24 Years Ago Yeltsin Signed A Peace Treaty With Chechnya That Moscow Didn’t Keep – OpEd
By Paul Goble
The August 31, 1996 Khasavyurt accord between Russia and Chechnya which ended the first post-Soviet Russian-Chechen war is better known, but the May 12, 1997 peace treaty signed by the leaders of the two countries, Boris Yeltsin for the Russian Federation and Aslan Maskhadov for the Chechen Republic-Ichkeria, must not be forgotten.
It committed Moscow and Grozny “forever to reject the application of threats and force for the resolution of disputes and the formation of their relations in correspondence with generally accepted principles of international law” (doshdu.com/24-goda-nazad-mezhdu-rf-i-chechenskoj-respublikoj-byl-podpisan-dogovor-o-druzhbe/).
Like the Khasavyurt accord the year before, the 1997 peace treaty was vitiated by the fact that Moscow did not live up to a single provision in either document and then two years later launched a new war against Chechnya and imposing a colonial administration there which remains in place to this day (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/308807/).
