Spetsnaz: Russia’s Special Forces (Elite) by Mark Galeotti & Johnny Shumate

Author:Mark Galeotti & Johnny Shumate [Galeotti, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472807243
Publisher: Osprey Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-06-19T23:00:00+00:00

Russian peacekeepers in Bosnia, 1996, as part of the multinational Implementation Force (IFOR) supporting the Dayton Peace Accords. They have been patrolling in their BTR-80 and are, characteristically, in full combat gear.

Russia sent a brigade-strength unit to join the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) which kept the peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995–96 after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. This 1st Independent Airborne Brigade, based in Ugljevik, was under the operational command of the US-led Multinational Division (North). As a result, it was hailed – and in fairness, should be considered – as an example of the new spirit of cooperation between Moscow and the West. Some of the brigade’s razvedchiki were rumored to be Spetsnaz, brought into the unit not just to provide much-needed skills but also to use the opportunity to gather intelligence on local and Western forces alike. This is unconfirmed, although elements from the VDV’s 45th Independent Reconnaissance Regiment and 22nd Independent Airborne Regiment were attached to the force (and Spetsnaz did subsequently recruit a number of veterans from Russia’s IFOR contingent).

All these operations were just sideshows, however, compared with the main theater in which the Spetsnaz would find themselves operating in the post-Soviet era: Chechnya.

CHECHNYA

In the mid-1990s a significant number of the inhabitants of Chechnya – an ethnically distinct and traditionally Muslim republic in the Caucasus, long unhappy under Russian rule – took at face value the new Russian President Yeltsin’s offer to the constituent regions of the Russian Federation to “take as much freedom as you can chew.” This began a slide toward not one, but two bloody wars. As Afghanistan was to the Soviet Spetsnaz, so the Chechen wars were crucial in the evolution of Russia’s military special forces. They acquired a wide range of roles, from hunting rebel leaders to intercepting supply convoys, but they also found themselves fighting an enemy that included many ex-Soviet Spetsnaz among their ranks, leading to some serious reverses6.

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