ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1995 the journalist Sebastian Smith visited Aslan Maskhadov, the chief of staff of the (separatist) Chechen Republic, who was then in the midst of war with Russia. Maskhadov explained his plans for the future to Smith: he said that he intended to fight a pitched defensive battle, to use all his force to fight for every town and village, in order to prevent the Russians from ‘governing over the territory’ and thus declaring ‘that we are only bandits who hide in the hills’. Maskhadov was aware that a pitched battle could be highly costly for him, but he said that he wanted to show ‘that I can fight a real war, army against army, position against position’.1 At that time the Chechen militia had already been driven out of the capital Groznyi after two months of strenuous fighting and the Chechen commander’s forces and means of defence were clearly inferior to those of the Russians. Hearing these words Smith came to his own conclusion: Maskhadov ‘was crazy’.2
