This led to a rise in racist sentiments against people mainly from the Caucasus regions. Russia is now engaged in a full scale war with Chechnya. There have been many reports of bombing raids by Russian forces and over 500,000 people are said to have fled Chechnya since the war began. Slowly Groznyy and other parts of Chechnya are being pounded and destroyed causing thousands of casualties .
The characteristics of Chechnya a nation-state (although not officially a state) as well as the history of Russia and the former USSR are the main causes if the current Chechen war as they were the main factors that kept Russia from giving Chechnya independence. Back in the days when Russia was still the Union of Soviet and Socialist Republics, it was one of the greatest superpowers in the world. At that time, the USSR and the United States of America were the sole players in the bi-polar world stage. However this all changed after the cold war ended and the Soviet Union began to collapse. As republics began leaving the Union, Russia's economic, political, and military power decreased significantly causing a huge power vacuum in the world which led to the US becoming the sole super power in today's world which became a uni-polar political world ever since the Soviet demise . .
As more and more republics gained there independence, Russia faces both an economic and political crises. In the economic sense, many of the ex-soviet republics had a lot of extremely valuable natural resources some of which the Russian economy was dependant on such as the ore and coal mining of the southern republics. Not only that but when a republic gained its independence it made the Russian labor force shrink since it lost many people which led to many unskilled workers filling up jobs that needed skilled labor. This was a disaster for the efficiency of the Russian economy. Politically, Russia fears that if they give Chechnya independence the current government will lose most of the hard-line support it gets from conservative reactionaries after it succeeded in adopting policies that satisfy both sides of the political spectrum.