Shortly before flying off to Moscow, Maskhadov persuaded a renegade commander Salman Raduyev to cease his agitation and provocations against Russia.

[3] 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 Yeltsin, this was a "peace deal of historic dimensions, putting a full stop to 400 years of history [of the Chechen–Russian conflict]".

[4] 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 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 a unified Islamic state encompassing most of Russia's North Caucasus.