Reading Comprehension - Russia Chechnya Conflict

Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

Passage III

Twenty years ago on Thursday, Moscow started what it thought would be a "blitzkrieg" against secular separatists in Chechnya, a tiny, oil-rich province in Russia's North Caucasus region that had declared its independence.

But the first Chechen war became Russia's Vietnam; the second war was declared a victory only in 2009. The two conflicts have reshaped Russia, Chechnya, their rulers - and those who oppose them. In 1994, shortly after Moscow invaded Chechnya in an effort to restore its territorial integrity, Akhmad Kadyrov, a bearded, barrel-chested Muslim scholar turned guerrilla commander, declared jihad on all Russians and said each Chechen should kill at least 150 of them.

That was the proportion of the populations on each side of the conflict: some 150 million Russians and less than a million Chechens in a small, landlocked province, which the separatists wanted to carve out of Russia. Western media and politicians dubbed the Chechens "freedom fighters" - an army of Davids fighting the Russian Goliath.

Moscow was lambasted internationally for disproportionate use of force and rolling back on the democratic freedoms that former leader Boris Yeltsin was so eager to introduce after the 1991 Soviet Union collapse. Tens of thousands died amid atrocities committed by both sides - and many more were displaced before 1996, when the Russians retreated, leaving Chechnya essentially independent. Retreating was a humiliation for Russia's military machine that less than a decade earlier had presented a seemingly formidable threat to the entire Western world.

Why did Russia declare war against Chechnya?

How did the first Russia Chechnya war come to an end?

What was western media's attitude about the conflict?