Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria declared its independence from Russia in 1991, in the rush of the Soviet collapse, and then did something almost no other separatist movement managed: it made the independence real, if only for a while. The First Chechen War (1994–96) was a humiliation for the Russian army; despite taking Grozny, Russian forces could not hold the republic against determined Chechen resistance, and the 1996 Khasavyurt Accord ended the war with Russia withdrawing and the question of Chechnya’s final status simply postponed. For three years Ichkeria governed itself, with an elected president and internationally observed elections — a de facto state, unrecognised but functioning.

Those three years were also its undoing. The independent republic was weak and lawless, its government unable to control the warlords and the kidnapping economy, and increasingly pulled toward militant Islamism. When Chechen fighters invaded neighbouring Dagestan in 1999 and a wave of apartment bombings hit Russian cities, Vladimir Putin launched the Second Chechen War. This time Russia was determined and brutal: Grozny was bombarded into what the UN called the most destroyed city on earth, and fell in February 2000. Russia installed a loyal Chechen administration, and the Ichkerian cause survived only as a fading insurgency and a government-in-exile. In 2007 even that ended, when the last separatist leader formally abolished the republic and folded the struggle into a pan-Caucasus “emirate.” The state that had beaten the Russian army once was gone, reconquered and then disowned by its own remnant.