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Nick Paton Walsh in Grozny
Sunday December 14, 2003
The Observer

Dusk was falling on the farm in the Chechen hills. Four men and a woman cowered in the freezing mud of a ditch. Above them were a group of Russia's elite troops who had mistakenly shot up a civilian bus, killing one man, headmaster Said Alaskhanov, during a bungled stop-and-search operation.
Over the static of their radio, the order allegedly came to clean up the mess. The five were pulled from the ditch and told to run. They were shot as they fled.

In the second high-profile case of its kind, the Russian military have opened the trial of four soldiers for murder, in a bid to show troops are accountable for atrocities committed in the separatist republic - where murders are perpetrated daily.

The last such case was that of Yuri Budanov, jailed for 10 years for the rape and murder of an 18-year old Chechen girl. His imprisonment was seen as a token gesture from the Kremlin.

The Observer has spoken to key sources in Moscow and Grozny who paint a picture of horrifying military practices and brutality.

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By Alexander Golts

The piercing wail of ambulance sirens, victims' bodies covered in blood, fear in the eyes of those who managed to escape unharmed this time. This was the scene after the storming of the Dubrovka Theater in October 2002, and after the terrorist attack at a rock concert in Tushino last July, and after a bomb exploded on 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Ulitsa less than a week later, and after the blast outside the National Hotel in December. Last weekend we saw it all again after the explosion in a metro car at Avtozavodskaya station.

President Vladimir Putin may look nothing like Aphrodite, but he was born of the same element. According to legend, the sea foam from which the Greek goddess emerged was mixed with the blood of Uranus, castrated by his son Cronus. As a politician, Putin rose from the blood and muck of the Chechen war, and they have left their mark on his entire presidency.

Endless war in the North Caucasus has proven to be Putin's all-purpose campaign strategy. In the summer of 1999, the ruling elite was at a loss. Boris Yeltsin was clearly not up to running the country, but no suitable successor could be found. The obvious candidates -- Sergei Stepashin, Nikolai Bordyuzha and Sergei Kiriyenko -- weren't presidential material. But then Chechen separatists staged a raid into neighboring Dagestan. Putin directed the operation that drove the fighters from Dagestan, and after two apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Putin launched an "anti-terrorist operation" in Chechnya. Suddenly Putin was the No. 1 politician in the country.

Surprisingly, the heavy losses suffered by Russian troops in Chechnya and the generals' failure to establish control over the breakaway republic did nothing to dent Putin's popularity. To give Putin his due, his modus operandi from the day he became prime minister has differed markedly from the leadership style of former Kremlin bosses. Beginning in the 1980s, Soviet and then Russian leaders did everything possible to avoid taking responsibility for ordering the use of military force. Decades passed before we learned who had made the decision to send troops into Afghanistan. Like Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin preferred not to create a paper trail when he sent troops into combat. When things went wrong, the top brass took the heat. You may recall that after sending troops into Chechnya in 1994, Yeltsin suddenly underwent a nose operation. At least a week went by before the leadership explained anything to the people.

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DOHA, February 26 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Qatar charged two Russian intelligence agents on Thursday, February 26, with the assassination of former Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yanderbiyev.

Yanderbiyev, whose extradition from the Arab Gulf country had been demanded by Moscow, was killed in a bomb attack on his car in Doha Friday, February 13.

Qatar charged the two agents with the murder while a third Russian agent was freed after a short arrest, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

"The two suspects arrested during the inquiry into the murder of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev have appeared before the prosecutor, who, after questioning, brought charges of murder against them," a Qatari spokesman was quoted as saying by the official QNA news agency.

The report gave no details about the suspects.

The 51-year-old Yanderbiyev lived in Qatar "temporarily" for nearly three years with his family, despite a Russian extradition request and much to the Kremlin’s consternation.

After his assassination, Chechen resistance fighters fingered the Russian intelligence, which claimed it has anything to do with the murky plot.

Born in 1952, Yanderbiyev became vice-president of Chechnya under separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev.

He served as acting president of de facto independent Chechnya in 1996-97 and led its delegation at talks with then Russian president in 1996.

Yanderbiyev was replaced by Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected Chechen president in 1997

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