February 18, 2001, famed Russian reporter Anapollikovskyar travels on assignment to the Caucasian

Republic of Chechnya.

It's two years into Moscow's second war to subdue the in battle state, and

Polikovsky, who works with the crusading Navaya Gazeta, has been getting tip-offs about

Russian war crimes, bodies in mass graves,

torture, civilians starving and threesing to death,

brutal punitive raids on defenceless villages.

The kind of information you need to verify in person.

Polykofskiya doesn't wait long to learn of the horrors.

People thrown into shallow pits, defecating and growing sick and being tortured with electrical wire and

planks, prisoners missing fingernails and others dead from days in a flooded hole the Russians

call the bathtub. Sexual Abuse. A junior officer tells Polikovsky the Chechen women have

quote nice butts telling in turn the Chechen men that they're being punished because

quote your women wouldn't let us, I won't complete the quote.

It's getting worse than Grim on the front. It's horrifying. I heard dozens of

harrying accounts from people who had been exposed to torture and maltreatment by Russian troops.

The story is so horrific that one's hand refused to jot them down, writes Polikosskiya in the Guardian.

And then, she adds, I myself was the victim.

Minutes after leaving an officer who expresses his regret over the abuses, she is detained and held in a

rutted field. Soldiers arrive, accused her of being a Chechen rebel herself.

Young officers say they're getting their orders directly from Vladimir Putin himself.

They made it clear to me that freedom was over, she writes.

...