The Second Chechen War is a military campaign conducted by Russia starting August 26, 1999, in which Russian forces largely recaptured the separatist region of Chechnya. The Second Chechen War was started in retaliation for the Dagestan War and Russian apartment bombings. The campaign largely reversed the outcome of the First Chechen War, in which the region gained de facto independence as the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Although it is regarded by many as an internal conflict within the Russian Federation, the war has attracted a significant number of jihadist foreign fighters.
The war bolstered the domestic popularity of Vladimir Putin as the campaign was started one month after he had become Russian prime minister. However, the war eventually became less popular; according to a March 2007 poll 70 percent of Russians believe there should be negotiations with the separatists, and only 16 percent believe the military campaign should continue. The conflict greatly contributed to the deep changes in the Russian politics and society.
During the initial campaign, Russian military and pro-Russian Chechen paramilitary faced Chechen separatists in open combat, but eventually seized the Chechen capital of Grozny in February 2000 after a winter siege. After the full-scale offensive, Chechen guerrilla resistance throughout the North Caucasus region continued to inflict heavy Russian casualties and challenge Russian political control over Chechnya for several more years. Chechen separatists also carried out attacks against civilians in Russia, such as notably taking hostages inside a Moscow theater in 2002 and later doing so in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia in 2004. These terrorist attacks, as well as widespread human rights violations by Russian and separatist forces, drew international condemnation. The exact death toll from this conflict is unknown, yet estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands dead or missing, mostly civilians in Chechnya. No clear figures for Russian losses exist, but military deaths in two wars thought to at least equal the losses suffered during the Soviet war in Afghanistan of 15,000.
Meanwhile, the fortunes of the Chechen independence movement sagged, plagued by the internal disunity between Chechen moderates and Islamist radicals and the changing global political climate after September 11, 2001, as well as the general war weariness of the Chechen population. The Russians have succeeded in installing a pro-Moscow Chechen regime, composed of the former separatists, and eliminating most of the more prominent Chechen separatist leaders, including former president Aslan Maskhadov and leading warlord Shamil Basayev. By now, large-scale fighting has been replaced by low-level skirmishing, hit and run attacks and bombings targeting federal troops and forces of the regional government, with the violence often spilling over into adjacent regions. Since 2005, the insurgency has largely shifted out of Chechnya proper and into the nearby Russian territories, such as Ingushetia and Dagestan; the Russian government, for its part, has focused on the stabilization of the North Caucasus. The conflict remains largely unpublicised in the West.