March 2000
The last major conventional battle of the Second Chechen War. Russian forces cornered a large Chechen unit under Ruslan Gelayev in the village of Komsomolskoye and besieged it for two weeks. The Chechen fighters were largely wiped out, with hundreds killed. The fall of Komsomolskoye marked the end of organized Chechen resistance as a conventional military force — from this point, the conflict transformed into a guerrilla insurgency and terrorism campaign that would persist for nearly another decade.
Commanders