Word: chechenization
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...light, Russian troops in combat gear move slowly along one of Grozny's ruined main streets, past makeshift crosses erected to their fallen comrades. Hugging the edge of the road to avoid snipers, they peer into the bushes, looking for radio-controlled mines and booby traps laid overnight by Chechen separatists. The soldiers--young conscripts fresh from the provinces and professionals here for the money--are tense, but they barely glance at most Chechens passing by. And the Chechens ignore them. The Russians don't find any mines this morning, and at a concrete-and-barbed-wire checkpoint, their comrades...
...what passes for life in Chechnya. When a mine blew up recently near the campus of Grozny University, a student looked at his watch and quipped, "Normalization is early today." Normalization is scheduled to enter a new phase this week, with the expected announcement of election results for the Chechen presidency. Chechens had little choice but to vote for Putin's hand-picked nominee, Akhmad Kadyrov, 52, head of the Moscow-appointed administration in Chechnya. The former mufti, or chief Islamic legal authority, of Chechnya was once an anti-Russian guerrilla fighter. He rallied to the Russian cause in late...
Once in office, the new Chechen President is to be given broad powers to run the republic, Putin recently told a group of journalists from the U.S. media, including TIME. A local legislature will also be elected. Then the Kremlin plans to announce that the war is over, reduce its troop numbers to a small permanent garrison and hand over pacification duties to the 13,000 men in the Chechen police force, which is widely viewed as Kadyrov's private army, and an undisclosed number of Kadyrov's personal security guards...
There's a neat symmetry to Putin's Chechenization scheme. The Chechen war, waged in 1994 by Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin, was supposed to be a brief punitive action against a small, unruly republic. But it ended in August 1996 with at least 80,000 Chechens dead, Russia humiliated and Chechnya independent in all but name. The experience was as scarring for Russia as Vietnam was for the U.S. In late 1999, after a series of apartment-block bombings in Moscow that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen terrorists, Putin, then Prime Minister, ordered the reinvasion of Chechnya, making...
...carry out preemptive strikes anywhere in the world its interests require. This is a departure from official Russian military doctrine, which currently calls only for sufficient defensive capability, says Alexander Pikayev, a security analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. Putin initiated the policy review last December, soon after Chechen rebels seized a Moscow theater; after a three-day siege, 129 died as Russian special forces used a sedative gas to storm the building. Ivanov now says it would be "irresponsible to confine the armed forces' prerogatives to the realm of external operations," adding that - as Chechnya proves - it's impossible...