In recent history, one issue has dominated the news in Eastern Europe and especially Russia. That issue is the Russian conflict in and with Chechnya. It is a very complex and deadly conflict that has no clear end in sight. I found three very interesting intertwined things when doing all the research on this topic. There are unavoidable parallels between the Russian/Chechnyan struggle and the US/Iraq war. One is the underestimation by the larger power of the smaller countries forces and convictions. The other is the fact that both of the smaller countries under attack have valuable oil reserves. The final is that there is a strong Muslim contingency. For this research paper I have chosen to analyze the Chechnyan struggle with the hopes of finding the roots, parallels to other conflicts and also find possible solutions.
             In August 1999, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched a full scale military operation to combat insurgency in Dagestan followed by a massive military intervention in Chechnya. This second campaign was launched with confidence that victory could be swiftly achieved. Why not, it's the Russian military going up against rebel forces. It was believed that there would not be a repeat of the costly first campaign which commenced in 1994 that ultimately ended with a withdrawal of Russian forces. However, such optimism has proved to be poorly founded since Russia has yet to decisively defeat the Chechnyan fighters and to establish strong control over the republic.
             The Russian intervention in Chechnya during 1994 was encouraged by a number of key factors. Under President Jokhar Dudayev, Chechnya had declared itself independent in November 1991 despite Moscow's opposition. Russia was still funding Chechnya so Russia saw this as a civil revolt not an independent nation at war. Yeltsin attempted to blockade the republic and cut it off from federal budget funds. However, Dudayev remained in power and Yeltsin became increas...