The 10th aniversary of the Grozny bloodbath.

A tv series about the origins of the first Chechen war and the new year’s day assault on Grozny has just been shown on the Russian tv.

Horrible and senseless slaughter of civilians and young inexperienced Russian recruits alike. It was really such an unimaginable military debacle that one is left wondering whether the Russian Generals and officers had any slightest idea of how to conduct urban warfare or any warfare for that matter. Did they read any books about WW2 experiences of their predecessors, about Stalingrad or Berlin?

Indeed Grozny was a Stalingrad for the Russian troops in January 1994. A whole Maikop brigade got caught totally unawares and unprepared in the middle of the town and annihilated almost to a man. They didn’t even bother to establish security around the perimeter.

Loosing hundreds of troops and dozens of armoured vehicles in a single day is probably more than Germans would have lost in the first day of the Kursk battle against a million strong Soviet defenses and 2,000 tanks. And this is against a several thousand strong Chechen guerrilla armed with small arms and handheld rocket launchers.

In the first weeks of the Chechen war alone Russians lost some 2,000 killed and almost 500 missing. Is it a modern army at all? Don’t think so.

The sight of streets of Grozny strewn with corpses, heaps of mangled Russian soldiers’ bodies, trenches filled with dead civilians, dozens of burnt out armoured vehicles and tanks is really gruesome. If there's hell that is Grozny that day.

If such a barbarous warfare and complete disregard to human life both of soldiers and civilians is possible in the 21 century, one is only left wandering what type of fighting Soviets conducted in the Great patriotic war when there was no television, no human rights activists, no mothers of soldiers organizations, no international condemnations.

Gruesome.