Whatever option the Family would choose: a Bonapartist coup d’état or “Operation Successor”—in
both cases an appropriate climate would have to be created in Russia: in the first case
to justify a state of emergency, in the second case to boost the popularity of the
Family’s presidential candidate.[5] And again—as in 1994—the Chechen option was chosen. At the end of March 1999 a
meeting of the “power ministers” was held in which Sergey Stepashin, at that time
still minister of the interior, Igor Sergeyev, minister of defense, Anatoly Kvashnin,
head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and Vladimir Putin, director
of the FSB, participated.[6] They adopted a plan to intervene militarily in Chechnya. The original plan, considered
in March 1999, was more modest than the one that would ultimately be chosen. It intended
just “to seal Chechnya off” by creating a cordon sanitaire around the republic. The plan included the occupation of about one third of the Chechen
territory north of the river Terek—but it did not include the capture of the capital,
Grozny. Additionally, the border zone of Chechnya with Georgia would be occupied.
In April the Russian Security Council approved this plan. At that point, this council
had, for only a few days, been headed by Putin.
However, in May 1999—after the dismissal of Prime Minister Primakov, who had been
critical of an intervention in Chechnya—this moderate plan would be changed and another,
more radical plan adopted. This was a plan to reconquer the whole Chechen republic and bring it back into the Russian Federation. It is unclear how
far these changes were affected by developments on the ground in Chechnya. Radical
Wahhabists within the Chechen government, led by Shamil Basayev, convened, in April
1999 in Grozny, a Congress of the Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan to discuss the
unification of the two republics into a caliphate. In May a group of about sixty radicals
crossed the border into Dagestan and wounded eleven servicemen and two policemen before
retreating. This led to the first attacks by the Russian air force against radical
positions in Chechnya since the first Chechen War.[7] However, it was clear that, in order to start an all-out war, a more serious casus belli had to be found.
A Real or Constructed
Casus Belli
? The Alleged Chechen Attack on Dagestan
This casus belli was a second and more important incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan. A Chechen
attack on another Caucasian republic that was—unlike Chechnya itself—an undisputed
part of the Russian Federation, could not be accepted, and clearly justified a counterattack.
On August 8, 1999, an incursion took place involving about one thousand Chechen fighters,
led by the jihadist rebel leader Shamil Basayev and his Saudi ally, Umar Ibn al-Khattab,
leader of the foreign mujahideen in Chechnya. The Kremlin immediately declared Russia
to be under attack by international terrorism. Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Stepashin
and, on August 9, appointed Putin as his successor. He indicated that he considered
Putin a worthy successor to become the next Russian president. The Chechen attack
on Dagestan was presented by the Russian authorities as a complete surprise. But how
spontaneous and “unexpected” was this Chechen attack? In early August 1999, just after
the incursion took place, the investigative Russian weekly Versiya published a report alleging that, some time before the incursion into Dagestan,[8] the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had purportedly
met in France with Shamil Basayev. The meeting allegedly took place in a villa on
the Côte d’Azur, which belonged to a Saudi citizen, Adnan Khashoggi, a rich international
arms dealer with a dubious reputation. The meeting was, allegedly, arranged by a middleman,
Anton Surikov, a retired officer of the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedivatelnoe Upravlenie), the intelligence service of the Russian army. Surikov and Basayev would have known
each other and would even have been on friendly terms since 1992, when they fought
together on the side of Abkhazia in the war against Georgia. In this period Shamil
Basayev, his brother Shirvani Basayev, and their Chechen fighters worked closely together
with the GRU. They were even trained by this organization. “There is little doubt,”
wrote Martin Malek, “that Basayev worked together well with [the] Russian secret services
in Abkhazia (where Basayev’s men are said to have played soccer with the heads of
killed Georgians).”[9]
