Transcaucasian Military District
After he finished a Grozny vocational school in 1989 he went to serve in the Soviet Army from 1989 to 1991 in a reconnaissance battalion of the Transcaucasian Military District. He was assigned to Nagorno-Karabakh where he witnessed at first hand the devastating aftermath of the Soviet Union collapse. In the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, he acquired the rank of Major.