For the Russian President, those Chechens who resisted his firepower inside Russia are merely continuing their struggle inside a Russian ally further to the south
Now what does this remind you of? “After an attempt to seize Grozny by land ended in defeat, Yeltsin resorted to … pounding the city from the air. Thousands of civilians died in the attacks on the capital. Two years of gruesome fighting [in Chechnya] killed tens of thousands of civilians and probably 15,000 Russian soldiers. Putin … cemented his rise to power by launching a new campaign that would be equally bloody, but would eventually bring the territory back under Moscow’s control. He filled the airwaves with tough talk, promising to hunt down the Chechen bandits … The Chechen battle was portrayed as a terrorist struggle against the legitimate Russian state. This was partly true – the Chechens did begin to use terror as a weapon.”
Sound familiar? I owe the above quotation to Shaun Walker’s new take on the Putin years in his book, The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past – and it doesn’t stop there.
In early 2000, in one of his first interviews, Putin told the Chechens they were not under attack from Russia – they were being brought under its “protection”. The Chechens were not a defeated people, Putin announced. “They are a liberated people.” And all this, according to Walker, while Putin’s fighter jets “were bombing Grozny, raining more misery down on a city that already seemed as though it had reached total devastation”.