President Yeltsin said he wanted to “restore constitutional order” to a republic that had declared its independence, and “help the Chechen people to escape from the misfortune they have fallen into”. Pavel Grachev, his Defence Minister, boasted that a single regiment could seize Grozny in two hours.

But crossing at night into Chechnya a week later, a boy of 15 stopped me at an impromptu checkpoint. On his jacket was the rebels’ wolf insignia. “This will be worse for the Russians than Afghanistan!” he swore.

The boy was not bluffing. When Russian tanks stormed Grozny on December 31 I saw Chechen men, often barely armed or trained, plunge into battle. Over the next two days they killed about 1,000 soldiers and wounded another 3,000.

A decade later the killing continues, and not just in Chechnya. The Chechens have carried the battle to the heart of Russia with a series of spectacular terrorist attacks — the Moscow theatre siege, the Moscow subway bomb and the Beslan school massacre to name but a few. Many are perpetrated by “Black Widows” — women ready to die avenging husbands killed by Russian troops.

Officially about 10,000 Russian troops have been killed in Chechnya, though unofficial estimates are double that. Of the million Chechens living in the republic in 1994 perhaps a fifth have been killed. Tens of thousands more have been driven from their homeland.

For Russia, what started as an obscure regional dispute has turned into a national crisis, badly damaging the country’s reputation abroad, exposing the hollowness of its military, and giving President Putin a pretext for rolling back democracy. Visiting Grozny today, it seems all to have been for nothing. Carpet bombing has torn up almost every part of what used to be a major oil-refining city and home to half-a-million people. Twelve-floor tower blocks have been reduced to one floor of rubble. Warrens of small houses with vine-covered courtyards have become a jungle of debris and weed. The city centre is now a square kilometre of desert. Where formerly stood the presidential palace, parliament, hotels, oil institute, university, a library and apartment blocks for thousands of people, there is only wasteland and sky.

There is gas heating, but feeble electricity, little running water and no rubbish collection. Telephones long ago ceased to work. The handful of new or restored buildings — mostly housing security forces, government, or electricity and oil offices — seem almost out of place.

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m dreaming,” said Lela, 51, as she joined a queue to fill her bottles at a broken water pipe.

“Right here, where this pipe is — this used to be the Okean restaurant. Over there, you had the jewellers. There was the music school. There was a college. There were apartment buildings . . .” she said. Somewhere close, a burst from a Kalashnikov. Nobody even looked up.

I too remembered the Okean. That was where one of the first bombs fell in December 1994, the blood of two victims turning the snow red.

In the overcast skies of those weeks you rarely saw the aircraft, only heard their scream as they dived. Being bombed by the very country claiming their allegiance was so surprising that Chechens would crowd round each fresh crater.

All that month, bombs: against schools, the parliament, roads, an orphanage, and countless apartment blocks and houses. People learnt to hide, not gather. Chechnya’s irreversible descent into madness had begun.

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