MOSCOW: Russia’s brutal 1994-1996 Chechen campaign mastermind and former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev died yesterday at a military hospital in Moscow at the age of 64.
The Afghan war veteran became a hated figure by human rights groups for convincing the late Boris Yeltsin to unleash what he had promised would be a “victorious Blitzkrieg in Chechnya” meant to stamp out a growing separatist insurgency.
Grachev’s tanks ended up going up in flames in the first offensive on the capital Grozny — a humiliation that prompted him to order carpet bombings that subsequently claimed the lives of tens of thousands and displaced many more.
“We just received a call from the Vishnevsky hospital confirming that Pavel Sergeyevich (Grachev) is dead,” his colleague Nikolai Deryabin told the Interfax-AVN military news agency.
Grachev had been resting at the military hospital’s emergency ward since September 12 with an unspecified medical condition.
The tough-talking minister headed defense from Russia’s first full year of post-Soviet independence in 1992 until the summer of 1996.
He was removed during a heated political power struggle that was almost immediately followed by a truce agreement with Chechnya that handed the tiny Muslim region de-facto independence within a sovereign Russia.
Federal troops rumbled back into the area in 1999 in the final months of Yeltsin’s presidency under the leadership of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, Moscow police say they have detained more than 130 drunken drivers over the past 24 hours, including a man who crashed his car into a bus stop, killing seven people and injuring three.
Police said the car was traveling more than 200 kilometers per hour (120 mph) when the driver lost control and slammed into the bus stop.
The Interfax news agency reported that the 30-year-old driver, Alexander Maximov, had been arrested for drunken driving in 2010 and told police that prior to Saturday’s accident he had been drinking for two days. The driver also had received two speeding tickets this year.
Police report numerous arrests of drunken drivers, but the accident rate remains high, compounded by drivers who routinely speed and disobey traffic rules.