Russia – Chechen Peace Treaty Russian - Chechen Peace Treaty ( or Moscow Peace Treaty ) was a formal peace treaty " on peace and the principles of Russia n - Chechen relations " following the First Chechen War of 1994 - 1996 . It was signed by the president of Russia Boris Yeltsin and the newly elected president of Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov , on May 12 , 1997 , at the Moscow Kremlin . The 1997 agreement was preceded by the Khasavyurt Accord signed by Maskhadov , then the chief of staff of Chechen separatist forces , and the Russian general Alexander Lebed on August 30 , 1996 , which had formally ended the war in Chechnya with the withdrawal of all federal forces and administration , and thus the return to uneasy status quo of 1991 - 1994 . During the often - tense subsequent talks , the Russian negotiating team was headed by Ivan Rybkin , Lebed ' s replacement in the post of chief negotiator , and Boris Berezovsky and their Chechen counterparts Movladi Udugov and Akhmed Zakayev . In January 1997 , Russia officially recognized the new Chechen government of president Maskhadov , paving the way for his meeting with Yeltsin . Shortly before flying off to Moscow , Maskhadov persuaded a renegade commander Salman Raduyev to cease his agitation and provocations against Russia . In the short treaty the two sides agreed to reject " forever " the use of force or threat of force in resolving disputed issues , and to build bilateral relations the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria " on the generally recognized principles and norms of international law . " Besides Maskhadov and Yeltsin , former Chechen acting president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev also took part in the signing , together with Zakayev and Udugov , and several Russian top government officials . According to Yelstin , this was a " peace deal of historic dimensions , putting a full stop to 400 years of history [ of conflict between Russia and Chechnya ] " . It was then complemented by a longer intergovernmental economic agreement signed the same day by Aslan Maskhadov and the Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin , including the heated issue of how much Russia would pay the devastated republic in war damages . The Moscow treaty caused great jubilation in Chechnya , but the key issue of independence was not resolved . According to the Khasavyurt Accord , all agreements on the relations between the Grozny and Moscow should be regulated until the end of 2001 , however in 1999 Moscow nullified the peace treaty after the invasion of Chechen Basayev forces to the neighbouring Russian republic of Dagestan . The Russian forces invaded the breakway republic again , occupying its whole territory by the next year . In 2003 , Russia created the new constitution for Chechnya , according to which the Chechen Republic is one of federal subjects of the Russian Federation . Maskhadov has been killed by Russian special forces in 2005 while calling Moscow for negotiations to end the Second Chechen War . The increasingly radicalized Chechen separatist movement evolved into an interethnic , pan - Islamic militant network , and in 2007 its originally nationalist goal of an independent and secular Chechnya has been officially abandoned in favor of an unified Islamic state encompassing most of Russia ' s North Caucasus .