Which city was described in a 2003 United Nations report as "the most destroyed city on earth"?

Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a city of about a quarter of a million inhabitants on the Sunzha River in European Russia. Its name is the Russian for "fearsome."

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Grozny became the seat of a separatist government led by Dzhokhar Dudayev. Russia tried to overthrowing Dudayev covertly by means of armed Chechen opposition forces, which resulted in repeated failed assaults on the city. The capture by the separatists of mercenaries hired by the former KGB led to open intervention by the Russian government. In the ensuing First Chechen War, Grozny was the site of an intense battle in the winter of 1994/5 which Involved carpet-bombing by the Russian Air Force and ended in the capture of the city by the Russian military.

Grozny was again the centre of fighting after the outbreak of the Second Chechen War in 1999 causing thousands more fatalities and leaving the city with scarcely hardly a building undamaged. The final act of the conflict came in early 2000, when the Russian military lured the besieged militants to a promised safe passage. The day before the planned evacuation, the Russian Army mined the exit route from the city and concentrated their firepower on that point. President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin announced that Grozny was liberated and said that military operations had come to an end.

In 2003 a UN Commission came to Grozny: its report described Chechnya’s capital the world’s most the most destroyed city on earth.