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I don't believe in the "hard leader" argument, it's awfully reactionary.
Financial Times. September 22 2004
Mr Kristol is wrong to place the Russia of Vladimir Putin among the forces of civilisation, and is mistaken in regarding Russia as a valuable ally in the struggle ahead. He misunderstands the war against terror. He is misleading in his comparison between the war against the jihadis and that waged against the totalitarian states of the mid-20th century. He is misguided in downplaying the role of diplomacy. He is, in short, displaying an attitude and propounding a strategy that is more likely to increase than reduce the dangers we confront. Let us start with Russia's onslaught on Chechnya. In the wars fought under Boris Yeltsin and Mr Putin, some estimates put the number of Chechens dead at 250,000, while the population of Chechnya is thought to have fallen from 1.25m to some 500,000. Who can seriously consider a state prepared to wage so murderous a war against its own citizens an ally in the struggle against genocidal barbarism, rather than a perpetrator?
WIN #17-04 dtd 24 May 2004
RUSSIAN IMPRISONED AFTER NEGLECTING WIFE’S ADVICE -- On 19 May, Mikhail Trepashkin began a four-year sentence in a penal colony after a military court convicted him of divulging state secrets and the illegal possession of ammunition. A veteran of the KGB, Trepashkin said its successor the FSB (Federal Security Service) fabricated evidence to prevent him from exposing its involvement in the bombing of apartment houses in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999 that took more than 200 lives. Trepashkin's wife, Tatiana, called the verdict a sham, but added her husband should have realized that his probing would have dire consequences, the Daily Telegraph (London) reported on 20 May.
Vladimir Putin, head of the FSB until August 1999, blamed the bombings on Chechen separatists. The following year he won a presidential election and Moscow launched its second Chechen war that continues to the present. (The first war was from 1994 to 1996.)
There has long been speculation among Kremlin watchers that the bombings were provocations carried out by the authorities to rally the public around Putin and crushing the Chechen uprising.
Last fall, Trepashkin was preparing to present his findings in the case of two Chechen militants accused of three of the bombings when he was pulled over a week before their trial and accused of illegally possessing a handgun said to have been found in his car. He has been in jail ever since, with additional charges of divulging state secrets to British intelligence to discredit the FSB and illegal possession of ammunition at his home. A decision on the handgun charge was expected this summer. Trepashkin insists police planted the gun. "I'm absolutely certain that this was the system taking revenge on him," said Valentin Gefter, a member of a parliamentary commission and director of the Moscow-based Human Rights Institute. "It's a shame that our courts cannot act independently."
The State Department has said the Trepashkin case raised concerns about the undue influence of the FSB and arbitrary use of the judicial system.
In a curious incident related to the bombings, police in Ryazan, 120 miles southeast of Moscow, discovered large sacks of what they said were explosives and a detonator in the basement of an apartment house in September 1999. The FSB acknowledged placing the sacks there but said they contained sugar and had been put there as part of a civil defense exercise.
Daily Telegraph. 13/03/2004
Instead a growing body of proof has surfaced that links the bombings, and the Ryazan incident in particular, to the FSB - the revamped KGB. Independent investigators, including several MPs, who have sought to look into the case have been intimidated, arrested or beaten. |
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