Kizlyar-Pervomayskoye Hostage Crisis - Aftermath

Aftermath

Russian press accounts of the carnage (including those by Izvestia correspondent Valery Yakov, who witnessed the fighting from inside the village) described a chaotic, overmanned, and bungled Russian operation in Pervomayskoye (Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer wrote that the armed services involved in the assault displayed a "fantastic lack of coordination)." The international organization Reporters Without Borders publicly protested at Russian security authorities' intimidation of the press at Pervomayskoye as well as the Russian military authorities' ban on medical assistance to civilians and their refusal to allow evacuation of the wounded. The United States Secretary of Defense William Perry, said that Russia was justified in using military force in response to hostage-taking. Yelstin defended the assault on Pervomayskoye, saying the operation was "planned and carried out correctly."

On January 19, 1996, Raduyev proposed to exchange the police hostages for the seriously wounded fighters he had left behind. The Chechens announced their readiness to turn over the remaining civilian hostages to Dagestani authorities. A special resolution by the Russian State Duma granted amnesty for the 11 captured guerrillas. They were swapped in exchange for 17 policemen (a CNN report said the captives were "12 Russian soldiers and six police officers") seized by the rebels in Pervomaiskoye. On January 27, 1996, 26 dead Chechen fighters, were swapped for hostages and returned by Russian authorities through Dagestani intermediaries. They were buried in the Tsotsin-Yurt village cemetery, which is considered a holy place because it holds the bodies of 400 Chechens killed while fighting Russian forces during the Russian Civil War in 1919.

The hostage crisis also caused a split among the Chechens, Salman Raduyev was denounced by top Chechen rebel leaders. According to the Polish volunteer Mirosław Kuleba (Mehmed Borz) who met Raduyev two months after the crisis, it was possible that Raduyev meant to ignite a broader civil war in Dagestan. Kuleba said Raduyev tried to hide in the conversation that the taking of a hospital and gathering of hostages was planned from the beginning. Raduyev was shot in the head in what some reports described as an ambush by rival guerillas and reportedly killed, but he resurfaced after the war (and Dudayev's death), to became a renegade warlord.

Raduyev was captured by the Russians during the Second Chechen War and in 2001 sentenced to life in prison; he died in a prison colony in 2002. That same year, Turpal-Ali Atgeriev (sentenced to 15 years) also died in prison. They both died in mysterious circumstances. Two other participants of the raid were also convicted – Aslanbek Alkhazurov to five years imprisonment (Alkhazurov died in prison in 2004) and Husein Gaisumov to eight years.