We Should Have Known From Chechnya

Andrea Jeska on Grozny, Beslan, Ukraine and Europe’s Lost Illusions

For decades, Europe wanted to believe that war, political violence and authoritarianism were gradually becoming remnants of the past. But for those who had already witnessed Russia’s wars in Chechnya, many of the methods now being used against Ukraine were visible much earlier.

IESS spoke with Andrea Jeska, who reported from Chechnya during the Second Chechen War, travelled to Beslan immediately after the 2004 school siege, spent a year documenting the stories of its victims and later reported from Ukraine. We spoke about Grozny and Kostiantynivka, Russian violence across two different wars, Europe’s unwillingness to confront uncomfortable realities, and why freedom and democracy cannot be treated as permanent conditions.

I entered Chechnya pretending to be deaf and mute

How did you decide to go to Grozny? You were already a young mother at the time.

I did not originally decide simply to go to Grozny. I was reporting from the Caucasus, mainly from Georgia, and travelled to the Pankisi Valley. At that time, it was an area that was not really under the control of the Georgian authorities. The Kists who lived there are closely related to the Chechens, and Chechens would cross the mountains into the valley to find shelter and rest.

I met a man in Tbilisi who came from a prominent family in the valley, and he agreed to take me there and let me stay with his family. Through these contacts, I met Chechens who offered to take me across the mountains into Chechnya. Initially, I thought that was simply too dangerous.

Later, however, I established contact with Chechens in Germany. They agreed to help me enter Chechnya using the passport of a female relative. That is how I eventually got into the country.

And you pretended to be deaf and mute?

Yes. I wore Chechen clothes so that I would attract as little attention as possible at Russian checkpoints, and I pretended to be deaf and mute. For some reason, it worked.

What did you see when you arrived?

This was during the Second Chechen War, after much of Grozny had already been destroyed. Most of the buildings around me were in ruins.

I remember sleeping in a building where parts of the roof were simply gone. When it rained, I had to keep moving my mattress so that I would not get completely wet. There was no running water and no electricity. Women collected water from wells. People were living inside ruins.

There was very little food. And I had not been prepared for the degree of violence and cruelty I encountered there.

I spent a lot of time with Chechen families, particularly with mothers. I had children myself, so it was relatively easy to establish a connection with them. Many of these women were searching for their sons. Young men had been taken from their homes, and their families had no idea where they had gone.

I accompanied mothers from one police station to another as they tried to find them. Many never discovered what had happened. Others eventually received the bodies of their sons.

There was enormous fear that these young men could become part of the future resistance. Chechen society was very tightly structured, and resistance was extremely strong. Russia could occupy territory, but that did not mean it controlled Chechen society.

At the checkpoints, I often saw Russian conscripts who were only 18 or 19 years old. They were frightened young men placed in situations they could not control. They would sometimes shoot when there was no apparent need to shoot because they themselves were afraid.

That was one of the things I understood there: Russia did not really control the situation, and it feared the resistance precisely because it could not control it.

There was no hope in Chechnya at that time

What did Grozny look like?

It looked like Dresden after the war. It was completely destroyed. People were living in damaged apartments and making fires inside because there was no other way to cook or keep warm.

It looked apocalyptic.

And I think this is something we repeatedly see in the Russian approach to war: when Russia feels that it cannot control a situation, it resorts to maximum destruction and maximum violence.

But what I remember most is the poverty. Families were huddled together inside ruins, trying to keep warm, trying to find water and something to eat. There was this overwhelming desperation because people could not see any future.

I also spoke to young men involved in the resistance who swore that Russia would never take their country. But even then, you could see how unequal the struggle was.

There is one scene that has stayed with me as a kind of symbol of Chechnya.

One night, I walked out of the ruined apartment where I was staying. There was no electricity, so everything was completely dark. In the courtyard, someone had made a fire inside a metal barrel.

Two children were jumping over the fire again and again. It was probably one of the only forms of entertainment available to them.

Then a man came out of one of the apartments with a portable stereo and started playing this very sentimental music.

I remember standing there watching these children jumping over the fire in the darkness, listening to this melancholic music. That combination of danger, melancholy and complete desperation has remained in my mind ever since.

There was no hope in Chechnya at that time.

What did you feel when you finally left Chechnya?

I went through Ingushetia, but the situation did not really become better. There were so many Chechen refugees there, and the desperation continued.

I met a seven-year-old boy who had lost his family and was completely alone.

That encounter affected me personally because my father had also been seven years old when he fled from what had been Germany and is now part of Poland. He was an orphan and was also alone.

For the first time in my life, looking at that seven-year-old Chechen boy, I understood something about what my own father must have experienced.

So leaving Chechnya did not mean leaving the suffering behind. In Ingushetia, the desperation was everywhere as well.

How did Chechens themselves speak about Russia?

With fear and pain.

Russia had killed so many young men. Mothers were afraid to allow their sons to leave the house because they did not know whether they would ever return.

There was hatred toward Russia, but there was also another, much more complicated dimension.

I met professors and teachers who had grown up with Russian literature and Russian poetry. They loved that literature and that language, and suddenly it had become the language of the enemy.

I think there is something similar in Ukraine today. You can grow up with a language and its literature, and then suddenly that language is associated with the country destroying your home.

What do you do with that? Do you simply stop speaking it? Do you abandon literature that has been part of your life?

For many of the people I met in Chechnya, that was extremely difficult. They wanted to hold on to this part of their cultural lives, while at the same time it had become inseparable from the destruction and violence surrounding them.

We should have known from Chechnya that Putin was lying

You have also reported from Kostiantynivka in Ukraine. Can you compare what you saw there with Grozny?

Not directly.

Grozny was attacked with overwhelming force and devastated. Kostiantynivka has been a much slower process of destruction, and people have had opportunities to evacuate. There was nothing comparable to that evacuation process in the Grozny I witnessed.

When I was in Kostiantynivka last year, it was still possible to enter the city, rent an apartment and work there despite the fighting and shelling.

I returned a few months later with an evacuation team, and the picture had already changed dramatically. People were desperate and frightened. The evacuation team itself was frightened.

So I would not say that Kostiantynivka and Grozny are the same.

What is comparable is what happens to ordinary people in small frontline communities.

In villages in Donbas, I have seen things that reminded me very strongly of Chechnya: poor people who do not fully understand what is happening around them, who do not know how to escape and who often have nowhere else to go.

People in Chechnya had their animals, their homes, everything they had ever earned invested in those homes. They were poor and often had no relatives elsewhere. Technically, they could flee to Ingushetia and live in a refugee camp, but that was also a miserable existence.

You see the same fundamental problem in many wars. If you are poor, if you have no connections and nowhere else to go, your choices become extremely limited.

Looking back, did Europe already have enough evidence in Chechnya to understand what Putin's Russia was becoming?

Yes. I think we should have understood who Putin was from Chechnya.

But European politics was trapped in a particular way of looking at the war. People would say: these are Chechens, they are Muslims, they are terrorists, they have criminal clans. And because we could put them into those categories, we did not really care enough about what was happening to them.

That allowed us to ignore what Russia was actually doing.

Then Putin came to the German Bundestag and spoke in German about overcoming old divisions, cooperation and a common European future.

If we had seriously looked at what had already happened in Chechnya, we should have known that he was not the man he was presenting himself to be.

We should have known that he was lying.

Putin did indeed address the Bundestag on 25 September 2001, delivering much of his speech in German and presenting Russia as a friendly European nation seeking partnership and a common European security architecture.

Beslan was the abyss of evil I had ever seen

You later went to Beslan. How did that happen?

I saw on television that a school had been seized and that children were being held hostage. I called one of the magazines I was working for and said: I want to go there.

They told me to go.

So I took a flight and travelled to Beslan.

As far as I remember, I arrived the day after the final assault. The gym had burned, and the bodies of dead children were still lying on the grounds of the school, wrapped in plastic.

From an emotional point of view, it was the most terrible thing I had ever seen.

As a mother, as a journalist, as a human being, the cruelty of killing children was almost impossible to process.

I entered the burned gym with people who took me inside. There were still bodies of some of the militants who had been killed by Russian special forces. Only one of the attackers was ultimately captured alive and prosecuted.

But what happened in Beslan also raised fundamental questions for me about Russia's role and about the political use of the attack.

I believe Russia was behind it. I do not believe this can be understood simply as a group of Chechen terrorists acting independently. Russia needed Beslan to reinforce the narrative that what it was fighting in Chechnya was terrorism rather than the Chechen population.

Putin's narrative was always about "Chechen terrorists." Civilians almost disappeared from the picture. It created the impression that there was nobody else in Chechnya.

And twenty years later, I see the same narrative mechanism being used against Ukraine.

Now Ukrainians are "Nazis."

Again, civilians disappear from the narrative. A whole society can be reduced to an enemy category, and once you have done that, violence against that society becomes much easier to justify.

It is essentially the same narrative twenty years later.

People do not want brutality thrown into their faces

You spent a year researching Beslan and later wrote a book about it. What did you want to show?

I wanted to show the human side rather than simply the political side.

I returned to Beslan repeatedly over the course of a year. As a woman and a mother, I was able to establish close contact with many of the mothers. They had formed a community and were trying to comfort one another.

The grief was overwhelming.

I wrote about individual mothers, about the children who had been killed, about journalists who were trying to document every child's story, and about people who had tried to save them.

I remember one father who ran into the burning gym six times because he was trying to find his daughter. He managed to save six children, but he never found her. She was dead.

Those are the stories I wanted people to understand.

Later, I presented the book in different German cities. At one presentation, a man stood up and accused me of exposing him to this level of brutality. He said the book would give him nightmares and asked why I had written it in such a brutal way.

Then he left.

I tried to explain to him: you only have to hear about it. These people actually lived through it.

It was reality.

But his reaction was essentially that you cannot confront people so directly with what happens. You cannot throw this kind of reality into their faces.

Do you see the same reaction to Ukraine today?

Absolutely.

When I speak to friends about the brutality in Ukraine, I often feel that they simply do not want to hear these stories. They are trying to protect themselves from them.

And I think this is particularly important for my generation.

We grew up believing that after German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet Union, history was moving in a linear direction toward peace.

We thought we had learned the lessons of the Second World War. We had learned about the Holocaust. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Europe was reunited.

And from that, we constructed an idea that civilisation would simply continue moving forward.

But it is not true.

We are back in a time of war.

And many people simply do not want to recognise that because recognising it would mean accepting that the world they believed they lived in no longer exists.

The world I wanted to believe in does not exist anymore

When did you personally realise that this idea of a linear movement toward peace was no longer true?

I do not think there was one particular moment. It was a process.

It was Chechnya. It was Beslan. And then, probably, I fully realised it with the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

That was when I understood that the world I wanted to believe in does not exist anymore.

And perhaps it never did.

Perhaps it was simply an illusion.

I think you can see something similar when you look at the rise of the far right in Germany and the AfD. We somehow thought these ideas had disappeared.

But they had not disappeared. The people who held them were still there. They were simply hiding because openly expressing those views was socially unacceptable.

And the moment it became acceptable again, they came out.

Ideas that we thought could never again be expressed publicly in Germany can now be said openly.

So perhaps the problem was not that these things returned. Perhaps they never really went away.

It is not a Ukrainian war. It is our war

You covered the war in Donbas before the full-scale invasion and have continued reporting from Ukraine. How has Ukrainian society changed between 2022 and 2026?

Before the full-scale invasion, one of the things that constantly surprised me was how distant the war in Donbas could feel even in Kyiv.

People were dying in eastern Ukraine, but for many people elsewhere it was almost as if the war did not exist. It was somewhere far away in the east.

Europe made essentially the same mistake.

We did not call it a war. We called it a conflict. We did not speak about a front line. We spoke about a contact line.

But people were dying there all the time.

I was reporting from frontline villages where families were raising children only hundreds of metres from positions where they could be shot. I repeatedly visited one family with a photographer over a longer period, documenting how they lived.

I remember being shocked by how little attention was paid to the question of how people were supposed to raise children in such circumstances.

Now, of course, everyone in Ukraine understands that there is a war and that the war in Donbas was not something separate. It was the beginning of the same war.

Ukrainian society has become enormously politicised. And, like societies everywhere that experience war directly, Ukrainians have lost their innocence.

I wish we in Western Europe would lose ours.

So far, we do not have.

I also see Ukrainians becoming bitter because many believed they were part of the West and that the West would support them more decisively. Now they are discovering that in many situations they are still on their own.

Sometimes that makes me ashamed of my own country.

We still do not understand the gravity of what is happening. We do not understand that this is not simply a Ukrainian war.

It is our war.

It is a war over the values we claim to represent: freedom, democracy and human dignity.

It has never been only Ukraine's war. From the beginning, it has been a conflict between fundamentally different ideas about how societies should be organised.

If we genuinely want to preserve the values of democracy, freedom and humanity that we constantly speak about, then we should be doing much more to support Ukraine.

But too many people still do not understand that.

Europe will choose the warm bath

Why is it that when Europeans are forced to choose between their comfort and the values they have spoken about for decades, they so often choose the warm bath?

Because we have become very spoiled.

I do not necessarily say that to blame people. For decades, we genuinely believed that civilisation and peace were part of a linear historical process.

Western Europe has enjoyed an extraordinary number of privileges. But we often do not recognise them as privileges because we do not look far enough beyond our own borders.

We do not see that the conditions we consider normal simply do not exist for a huge part of humanity.

We have lived inside our own Elysium and gradually started believing that it was the natural state of the world.

It is not.

And what many Europeans still do not understand is that this period is over.

Things will not simply return to the way they were.

Perhaps in ten generations. I do not know.

But not now. Not for my children. Probably not for their children either.

Democracy and freedom are things you have to fight for

You have seen considerably more of this world than most people. What have you tried to teach your own children about it?

My children often accompanied me during my travels and research when it was safe enough to take them with me. I took them to Africa. I took them to the Caucasus.

They saw quite early that they were privileged.

They understood that the life they knew did not exist in many other parts of the world.

So I think they started asking themselves quite early what values actually mean and what they themselves stand for.

I hope they carry that understanding throughout their lives.

And I think they understand something that Europe as a whole needs to understand again: democracy and freedom are things you have to fight for.

They are not simply given to you.

And you cannot assume that they will always be there.

Be kind

If you could send one message through every radio station, newspaper and media outlet in the world, what would it be?

Be kind.

I think that is ultimately what you need to know.

Be kind to each other and understand that no matter which country or culture another person comes from, you should be capable of seeing that person as your brother or your sister.

There is an old song, He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, and I think about it quite often.

Of course people are different. People living in African countries have different experiences from people in Europe. Someone in a village in Sudan lives a very different life from someone in Donbas or a spoiled child growing up in Germany.

But ultimately, aren't the fundamental things that make us human the same?

We want to be happy. We want to be loved. We want to live without constant fear and worry.

Those fundamental desires are the same everywhere.

And if we genuinely understand that, there should be no reason for us to become enemies.

But how do you deal with people who strategically choose not to be kind?

That is a good question.

If I knew the complete answer, I would tell you.

But perhaps part of it is refusing to allow somebody else's aggression to determine who you become.

Look at social media. People are extraordinarily aggressive toward each other. They insult each other, curse each other and invent terrible names for people they disagree with.

And I always wonder: what exactly do you expect to come from that?

Nothing.

I am a great believer in Kant's categorical imperative: you should try to act according to principles that you could want to apply universally.

If somebody behaves like an asshole, why should that make me abandon my own belief that I should not behave like one?

If I simply begin behaving exactly like the person I condemn, I am destroying my own values.

I want to remain kind. If another person believes that he or she has to behave differently, that should not determine the way I behave.

I want to remain faithful to what I believe.

If I do not believe in being cruel or malicious, nobody else should have the power to make me cruel or malicious, no matter how evil that person may be.

There is also that biblical idea: if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Because then you retain something that matters enormously.

Your dignity.

And I think dignity is one of the most important words in the world today.