January 1995
On New Year's Eve 1994, Russian forces launched a three-pronged assault on Grozny. The 131st Maikop Brigade drove its tanks into the city center and was ambushed in a carefully laid Chechen trap — nearly the entire brigade was destroyed within hours, with hundreds of soldiers killed or captured. It was the worst Russian military defeat since World War II, a catastrophic demonstration of what urban warfare could do to a conventional army unprepared for guerrilla resistance.
Commanders