The January 1996 operation led by Salman Raduyev and Khungar Ibragimov began as an attack on a Russian military helicopter base near Kizlyar, but ended in the mass seizure of civilians at a hospital and maternity ward and later in the village of Pervomayskaya. According to people involved in those events, the hostage crisis on that scale could have been avoided if the security agencies had acted in a coordinated way.
A former officer from the Defense Ministry special forces headquarters in the Caucasus said military intelligence already knew by January 4-5 that Dzhokhar Dudayev had ordered attacks on targets near Kizlyar. When about 400 militants tried on January 9 to seize the base and an Interior Ministry unit, they met resistance, but after failing they moved into the city, took more than 3,000 people hostage, and demanded that Russia withdraw its troops from Chechnya.
Former Vityaz fighter Aleksandr Ravilov says enough forces had gathered in Kizlyar: GRU special units, Alpha, Vympel, OMON, and Interior Ministry rapid-response units. In his view, the militants could have been eliminated, but there was no unified command and the agencies operated separately.
The hospital in Kizlyar was not stormed because of the risk of mass civilian deaths. Raduyev was allowed to leave with about 100 hostages on buses toward Chechnya, but the convoy was stopped near Pervomayskaya. Command of the operation was later handed to the FSB, and deputy director Viktor Zorin, who had no experience in such hostage rescue operations, was put in charge.
Ravilov and other sources criticize the decision to shell militant positions with artillery, including Grad rocket systems, despite the presence of hostages. After the bombardment on January 15, 1996, the militants began trying to escape in small groups. Participants say there were moments when they could have been blocked and destroyed, but combat actions were interrupted by negotiations that gave them time to regroup.
Officially, 139 civilians were reported killed; unofficial estimates put the toll at more than 500. On February 9, 1996, the State Duma granted amnesty to participants in the attack on condition that the remaining police hostages be released. Raduyev was arrested on March 12, 2000, sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 for terrorism, including the Kizlyar and Pervomayskoye attack, and died in prison in 2002.