Shamat survived the war in the basement.

He lived there for five months, together with six other residents of his block of flats, three men and three women.

His family had left the city when the first Russian bombs fell.

But Schamat didn't want to give up the only thing the family had: the apartment in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The people in the basement only went out to fetch water and firewood.

Sometimes Shamat slipped into a neighboring cellar to see how the others were doing, to exchange messages.

They had a battery-powered radio in his basement.

“They reported the first, second, third stage of the anti-terrorist operation.

We couldn't hear it anymore.

What are the stages when you're sitting in the basement in a hail of bombs?” For weeks Schamat was always afraid that a bomb could hit the house, he doesn't even know how he survived it, he says.

At some point there was silence.

The Chechen fighters had withdrawn from the city.

Now the Russians came.

They were young soldiers.

They asked if anyone else was in the basement.

Then they threw in grenades.

Seven men and five women lived in the basement of the house next door.

Other Russian soldiers had joined them.

The next day, Schamat found the neighbors lying lifeless in front of the house.

The Russians had taken everyone out of the basement and shot them.

"The bodies lay there for days," says Schamat.

“You took all the agony on yourself.

And then you just shoot them.”

Schamat told his story in March 2000, when he was 60 years old.

At that time, Grozny was nothing more than a desert of stone, scrap and earth.

No house in the city center was left intact after weeks of rocket and bombardment by the Russian army.

Black holes yawned from the ruins.

They were pictures like those that can be seen again today in Mariupol.

In the houses that were not completely destroyed, the devastation of the looters reigned.

Even when the Chechens withdrew, the bombing continued

The Russian soldiers removed everything that was left: furniture, electrical appliances, household effects, clothes.

The earthworks of the soldiers were covered with carpets.

The remaining residents of Grozny, mostly old Russians, queued for hours to get a ladleful of porridge from the Emergencies Ministry.

The ministry was headed at the time by Sergey Shoygu, now Russia's Minister of War.

At that time, Alexander was also waiting in line.

His mother was killed when she went up to the apartment from the basement.

A bomb hit the house, a quick, happy death, her son said at the time.

Alexander had buried her in the yard under bombardment.

When the fighting stopped, the Russian dug her up again and buried her in the cemetery.

On Minutka Square in Grozny, only heaps of stones were left of the nine-story prefabricated buildings; it looked as if the houses had been blown up.

Even after the Chechen fighters had withdrawn, the bombing continued.

The military leadership killed hundreds of Russian soldiers in the fighting for the square.

Because Grozny had to fall before the then warlord, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, could be elected president.

In Grozny at that time, death was omnipresent.

Every day in the spring, 2,000 bodies were found in homes, in basements and under rubble.

It is feared that the same will happen in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities.

That was not only the case in Grozny in Chechnya.