Word: chechen
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...Litvinenko murder investigation, in fact, may have a profound effect on the image of President Vladimir Putin in the West - much like the Chechen war of 1999 did, or the dismembering the oil company Yukos and the imprisonment of its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or the Beslan terror tragedy. Each time, Putin chose a course of action that benefited his regime in short term, but deeply hurt his country's interests in the long term...
...Western media has been too lenient with Putin’s administration for far too long. But instead of condemning, say, Anna Politkovskaya’s death, the Chechen campaign, or even the Kremlin’s nuclear dealings with Iran, the media has made its criticism on the basis of irrational and sensationalistic fantasy scenarios. As comparisons with the luckier spy James Bond flooded in, The London Times’ Edward Lucas recommended the West got ready for a new Cold War. The Financial Times’ John Thornhill nostalgically remembered Churchill calling for Europe’s union...
Most famously, Litvinenko wrote Blowing Up Russia, which claimed FSB agents had actually planned the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that killed over two hundred civilians and lead to the second Chechen war. Supposedly, the Kremlin had handcrafted a causus belli sacrificing hundreds of Russian civilians in order to invade Chechnya and prevent its independence. I wonder how many friends he had left at the FSB after such a thesis...
...generation could only dream of such freedom. Still, Kondaurov's feeling of claustrophobia - what Victoria Webb of Amnesty International describes as "the shrinking space for individual voices in Russia" - now appears to be widely shared. This year, Stanislav Dmitrievsky was prosecuted and saw his human-rights group, the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, closed down after its newsletter reprinted speeches by Chechen separatist leaders. Amnesty International contends that shuttering the society "appears to be the latest move in a carefully calculated strategy to get rid of an organization that has been outspoken on behalf of victims of human-rights violations...
Stanislav Dmitrievsky Russian-Chechen Friendship Society Outraged by Russian policy in Chechnya, Dmitrievsky, 40, launched his society in Nizhni Novgorod in 2000 with the aim of helping victims of the war. He also started a regular newsletter, which once reprinted speeches by Chechen separatist leaders. A local court handed him a two-year suspended sentence in February on charges of inciting racial hatred, and the group was officially shut down in October. He's appealing the verdict to the Supreme Court. "They're trying to push us underground," he says, "but we'll keep working. We must keep telling society...