When on October 7, twenty years ago, Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for reporting the truth about Putin’s Russia, she became the third Novaya gazeta journalist to be killed. On the scale of the country, between 1992 and 2006, she was 201st. Post-Soviet Russia was among the world’s most deadly countries for journalists, followed only by Iraq and Algeria. Anna knew the risks of her profession better than most: some of her friends and colleagues, who reported on Russia’s crime and corruption, ended up dead.
Anna covered the second Chechen war almost single-handedly, writing about Russia’s war crimes and civilian suffering. In 1999, when Putin re-invaded the separatist enclave in the North Caucasus on the pretext of fighting terrorism, he also prohibited independent coverage: journalists were expected to employ information only from official sources. Anna refused to comply. By reporting on the ground, she revealed Putin’s big lie: his “anti-terrorist operation” was in reality the war on all Chechens. The federal army remained unaccountable for indiscriminate bombardments, extra-judicial executions, torture, and enforced disappearances –– crimes committed on a vast scale today in Ukraine.
In her day, the public turned a blind eye to the atrocities in Chechnya, but she never stopped informing the world. She campaigned in the West, pressed for justice and the rule of law, and succeeded, with help of human rights activists, in bringing to trial several war criminals whom Russian law enforcement shielded from prosecution. Anna continued her honest coverage for seven years despite death threats and an FSB attempted poisoning she barely survived.
Her first compendium of articles, A Dirty War, opens with these lines: “My notes … are written for the future. They are the testimony of the innocent victims of the new Chechen war, which is why I record all the detail I can.” Unusually for a journalist, her dispatches endured the test of time: some of her columns read as if written today.
I read Anna’s reporting from Chechnya during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and was struck with her foresight. A quarter of a century ago, she warned Europeans that Putin was rebuilding an empire and compared his drive for conquest with that of Hitler’s. Today, the truth of her words has become apparent.
Back in summer 2001, at the height of Russia’s military lawlessness, she appealed to Europeans to wake up.
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In August 2001, Anna was at a literary festival in Molde, Norway, speaking on the crisis in Chechnya where federal troops committed war crimes with impunity, the subject of her first book, A Dirty War, released that year in London. From Norway she filed a column, “Who in Europe Should Take Responsibility for a War in Europe.” In it she alerted Europeans to the rise of the new aggressor on their doorstep. During her meetings at the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, with journalists and human rights activists, she spoke of the need to provide pressure on Putin. Since Russia was a member of the Council of Europe, she argued, it must abide by the same standards of human rights and international law. Her message fell on death ears: support for Russia was strong in a Europe that benefitted from cheap gas and oil. These meetings only confirmed what she had known all along: Europeans had no desire to confront Putin or oppose the war in Chechnya, believing it did not concern them.
Anna was struck with politicians’ willful blindness, their failure to recognize Putin’s military aggression. “Russia is in the grip of war fever, Europe reacts sluggishly,” she wrote. Two years into Putin’s war, there were mass graves across Chechnya. As she wrote in her column, “Europe effectively condones the existence of a territory where atrocities go unpunished…There are few protests, no sanctions are imposed on Russian officials…” By appeasing a rising authoritarian leader, Europeans were repeating their historic mistakes: “Europe has been here before, with infamous consequences. In 1933 the Führer of a new Germany was also ‘democratically elected.’ Europe was frightened by his speeches but, until they could no longer be ignored, paid them no attention… The consequence was 1945, with millions dead, millions burned in crematoria, and Europe in ruins.” This suggested Putin was bringing back a world order where stronger countries dominated and conquered the weak.
(The argument, “it’s not our war,” was made many times. In 1939, when Germany attacked Poland, the French politician and journalist Marcel Déat famously argued that it was foolish “to die for Gdańsk.” In the same way, in the early 2000s few understood the urgency of stopping Putin in Chechnya.)
There were always moral dimensions to Anna’s texts. This August column opens with a story of Ingeborg Foss, a nurse from the Norwegian town of Molde, who was killed in Chechnya while on a mission with the Red Cross. The town cemetery where Anna arrived with Ingeborg’s mother was on a cliff overlooking a fjord, the cemetery’s highest point faced the Atlantic. The place inspired Anna’s thoughts of the mother’s grief, of Ingeborg who had died for people she did not know, of civilian mass graves across Chechnya, and of how Molde and Chechnya had become linked. “Do you still think the world is vast? That if there is a conflagration in one place it does not have a bearing on another…?” It was a passionate call for Europeans to wake up to the danger brewing on their continent.
***
Anna pursued causes no other journalist would take on. In September 2001 she began to cover “the most appalling tragedy in Chechnya…the disappeared, those who vanish without trace.” In the third year of war, there were around 2,000 enforced disappearances. Civilians were forced out of their homes in the course of dreaded security sweeps, zachistki, accompanied by kidnapping for ransom, looting, and beatings. The Kremlin was aware of the lawlessness: relatives of those abducted wrote to Putin pleading to conduct inquiries, but to no avail. Law enforcement agencies refused to launch investigations and told families to forget it. That month, in a powerful column “The Disappeared,” Anna told of the abduction and murder of a university graduate, Zelimkhan Murdalov, who was kidnapped on a street in Grozny by a federal police detachment, brutally tortured, and died in detention. His prominent, well-connected family was able to establish identities of the perpetrators and had the Grozny prosecutor open a criminal case. One of Zelimkhan’s torturers was the decorated FSB-trained officer Sergey Lapin, known by the alias “Cadet.” When Anna named him in the article, “the Cadet” demanded a retraction and threatened to kill the journalist.
This case marked the beginning of Anna’s five-year campaign to obtain a trial and conviction for the war criminal Russia’s law enforcement shielded from prosecution. The prominent human rights activist Natalya Estemirova who attended trials in Grozny and the Moscow lawyer Stanislav Markelov who led the defence were part of her team. In March 2005, Lapin was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment, becoming the first Russian officer to receive conviction for abduction and murder of a civilian in Chechnya. (On July 15, 2009, Natalya Estemirova was abducted and murdered in Grozny by pro-Moscow Kadyrov forces. Earlier that year, on January 19, Stanislav Markelov was shot dead in downtown Moscow by neo-Nazis.)
In October 2001, faced with Lapin’s threats on her life, Anna fled abroad. She chose Vienna where the Institute for Human Sciences awarded her a Milena Jesenská Fellowship to work on her second book. During the three months in the West, she campaigned for a peace settlement in Chechnya. In mid-November, ahead of Putin’s planned discussions with President George W. Bush, The Washington Post published her opinion piece “Remember Chechnya.” It describes a typical day of Russia’s operations. Federal soldiers shoot at a passing tractor, wounding the driver and his assistant; a military column, en route to the mountains, fire on a roadside café, killing a waitress and wounding another. Two years into Putin’s war in Chechnya, Russian troops were killing civilians for sport (a crime known in today’s Ukraine as “human safari.” Murder weapons changed, but not the crime.) There was no investigation of these and similar incidents: in Chechnya federal servicemen acted with impunity. “What does Putin want in Chechnya?” Anna wrote. “In place of Chechnya? From the Chechens? What, in view of the fact that not one of the goals of the anti-terrorist operation has been realized?” By crushing the separatist enclave, the Kremlin promoted a nationalist idea of imperious Russia: “Chechnya provides the yeast for the growth of the great-power mentality, the basis of Putin’s state morality.” (The same ideology motivated Putin to invade Ukraine.) Anna’s article appeared after the 9/11 attack, when Chechnya, predominantly Muslim, lost even the little support in America it had before. With Russia becoming a part of the coalition on international terror, Putin’s narrative that in Chechnya he was conducting his own anti-terrorist operation earned credibility.
On November 20, in Washington D.C., Anna gave a talk at a forum hosted by Radio Free Europe. She spoke of “a military anarchy” in Chechnya where federal troops acted with impunity destroying even a semblance of human rights. Russia’s tactics of attacking civilians were counter-productive and only generated new insurgency. Anna revealed why this war mattered to her personally: “Many of the people I wrote about in my book have already perished during cleansing operations. I feel a sense of responsibility, that I owe to those who have died, that in many respects I live in their stead.” She referred to the tragic incident that took place earlier that year.
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In spring 2026, I connected remotely with Zainap Gashaeva, a prominent human rights defender, now living in Switzerland. Zainap documented crimes against civilians during both Chechen wars and had accompanied Anna on her trips through the region. I asked Zainap about the events she witnessed in February of 2001 when Anna was detained by Russia’s security forces. This story remains little known.
In February, Zainap received a letter signed by 90 families of the mountainous Vedeno district, whose villages neighboured a Russian military base. The soldiers regularly kidnapped people from these villages for ransom and held them in zindans, deep punishment pits, until money was paid. Zainap phoned Anna who found some of the stories almost beyond belief. On February 18, she set out to check facts. Zainap met her in neighbouring Ingushetia from where they drove to Makhety, one of the affected villages. It was evening, but Anna wanted to take interviews. A local woman, with whom they were staying, began to invite victims of torture. Two dozen people arrived, and Anna worked until midnight recording their accounts. Next morning, Zainap engaged a local driver to take them to other villages.
“You know that today,” Zainap told me, “No matter where you are in Russia, people are afraid to speak up. If you say a single word about Ukraine, next day you find yourself in prison. But back then people approached our car with stories. Right on the street! They described how they were tortured in two-meter-deep pits, how lime and urine were poured on them, dogs set on them. I was amazed: it was a cry from the heart. And for me––on the one hand, I followed up on their letter and brought a journalist from Moscow, but on the other, it was painful to hear all this.”
That evening, Anna told Zainap that she still needed to verify information at the military base: “I can’t just go and publish all this; I need to talk to them.” Zainap, realizing the risks, was taken aback: “I was disappointed and told her that I definitely would not follow her there. Musa, our driver, also said that it would be unwise to go, but Chechen men never show their weakness. Musa’s two sons had been shot a few months earlier by these same soldiers. He was someone who suffered greatly and who was later detained as well. But he agreed to take her.”
Against Zainap’s advice, Anna headed to the military base with her notes and recorded interviews. She argued that no one would touch a Russian journalist. “I begged her to give me all her records for safekeeping,” tells Zainap. “We worked all day: there could be 30–40 interviews. There were lists of names, surnames (of both victims and perpetrators), military call signs—it was an informational bomb. She refused to leave these materials with me and I know that they were seized from her. Anna did not expect this could happen to her.”
As Anna tells in the column “A Concentration Camp With a Commercial Streak,” she was toured through the base by a colonel, the regiment’s commander. He showed her one of the pits, saying it was used to incarcerate Chechen militants. But the punishment pit looked precisely as civilian victims described it. If those are militants, Anna argued, why do you release them?
Soon after she parted with the colonel, Anna was detained by FSB officers and accused of spying. An armoured vehicle arrived; soldiers pushed her inside with rifle buts. During two days of interrogations, she was tortured, threatened with rape, and kept in a punishment pit, thus gaining first-hand experience of the abuse she came to investigate. Her belongings, research notes, and tape recordings were confiscated. One night, she was led to a mock execution. “I’m going to shoot you,” an FSB officer said. They walked in pitch-dark. He took her underneath a rocket launcher and when it fired, she “crouched in fright.”
When Anna failed to return, Zainap walked with a local woman to the edge of Khattuni village, closest to the base. The driver, released at night, confirmed that Anna was still in detention. When the locals learned of Anna’s arrest, there was fear of reprisals. Even Zainap was no longer welcome in their homes. She escaped in the morning: a young man, Imran, agreed to drive her to Shali, the district centre. He knew the risks: the military paid local informers. (Imran was later executed: the officers, who entered his home, checked his name and shot him, point blank.) From Shali, Zainap phoned her daughter in Moscow, asking to contact Novaya Gazeta. This phone call with information of Anna’s whereabouts may have saved her life.
I ask Zainap how Anna was affected by her detention. “They kept her in a pit. And she told me once: ‘Did I really have to suffer myself to know the pain they felt in their hearts? The hatred they felt toward the soldiers who tortured them.’”
What happened later was tragic: despite high publicity of the affair, an official investigation launched at the base, and personal assurances to Anna by the Chechen pro-Moscow government that her sources would be safe, the military retaliated. “March passed quietly,” she wrote in Novaya Gazeta on July 2, “the military calmed down and were giving testimonies… But as soon as inspections left, the news faded from the airwaves…punitive expeditions swept through the villages…. And now…there’s no one left in the world among those who dared to speak to me back then… How am I supposed to live now? What’s happening in this country? Is death the punishment for speaking to a journalist?” She named fifteen civilians who were killed in military reprisals and twenty-one others who were since kidnapped and have disappeared. On July 17, in a column, “Witnesses Are Being Killed in Makhety,” she told how the military killed Imran, who drove Zainap to make the urgent phone call that saved her. “So, I live at the cost of Imran’s life?” Anna despaired.
Had this tragedy motivated Anna to fight to the end despite death threats and enormous pressure on her to stop reporting from Chechnya? At the November forum hosted by Radio Free Europe, speaking of civilians killed in cleansing operations, she said: “This war has become my personal cause… I feel a sense of responsibility, that I owe to those who have died, that in many respects I live in their stead.”
***
In March 2023, I attended an annual presentation of Politkovskaya Awards in London run by Mariana Katsarova who founded the human rights organization Reach All Women in War. For the second year Russia’s war on Ukraine was raging at the heart of Europe. The crimes against civilians were now committed on a much larger scale. One of the prize recipients, the Ukrainian midwife Tetiana Sokolova from Mariupol, spoke about the first weeks of Russia’s invasion when her city was attacked from air, land, and sea. In the ruined maternity hospital, she and her team moved their operating room to the basement. Remaining there for six weeks, they delivered 27 babies in spite of shelling and a lack of electricity and supplies. Tens of thousands have perished in Mariupol during Russia’s bombardments. Tetiana, who later moved to western Ukraine, kept thinking about the pilot who bombed Mariupol Theatre, clearly marked CHILDREN, the sign visible from the air. For someone who brings lives into the world it was unfathomable how that pilot could purposely annihilate hundreds of children and their families sheltering in the theatre.
But before destroying Mariupol, Russia waged two wars of annihilation in Chechnya. The first Chechen war (1994–96), launched by Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin with a declared goal to “re-establish the constitutional order,” killed an estimated 50,000 civilians in a republic of less than a million. In Grozny (as later in Mariupol), tens of thousands died under the ruins of their own homes. At the time, Chechnya’s capital became the most destroyed city in Europe with devastation not seen since the Second World War. The price for appeasing Putin is now shouldered by Ukraine where hundreds of thousands have been killed and crippled since the start of the total war, and ruins remain in place of villages and towns in the country’s east.
I asked Zainap how she felt at the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “I never thought they would attack Ukraine,” she replied. “I was on a train to Germany for work, and my heart ached so much, I cried so hard… because I know what war is. It’s death!.. War leaves so many victims, such destruction, such terrible consequences. That’s why I say—don’t start it; it’s hard to end… Of course, there are differences (between the Chechen wars) and the war in Ukraine. Now there’s big money involved, and contract soldiers fight in Ukraine for money.”
I thought of Martha Gellhorn’s words from her collection of war reportage: years before the Second World War, foreign correspondents reported on the horrors of fascism. “If anyone listened to them, no one acted on their warnings. The doom they had long prophesized arrived on time, bit by bit, as scheduled. In the end we became solitary stretcher-bearers, trying to pull individuals free from the wreckage.” At the end of her career spanning half a century, Martha Gellhorn was disillusioned with the results, writing that the public is gullible, it trusts government propaganda over truthful accounts. “I belonged to a Federation of Cassandras,” she concluded.
As Anna wrote in one of her dispatches, “We can either draw lessons from a war or ignore what it teaches us.” The Chechen wars have become nearly forgotten, overshadowed by Russia’s war on Ukraine that now threatens all of Europe. Having anticipated this greater calamity in early 2000s, Anna warned us that Putin would march on.