"The city was sealed off after a series of strange events there. Controls were so tight you couldn’t even move between different districts within the city, let alone make your way out of Grozny on foot.
On that day, 17 September, a helicopter carrying a commission, headed by Major-General Anatoly Pozdnyakov, from the General Staff in Moscow was shot down directly over the city. The general was engaged in work quite unprecedented for a soldier in Chechnya.
Only an hour before the helicopter was shot down, he told me the task of his commission was to gather data on crimes committed by the military, analyse their findings, put them in some order and then submit the information for the president’s consideration.
Nothing of the kind had been done before.
The helicopter in which they were flying out of Grozny was shot down almost exactly over the city centre. All the members of the commission perished, and since they were already on their way to Khankala airbase to take a plane back to Moscow, so did all the material they had collected."
"This is one of Chechnya's main problems. It's not the militants' craftiness or armaments or the foreign origins of their weapons, but the betrayal by its own "defenders."
Those who want the war to go on are capable of anything.
For example, the total blockade of Grozny that on September 17, 2001, created all the necessary conditions for antiaircraft rocket shooting at certain generals.
Shooting without witnesses.
—Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, p. 65
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