An appeals court in Sochi has upheld a local court’s decision to compensate the Ortsuyev family for inaction in the case of their relative’s abduction during the Second Chechen War, though the federal finance ministry and the Russian Investigative Committee tried to challenge the decision.

The court issued its ruling back on 27 November, but it appeared on the court's website only on 10 December. 

According to the case file, 38-year-old Adam Ortsuyev disappeared in Grozny in December 1999. After the city was completely taken over by Russian federal troops, his family appealed to the Prosecutor’s Office to search for the missing man. In December 2001, a criminal case of kidnapping was opened. Since then, the criminal case has been suspended four times, and the investigation has been ongoing for 25 years without any results.

The children of the missing man, Ali and Anzor, his brother Bekhan, and his wife Sovdat Ortsuyeva demanded compensation for the violation of reasonable time in the proceedings, asking for ₽1 million ($9,600) each.

In the end, the Chechen Supreme Court ruled that Ortsuyeva was not entitled to claim compensation as only the wife of Ortsuyev, despite the fact that she was recognised as a victim in the case. They also reduced the amount of compensation awarded to Ortsuyev's children and brother to ₽200,000 ($1,900) each.

Both the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of Finance, the defendants in the case, tried to challenge the court’s decision. Appealing in a court in Sochi, a representative of the Investigative Committee stated that the investigation into Ortsuyev's abduction ‘was effective’. The appeal was not successful. 

This is not the first such compensation case in recent years. In the summer of 2022, Natalia Zagudayeva, a former resident of the village of Sernovodskaya located some 50 kilometres from Grozny, sought compensation for the death of her three-year-old son Sultan during shelling by federal troops in 1999. The court valued the boy's life at ₽20,000 ($200).

In November 2024, a court in Chechnya partially satisfied the claim of two families for the uninvestigated murder of three of their relatives in 2000 who had been detained by the Russian military. Their bodies were later found in a mass grave with signs of torture. The six applicants were awarded compensation of ₽200,000 ($2,000) each. 

Before the Zagudayeva case, the only possibility to have Russia's responsibility recognised for the damage inflicted on Chechen civilians was the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). 

For example, in August 2019, the ECHR ordered Russia to pay €1.9 million ($2 million) over disappearances in Chechnya and Ingushetia. The ruling concerned 21 people who were allegedly abducted by Russian security forces in the early 2000s.

In total, between 2005 and 2021, the ECHR considered more than 250 complaints from Chechen residents who had been abducted by security forces in areas controlled by federal troops.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent expulsion from the Council of Europe, the Kremlin announced that it would not enforce any decisions of the European Court of Justice made after 15 March 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed this decree into law in June 2022.

Russia has not yet named the exact number of civilian casualties that occurred during the Second Chechen War. The conflict began in 1999 along with the beginning of Putin's rule, and the number of civilian deaths as of 2004 was as high as 10,000, according to the Russian human rights centre Memorial. Amnesty International placed the figure at around 25,000 civilian deaths. 

11 December marks the 30th anniversary of the starting date of the First Chechen War. On that date in 1994, columns of Russian military equipment entered the republic on the orders of Russian President Boris Yeltsin to ‘restore constitutional order’. According to various estimates, fighting and constant shelling by the Russian army during the First Chechen War killed between 30,000 and 40,000 civilians in the republic, though the exact number of casualties is still unknown. In August 1996, the Khasavyurt agreements were concluded between Russia and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, which were violated in 1999.