Russia and Chechnya have been involved in armed conflict many years. Moscow has been in intermittent conflict with the independence-seeking region in southern Russia for nearly 400 years. In recent years the conflict has escalated and media coverage has increased, this has lead to a public outcry to end the costly and bloody war. Chechnya considers itself an independent state, while Moscow considers it part of Russia. The current war has its roots in a two hundred year struggle by the Russians to hold the Caucasia region. Thus separatism and irredentism are the main causes of this long and bloody conflict.
According to an article written by Dave Damrel in Religious Studies News, the conflict started with the Russian expansion into Caucasia, the remote, rugged, mountainous territory between the Black and Caspian Seas that is home to over thirty different ethnic groups. In the late eighteenth century Catherine the Great's attempted many times to forcibly annex the region, but the Russian invaders inspired fierce, unexpected resistance from a broad ethnic coalition of Caucasian Muslims. The Muslims declared the struggle a jihad, and Muslim mountaineers inflicted a crushing defeat on Czarist forces at the Sunzha River in 1785 and were briefly able to unite much of what are modern Daghestan and Chechnya under their rule.
The article goes on to say the Chechens, one large group of Muslims living within the Russian federation (internal Muslims), are important to Russia for two reasons. The first is economic: both Chechnya and Tatarstan (a region held by the other large group of "internal Muslims" called Tartars) possess substantial oil reserves, with Tatarstan alone producing 25% of the Russian yield. The second reason is political: of all the former Russian republics and autonomous republics, only Tatarstan and Chechnya refused to ratify the 1992 Russian Federation Treaty that established Yeltsin's present Russian Federation.