When asked in early 2004 by a journalist about the road to peace in Chechnya, president Putin retorted combatively: ‘Russia does not negotiate with terrorists, we destroy them’. Putin's public eschewing of negotiations with Chechen insurgents is reminiscent of the assertions by past leaders of imperial regimes, and of contemporary democratic Western leaders, most recently in Iraq. The Russian-Chechen war is undoubtedly one of the most protracted, most bitter and bloodiest of the post-Soviet conflicts, involving terrorist acts such as those by Chechen extremists at the Budennovsk hospital, the Dubrovka theatre, and the Beslan school, and by the Russian military's terror-bombing of Grozny and massacre at Samashki. It is also a conflict, however, that involves a complex peace process which has engaged the main protagonists in periodic attempts to reach a settlement through dialogue and negotiations. The peace process in the conflict in Chechnya is littered by a ‘truce’, a ‘treaty’ and several ‘agreements’, though a final peace ‘settlement’ to the conflict remains elusive. While the key issue at the centre of the conflict is sovereignty for an independent Chechnya, the dynamics of the conflict have developed through several different phases, alternating between military conflict and negotiations. By examining these dynamics we can track how the mutual interaction of the military conflict and the peace process has shaped the parameters of a potential agreement. What might have been the basis for compromise and a settlement at one stage of the conflict may over time become redundant as new issues and new protagonists emerge, and new events transform the nature of the conflict and negotiation.