Casualties of the First Chechen War
According to the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, 3, 826 troops were killed, 17, 892 were wounded, and 1, 906 are missing in action.[29] According to NVO, the authoritative Russian independent military weekly, at least 5, 362 Russian soldiers died during the war, 52, 000 got wounded or sick, and some 3, 000 more remained missing by 2005.[30] The estimate of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, however, put the number of the Russian military dead at 14, 000, [4] based on information from wounded troops and soldiers' relatives (and counting only regular troops, i.e. not the mercenaries/kontraktniki and special service forces)[31]


casualties are estimated at up to 100, 000 dead or more, of which most were civilians.[32] Various estimates put the number of Chechens dead or missing between 50, 000 and 100, 000.[3] Russian Interior Minister Kulikov claimed that fewer than 20, 000 civilians were killed. State Duma deputy Sergey Kovalyov's team could offer their conservative, documented estimate of more than 50, 000 civilian deaths. Aleksander Lebed asserted that 80, 000 to 100, 000 had been killed and 240, 000 had been injured. The number given by the Ichkerian authorities was about 100, 000 killed.[3]

According to Russian newspaper Gazeta, approximately 35, 000 ethnic Russian civilians were killed by Russian forces operating in Chechnya, most of them during the bombardment of Grozny.[33]

Chechen separatists estimated their combat deaths at about 3, 000 (including 800 in the first three months, mostly killed by mortar fire [7]), although this number is almost certainly too low. Tony Wood, a journalist and author who has written extensively about Chechnya, estimated about 4, 000 Chechen militant losses.[34] It is impossible to know exactly how many Chechen rebels were killed, however, because many fought independently and were not under the control of Dudayev (as such, their deaths were not counted among official Chechen losses). The Russian estimate is much higher; Russia's Federal Forces Command estimated that 15, 000 Chechen fighters had been killed by the end of the war.[35]