The war has transformed a landscape of industrial cities and farmland into a rigid battlefield, a patchwork of cratered front lines and a cast of zealous fighters manning them.
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Dmitri Beliakov
Josef Stalin deported the Ingush people to Siberia and Central Asia from their homes in Russia's North Caucasus in 1944. The Soviet dictator inflicted such harrowing displacements upon a number ethnic minorities deemed suspicious during the Second World War.
2009 marked the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and 15 years since the war in Chechnya broke out. In both conflicts the Russian Special Forces (Spetsnaz) played key, front-line roles.