Word: putin
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...confident, however, that in the long run President Vladimir Putin's prestige won't suffer in Russian eyes as a result. Russians really like the fact that there's a tough guy running the state. And they don't expect the state to be a benign entity - over the last hundred years, they've come to expect that any situation in which the state's authority is challenged results in a lot of unpleasantness...
...TIME.com: Still, here's Putin having swallow the fact that his security forces killed two hostages for each terrorist, in an operation resulting from a war that he said was over...
...Putin is not linking this incident to the war in Chechnya (which he says is over); he's saying this hostage crisis was a product of international terrorism. He's trying to very hard hitch himself to the American bandwagon, saying this has proven, as Russians say, on their own skin, that Russia is a target of international terrorism, and that they'll fight it by any means necessary. And in doing so, Putin is making a terrible mistake...
...question. But al-Qaeda would have blown up the theater and everyone in it as soon as they were inside, and then celebrated the fact that they killed 800 Russians. These Chechens actually had a series of demands - they were totally unrealistic, of course, and there was no way Putin was ever going to agree to withdraw his forces from Chechnya. Nor did they have any exit strategy. But they were still using terrorism as a means, however misguided and brutal, of exerting political pressure...
...with the brush of international terrorism is not only incorrect; it's disastrous political mistake. Putin is not saying we have a problem in Chechnya that has to be resolved. He's saying simply these are international terrorists that have to be eliminated. But what he's ignoring is the frightening reality on the ground that many young Chechens have come to believe they have nothing to lose, that they're going to die by age 30 and that they want to go down fighting, hoping to kill as many Russians as they can. The 50 people who seized...