Ruslan Gelayev was born in 1964 in the village of Komsomolskoye (Saadi-Kotar) near Urus-Martan, 10 years after his parents had returned from the Stalinist deportation of Chechens into Central Asia.
In 1992–1993, Gelayev took part in the Georgian–Abkhazian conflict as a volunteer in the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus militia fighting for the Abkhaz separatist side against Georgia, serving under Shamil Basayev.
Gelayev fought against the Russian federal forces in the First Chechen War of 1994–1996, notably as a senior commander in the Battle of Grozny, for which he became one of the first to be awarded the Chechnya's highest medal Kioman Syi (Honor of the Nation).
Following the fall of Grozny and the Russian push into the highlands, Gelayev personally led the defense of the mountain village of Shatoy, where he was wounded several times.
[6] The later President of Ichkeria (and still later the self-proclaimed leader of the Caucasus Emirate) Dokka Umarov initially served under his command, together with Akhmed Zakayev, before they left it to form their own units.
Previously, on 6 March 1996, Gelayev had led a surprise raid on Grozny, seizing large parts of the city for two days and inflicting serious losses on Russian forces, before leaving with more than 100 civilian hostages.
At the start of the Second Chechen War in late 1999, Gelayev commanded a force of some 1,500 fighters in the siege of Grozny, charged with defense of the south-western sector of the city.
When Gelayev's forces arrived at the specified meeting place, where buses were supposed to be waiting to evacuate their wounded,[12] they were ambushed by a large number of Russian troops.
In August 2001, Gelayev played a crucial role in releasing Russian human rights activist Svetlana Kuzmina, who had been held in Chechen captivity for more than two years.
[17]) Islamova had tracked down Vyacheslav Izmailov, a former federal military officer turned a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, and offered to try to persuade the rebels to free hostages if Izamailov would help her try to secure her husband's release in court.
He would not perform any large-scale raid into Chechnya because he wanted to avoid clashes with fellow Chechens serving in pro-Moscow forces and because of his strained relations with Maskhadov and Basayev.
In September 2002, Gelayev personally led an incursion into the Russian republic of Ingushetia, capturing the villages of Tarskoye and Galashki, but his fighters became surrounded, took large losses and were dispersed.
However, according to the Kavkaz Center version, Gelayev fought against a larger group of Russian troops and was killed after his arm was shot-off by heavy machine gun fire from a helicopter.
According to Musienko, 20 Chechen fighters were killed and nine were captured and nine Spetsnaz GRU commandos under his command died in this battle, and that the official story of Gelayev's death after the clash with border guards was completely invented.
[citation needed] A supposed death of Gelayev in the firefight "that left nine Russian soldiers dead in December" was actually officially reported at the time, but later refuted and assumed to be incorrect after the new version was announced on 2 March 2004.
[29] Gelayev's eldest son, Rustam, was born in 1988 in Omsk, Russia, where his father lived during the 1980s when he was married to a local ethnic Russian woman Larisa Gubkina.