower. You mentioned Russian men and materiel losses, but you don’t seem to think that they can take it? Yet, all indications are pointing towards a rise in war approval within Russia. I’ll recall Mark’s anecdote in this very episode about his shock at his intelligent, liberal friends in Russia during the second Chechen war seemingly doing a 180 on the matter. Again, I’ll go back to a point I always bring up, and one that came from an actual expert - Ukraine is an existential concern for Russia, culturally, religiously and most importantly when it comes to security - it just means more to them than it ever will to us. My point is that Ukraine will now be used by us to inflict as much pain as possible on Russia, but it is a pain they are more than willing to take. When it comes to morale I’d suggest (If you can scroll pass the gory pics/vids quickly enough) to have a look at telegram. Follow both sides and you will see the difference. Even super pro-Ukraine channels are posting multiple videos of Ukrainian soldiers refusing to go to the front lines, and I mean literal dozens of fighters in squads making direct appeals to the government to stop giving suicidal orders: https://t.me/NovichokRossiya/1601

Dael Morris

As far as materiel goes, Russian military spending is 11 times that of Ukraine, and they increased that 40% in the first 4 months of this year. US "aid", like all US "aid" consists of the government transferring public money to US defence contractors. That accounts for the majority of military "aid". The remainder goes to non-military allocations, including extending the embassy.

Dael Morris

What's changes the equation, as in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and pretty much everywhere else is the distinction between professional troops and people fighting to avoid extinction in their own home. Spoiler: the latter win. Unfortunately, Ukraine will be destroyed in the process.

OneMoreAccount

There is an article in a German paper written by someone who was (involuntary) recruited to the TDF in Ukraine. Thought you might find it interesting. It can be translated using Google Translate: https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/427348.ukraine-dokument-des-krieges.html It gives another glimpse (there was an article in the NYT 1-2 weeks ago iirc) about the situation for ppl in the TDF though it doesn't tell us anything about the UAF.

CR

It's funny how you didn't say it (this time), but when you described how Kadyrov was from the right clan, I immediately added "just like in the U.S."

CR

Legalism. If the process is enshrined in some kind of a code, it can't be evil.

Dorothy Lyczek

Hello! Is the event at nowadays still happening tomorrow, and if so, at what time?

radiowarnerd

Hi Dorothy! There is still a week to go. The venue for the June 17 meet-up has changed to Slattery's Midtown Pub (8 E 36th St, New York, NY 10016) starting 7.30pm . Let the door staff know you're with Radio War Nerd. Hope to see you there!