“At night in Grozny we could hear the Chechens torture our soldiers who they had captured during the daytime. We would sit in our buildings and look at the burning city and listen to the screams of men begging for the torture to stop.

‘Uncle please! Don’t kill me! I want to go home!’ (Some soldiers called Chechens Uncle)

In the mornings, we would leave our defenses and come across the mutilated bodies of our guys. Their throats would be slit and have wounds all over their bodies. Sometimes just a burned corpse.

Retribution came quickly when we got our hands on one of them. We caught a Chechen with a bloody knife on him once. We knew he was one of the guys torturing our soldiers.

We brought him into a building and stabbed him in the stomach and let him walk out the front door. He tried to stumble down the street back to his friends, and right before he reached safety we shot him in the back. I was 19 years old.”
– Alexei Yermolov, Russian Army. First Chechen War, 1994.
————
As we always say here at Battles and Beers (TM) Every soldier has a story, and every story deserves to be told.