Spetsnaz

[4] Leonov had trained as a scuba diver, after which he joined 4th Special Volunteer Detachment, where he proved his daring and leadership skills conducting numerous clandestine operations and twice being awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

[3] Initially the unit was confined to performing small scale reconnaissance missions, platoon sized insertions by sea and on occasion on land into Finland and later Norway.

[citation needed] Lieutenant-Commander Lionel Crabb was a British Royal Navy frogman and MI6 diver who vanished during a reconnaissance mission around a Soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1956.

In November 2007 the BBC and the Daily Mirror reported that Eduard Koltsov, a former Soviet frogman, claimed to have caught Crabb placing a mine on the Ordzhonikidze hull near the ammunition depot and cut his throat.

[9] Peter Mercer of the Special Boat Service describes this incident in his autobiography: "The cruiser [Ordzhonikidze] was carrying the two Soviet leaders, Khrushchev and Bulganin, on a goodwill visit to Britain.

His [Crabb's] task was to measure the cruiser's propeller and to discover how the ship managed to travel at twice the speed originally estimated by British naval intelligence."

Within South Vietnam, rumors persisted for years that men with blue eyes were reportedly spotted doing recon missions and testing their new SVD Dragunov sniper rifles.

Their mission was twofold: first of all, to help a communist nation defeat an American ally, and secondly, test and evaluate their most sophisticated radars and missiles directly against the best aircraft America could deploy.

In the first one and a half years of the war, Spetsnaz units in the form of the 459th special forces company, were exclusively responsible for reconnaissance missions and intelligence gathering for the 40th Army.

A successful long-term campaign codenamed Operation "Curtain" or "Veil", lasted from 1984 to 1988, which aimed to close off the Afghan-Pakistani border and cut off supply routes coming in from Pakistan.

According to Soviet sources, the battle was actually fought between the GRU's 15th Spetsnaz Brigade, and the Usama Bin Zaid regiment of Afghan Mujahideen under Commander Assadullah, belonging to Abdul rub a-Rasul Sayyaf's faction.

[17] Fighting is also alleged to have taken place during Operation Magistral where over 200 Mujahideen were killed in a failed attempt to capture the strategic Hill 3234 near the Pakistani border from a 39-man Soviet Airborne company.

After several hours of fighting and Russian reinforcements imminent, the Chechens retreated to the residential district and regrouped in the city hospital, where they took between 1,500 and 1,800 hostages, most of them civilians (including about 150 children and a number of women with newborn infants).

In the years following the hostage-taking, more than 40 of the surviving attackers were tracked down and have been assassinated, including Aslambek Abdulkhadzhiev in 2002 and Shamil Basayev in 2006, and more than 20 were sentenced, by the Stavropol territorial court, to various terms of imprisonment.

Some of these successful missions were directed against separatist leaders such as Aslan Maskhadov, Abdul Halim Sadulayev, Dokka Umarov, Akhmadov brothers, Turpal-Ali Atgeriyev, Akhmed Avtorkhanov, Ibn al-Khattab, Abu al-Walid, Abu Hafs al-Urduni, Muhannad, Ali Taziev, Supyan Abdullayev, Shamil Basayev, Ruslan Gelayev, Salman Raduyev, Sulim Yamadayev, Rappani Khalilov, Yassir al-Sudani.

[27] The crisis was the seizure of the crowded Dubrovka Theatre on 23 October 2002 by 40 to 50 armed Chechens who claimed allegiance to the Islamist militant separatist movement in Chechnya.

Vega Groups, supported by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) SOBR unit, pumped an undisclosed chemical agent into the building's ventilation system and raided it.

[citation needed] During the raid, all of the attackers were killed, with no casualties among spetsnaz, but about 130 hostages, including nine foreigners, died due to poor first aid after falling unconscious from the gas.

Russian security agencies refused to disclose the gas used in the attack leading to doctors in local hospitals being unable to respond adequately to the influx of casualties.

Military analyst Vitaly Shlykov praised the effectiveness of Russia's security agencies, saying that the experience learned in Chechnya and Dagestan had been key to the success.

[55] Although crime has been markedly reduced and stability increased throughout Russia compared to the previous year, about 350 militants in the North Caucasus have been killed in anti-terror operations in the first four months of 2014, according to an announcement by Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev in the State Duma.

The OGV is the inter-service headquarters established at Khankala, Chechnya to command all Russian (MOD, MVD, FSB) operations from the start of the second Chechen war in 1999.

Since its inception, the OGV combined operations has conducted 40,000 special missions, destroyed 5,000 bases and caches, confiscated 30,000 weapons, and disarmed 80,000 explosive devices and in the process has killed over 10,000 insurgents in the time frame of 15 years.

[68] During World War II, Red Army reconnaissance and sabotage detachments formed under the supervision of the Second Department of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces.

[69] The infamous NKVD internal-security and espionage agency also had their own special purpose (osnaz) detachments, including many saboteur teams who were airdropped into enemy-occupied territories to work with (and often take over and lead) the Soviet Partisans.

[73] In 2006, five members of Arystan were arrested and charged with the kidnapping of the opposition politician Altynbek Sarsenbayuly, his driver, and his bodyguard; the three victims were then allegedly delivered to the people who murdered them.

[citation needed] Spetsgruppa "V", abbreviation of the Directorate в (Russian Cyrillic for V), also known as "Vega" in period 1993–1995, was formed in 1981, continues the lineage of two elite Cold War-era KGB special units—Cascade (Kaskad) and Zenith (Zenit).

Operations include both direct action against bandit holdouts in Southern Russia as well as high-profile arrests in more densely populated cities and guarding government officials.

Nevertheless, there were some rumors that such group does indeed exist and is assigned to execute very specific special operations abroad primarily for protection of Russian embassy personnel and internal investigations.

Two gangsters in the Guy Ritchie film RocknRolla have a 'scar competition' in which they show healed wounds (and describe how they occurred) from injuries they incurred whilst on several spetsnaz operations.