Lieutenant Colonel Balakin's army of two thousand surrounded the detachment of the Chechen militant Shamil Karaev. Shamil and his detachment hid in the center of the surrounded village and did not react in any way to the federal proposal to surrender. After a powerful artillery shelling, when the entire village was already in ruins, Balakin himself took on the field commander. With a group of infantrymen, under the cover of armor, the officer approached the house, where Shamil was still snarling fire. In order not to inadvertently run into machine-gun fire, Balakin took with him as a human shield a strange young man who surrendered to the federals just before the artillery shelling...