Second Chechen War
The UN calls Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth
After Basayev's fighters invaded Dagestan and apartment blocks were bombed in Russian cities in autumn 1999, Russian troops re-entered Chechnya and took Grozny by early 2000. An estimated 25,000–50,000 civilians died; rights groups documented abductions and torture. The counter-terrorism regime was lifted in 2009.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 19 years earlier
- 1981 AIDS first described — 18 years earlier
- 1997 Kyoto Protocol — 2 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 9 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 10 years earlier
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 10 years earlier
- 1991–2001 Yugoslav Wars — 8 years earlier
- 1992 Maastricht Treaty — 7 years earlier
- 2002 Euro notes and coins — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 9 years earlier
- 1990 Black January in Baku — 9 years earlier
- 1992–1993 War in Abkhazia — 7 years earlier
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 6 years earlier
- 2003 Rose Revolution — 4 years later
Africa
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 25 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 16 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 5 years earlier
- 1998–2003 Second Congo War — 1 year earlier
- 2011 Independence of South Sudan — 12 years later
Asia
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 24 years earlier
- 1997 Handover of Hong Kong — 2 years earlier
- 1998 Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests — 1 year earlier
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — 5 years later
- 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami — 12 years later
Americas
- 1983 ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 16 years earlier
- 1990 Launch of the Hubble Space Telescope — 9 years earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 2 years later
- 2003 Human genome sequenced — 4 years later
- 2007 Apple unveils the iPhone — 8 years later
Oceania
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 7 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 81)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 69)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 88)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 80)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 75)
- Fidel Castro (aged 73)
- Elizabeth II (aged 73)
- Gabriel García Márquez (aged 72)
- Mikhail Gorbachev (aged 68)
- Boris Yeltsin (aged 68)