Word: moscow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Indeed, eight years of the Putin administration's attempts to pacify the region have not worked. Last night's bombings occurred against the backdrop of a rapidly worsening situation in the Caucasus. In Chechnya, shootouts and combat engagements between Russian forces, pro-Moscow Chechnyan authorities and Chenyan rebels opposed to Russian rule have been on the rise over the last several weeks. Just this morning, a rebel attack in the Chechen capital of Grozny left one police officer dead and another wounded. And such ethnic tensions are not confined to Chechnya. Mass violence between Russians and people from the Caucasus...
...still too early to conclude that Chechnyan rebels were responsible for this bomb. The last train bombing in Russia occurred in June 2005, on a Grozny-to-Moscow train, but the perpetrators were an ethnic Russian Nazi group. Putin prepares to stand down once his second presidential tenure expires in May 2008. Kremlin insiders don't know who will succeed him, but throughout history, acts of terror have proven useful rationales to seize or hold on to power. The apartment bombings of 1999 helped make Putin president. A seizure of a school by terrorists in the city of Beslan...
...Sakhalin book up weeks in advance. Prices in the capital city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk are outlandishly high - $18 for a whiskey - and visitors (who usually come voluntarily now, unlike in Chekhov's time) have their pick of nightspots every bit as over-the-top as those found in Moscow...
...Moscow keeps more than nine tenths of the 6% royalty that SE pays on oil and natural gas pumped from Sakhalin, leaving just crumbs for the islanders. Pensioners live off vegetables they grow themselves, and it's not uncommon to see bundled old women by the side of the street selling carrots, while new SUVs pass them by. And, despite all that natural gas, Sakhaliners still use coal to heat their homes - although the government may transform the island's infrastructure to use gas in the future. "People think Moscow uses the island to squeeze out all of our natural...
...Such complaints are unlikely to mean much in a Russia growing prosperous off its abundant oil and natural gas reserves. But while Moscow puts post-Soviet poverty behind it, the residents of Sakhalin are experiencing the energy boom in a manner familiar to many citizens of oil-rich nations. "I'm a native," says Vasili Plotnikov, a pensioner who owns a tiny country shack just a few miles from the massive LNG terminal. "I don't see any plus. I only see negatives." Maybe Chekhov's hell wasn't so bad, after...