The Russian officer was adamant. He was prepared to disobey orders and let us drive into the Chechen capital Grozny, but on one condition. First we had to reach an isolated army outpost, cut off for days by Chechen rebels, and evacuate the wounded in our armoured car.

The post was not hard to find. Like so many Russian positions, it was poorly defended with pieces of wood, lumps of cement and rusting barbed wire. The garrison was pinned down by Chechen snipers in the high-rise apartment blocks that surrounded the base on every side.

We were greeted at the gate by the pinched, grubby face of a teenage sentry who stared out with a mixture of curiosity and fear. When we informed the commander that we would take away his injured men, a dozen bandaged conscripts, some limping, others on stretchers, were packed into the armoured car for a bumpy one-way journey out of this death trap.

The might of the Russian Army, once reckoned the most powerful force in the world, had resorted to asking a handful of Western journalists to rescue its men in a battered Land Rover from a city it no longer controlled.

The war in Chechnya was probably the most brutal conflict of modern times. In the first campaign, from the winter of 1994 to the summer of 1996, tens of thousands of people were killed as President Yeltsin used the might of the army to capture Grozny from separatist rebels. The rebels retook the city in 1996 before being driven out again in 2000 by President Putin.

Much of the war raged beyond the view of the outside world. Atrocities were commonplace on both sides. Most of the victims were the Chechen and Russian civilians caught in the middle.

The plight of the Russian conscripts has never fully been told. We knew that they were poorly trained, badly equipped and killed in their thousands because of the incompetence of their leaders and the ruthless fighting skills of their Chechen opponents.

But, until I read Arkady Babchenko's graphic first-person account in One Solider's War in Chechnya, I had not realised the depths to which the Russian Army had sunk. At times the stupidity, neglect and the scale of the suffering made this modern conflict in the Caucasus sound like an account from the trenches of the First World War.

A conscript arriving to fight in Chechnya had many enemies. First he had to survive the beatings and extortion of his superiors. Then he had to overcome the appalling conditions of the Russian Army, where food and clean water were scarce and soldiers went for weeks without washing lice-infested clothes. Finally there are the Chechen warriors who show their enemy little quarter. If captured, a Russian soldier could expect to be tortured and beheaded.

I recall interviewing one Chechen fighter at the start of the war. He was recounting how he had ambushed a column of armoured vehicles, killing dozens of soldiers. He saw the look of disbelief on my face and produced from his pocket a stack of letters and photographs taken from the corpses of the young men he had just killed.

“I did not want to kill them,” he said. “But they should never have come to our country.”

One Soldier's War in Chechnya, by Arkady Babchenko

Portobello, £16.99

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