Putin Vows Action

How will these changes affect the War on Terror? Personally I believe that the Russians will not offer any resistance to the US plan to attack Iraq as a result.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/29/i...d367add8d5e05b8d&ex=1036558800&partner=GOOGLE

President Vladimir V. Putin, echoing statements by President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, said today that Russia was prepared to strike at international terrorist groups in whatever country harbored them.

Speaking in the anguished aftermath of the 57-hour siege of a Moscow theater by Chechen guerrillas, Mr. Putin ordered the Russian military to draft a new doctrine adapting the country's forces and tactics to meet terrorist threats.

"Shock" was a word heard repeatedly today, as Russians tried to cope with terrorist disaster that for many here evoked the Sept. 11 tragedy in its randomness and unpredictability, and to come to terms with a rescue operation that killed many of those it was designed to save. At the theater today, hundreds of Muscovites came to lay roses and carnations, light candles and pay their silent respects to the dead as the police and Interior Ministry troops streamed in and out of the bullet-riddled building.

Television networks have been devoted to running war films, and on public buildings across Moscow, flags flew either at half-staff or with black ribbons fluttering from their masts. The radio call-in shows have featured a drumbeat of support for the government's decision to use a powerful sedative to disarm the terrorists and free the hostages.

Against this emotion-laden backdrop, Mr. Putin's tone was uncompromising.

"Russia will respond with measures that are adequate to the threat to the Russian federation," he said, "striking on all the places where the terrorists themselves, the organizers of these crimes and their ideological and financial inspirers are."

"I stress," he added, "wherever they may be located."

The Russian president gave no hint of where he believes international support for Chechen rebels may be located, but Russia has in the past accused Islamic extremists of assisting the Chechen cause and coming to fight for it.

In September, after months of cross-border tensions, Mr. Putin threatened to launch pre-emptive strikes against Chechen fighters operating in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Today Mr. Putin seemed to be broadening his threats.

President Bush, who has praised Mr. Putin's support for the administration's campaign against terrorism, expressed support today for the Russian actions, blaming the deaths of the hostages on the Chechen guerrillas who seized the theater in the first place.

"The president feels very strongly that the people to blame here are the terrorists," the White House's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters aboard Air Force One. "The people who caused this tragedy to take place are terrorists who took hostages and endangered the lives of others."

A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain issued a similar statement of support for Mr. Putin today, saying the siege and the bombing of a club in Bali represented a new form of terror.

Despite the death of one in seven of the hostages, Mr. Putin has enjoyed strong support for his action, a reflection of the sentiment that a worse outcome was possible and had been averted and of the widespread Russian view that the Chechen insurgency must be met with an uncompromising hand.

Russian officials continued today to deflect questions about the rescue effort, which began before dawn on Saturday when scores of commandos began to pump into the theater a debilitating gas described as a variant of a common anesthetic. On Sunday, senior health officials acknowledged that the gas caused the deaths of all but one of the 117 hostages killed in the raid.

Russian officials also refused again to disclose the name or specific characteristics of the gas, although they did provide the United States Embassy, along with other embassies, with what one American official said was "some preliminary information on the effects of the agent used."

That official and those of another foreign embassy said that an examination of survivors of the raid concluded that the hostages and hostage-takers alike were exposed to a vaporized form of an opiate, which quickly knocked many of them unconscious.

Today an official at the United States Embassy here said that an American, identified elsewhere as Sandy A. Booker, appeared to be one of the 117 hostages killed. Mr. Booker, a 49-year-old electrician from Oklahoma City who came to Russia to meet a woman he intended to wed, was one of nine foreign citizens so far believed to have died in the raid. The others were citizens of Austria, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Netherlands; three were from Ukraine.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, despite misgivings among Russia's conservative military and security leaders, Mr. Putin has strongly supported the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism and sought to portray his country's own bloody civil conflict in Chechnya as a struggle against terrorism.

The siege of the theater, which began Wednesday night during a performance of a popular Russian musical called "Nord-Ost," gave strong backing to the government's argument that Chechen guerrillas are not simply resisting Russia's dominance of Chechnya but terrorizing innocent civilians.

In his remarks, Mr. Putin never mentioned Chechnya's fighters or the roughly 50 guerrillas who seized the theater. Instead he spoke broadly of the threat of international terrorists, who, he said, were "behaving in a more and more cruel manner."

As Mr. Bush has done repeatedly, Mr. Putin raised the specter of a terrorist attack using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, vowing that Russia would respond with its full might.

Russian officials have said the Chechens who stormed the theater — camouflaged and heavily armed men and women — could have succeeded only with the financial and logistical support of Islamic extremist groups abroad.

A senior aide of Mr. Putin, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, said Chechen militants received financing from groups based in Turkey. Other officials said they intercepted telephone calls from the captors to still-unidentified embassies in Moscow, as well as to Turkey and unidentified Arab nations.

Here in Moscow, the hostage siege has been called Russia's Sept. 11, and military experts said Mr. Putin's order to the military could be the first of many changes in the policies of Russian agencies and departments.

Mr. Putin's order to the Russian military to draft a new doctrine to adapt its forces and tactics to counter the threat from terrorism both internally and externally appeared to presage sweeping changes for a military that has been slow to adapt.

"The tragic events are over," Mr. Putin said, "but there still remain very many problems. We are paying a heavy price for the weakness of the state and inconsistency of actions."

Nikolai M. Bezborodov, a retired major general who is now deputy chairman of the Parliament's defense committee, said in an interview that the military needed to create special units that are more agile and effective in unconventional conflicts, like those against terrorist groups, rather than enemy nations.

"The tragedy that happened in Russia strongly shook up our consciousness," he said. "It should also shake up our domestic policies and structures. Urgent steps are required to prevent anything like it again."

Slightly more than 400 of the 646 hostages who were hospitalized after the raid remained in hospitals, suffering from effects of the gas, which restricted breathing and circulation and, in some cases, caused heart, liver and kidney damage. As many survivors were reunited with their families today, the official death toll remained at 117, though doctors warned it could still rise.

Even before the siege, Russia had been under pressure to seek a political solution to the conflict in Chechnya, which began in 1999 , when Russian forces surged into the southern republic to crush its separatist government.

But far from easing Mr. Putin's opposition to negotiations with Chechnya's rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov, the crisis has hardened it.

In Copenhagen today, a representative of Mr. Maskhadov, Akhmed Zakayev, said that the Chechen separatists were prepared to hold talks with the Russian government.

He spoke at a two-day conference of Chechens in Copenhagen. Russian diplomats strongly objected to Denmark's decision to allow the conference to go ahead, saying it was a forum for Chechens to raise funds for their fight.

Russia made it clear that Mr. Putin would retaliate by refusing to attend a summit meeting between the European Union and Russia next month in Denmark, which now holds the union's rotating presidency. Denmark agreed today to move the meeting to Brussels.

 

Point?

 

Putin has certainly been aggressive at times but he has been against the US proposed effort to disarm Iraq. Now Putin believes that Islamic extremists are funding his enemies. I have a feeling that Putin's stance is about to change.