Hello and welcome to the Battleground Special Forces podcast with me, Saul David and Julius Strauss.

Today we're discussing Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Operations

Units, and two of their most infamous missions, the Nord-Oss siege in 2002, and two years later,

the Bezlan School Siege, both of which Julius covered as a reporter. The modern Spetsnaz

trace their history back to World War II when the Red Army

formed reconnaissance and sabotage detachments under the supervision of the general staff

of the Soviet armed forces, the NKVD Internal Security and Espionage Agency, the forerunner of the

KGB and now, of course, the FSB, also had its own special purpose or

Osnaz detachments, including saboteurs, who were dropped into enemy-held territory to work with

partisans. Yeah, that's right, Saul. But you know, the Spetsnaz, or in Russian, it's

special-noboennazna-ena, special purpose units that we know today,

were actually formed in 1950 by the famous World War II general, Georgios Zhukov.

He created 46 Spetsnaz companies, each consisting of 120 servicemen.

They later expanded into 14 brigadesades and they came under the main intelligence

directorate or the Gere'ul and were collectively known as Spetsnaz Gereau. Of course, we hear a lot about

Gereau today as well because they're still extremely active. My counter-terrorist unit known as

Spetsgruppa A or Alpha was created by the KGB in 1974 and is still part of the FSB today.

And they've taken part in many, many recent conflicts, you know, going back to the sort of the Prague

Spring, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Beirut, and more recently Chechnya.

And of course, they've been very busy in Ukraine as well.

Okay, Julius, we'll come to the details of the two sieges we mentioned at the top. But first,

tell us about your own experience, because you were for a while embedded with Spetsnows,

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