Word: putin
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...Chechnya is boosting new prime minister Vladimir Putin's domestic political standing, but foreign governments are less impressed. Russian forces Friday continued to pound Chechen villages -- for the benefit of a live TV audience for the first time in Russian history - and Western journalists reported that some 50 refugees had been killed in a Russian rocket attack on a convoy heading for the border. But U.N. moves to send a humanitarian team to assess the needs of refugees from the conflict, and President Clinton's exhortation to the two sides to "stop fighting and start talking," signaled that Moscow...
...more immediate concern to Moscow, though, is the fact that the Chechnya issue is now beginning to dominate its discussions with Western leaders. Last week, it took over the agenda of a meeting between Putin and the European Union, which had been scheduled to discuss economic assistance. And now Washington is stepping up its criticism, urging Russia to solve its conflict with Chechnya through dialogue. "Chechnya threatens to displace Russia's preferred concerns at the top of the agenda in its dealings with the West," says Meier. Even more alarming for the Kremlin is the fact that Washington is casting...
...exactly hiding out," says Meier. "It would require a stretch of the imagination to believe that the Russian special forces don?t know where he is." Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the mounting speculation that President Boris Yeltsin is unhappy with the spectacular rise in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin?s popularity prompted by the Chechnya operation. "Even though the Kremlin?s game plan was to use the war to get Putin elected president next year, there?s now talk that Yeltsin is unhappy about his prime minister getting all the glory. That?s even raised the fear that Putin...
...called a strike on an arms depot, Western reporters inside Grozny reported seeing scores of broken bodies strewn across the marketplace and the corpses of a large number of women and babies at the maternity home. The U.S. expressed concern over the civilian casualties, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held tense talks on the crisis at a meeting on aid with European Union leaders in Finland Friday ? the E.U. urged Moscow to halt its offensive and negotiate, but Putin stuck to his guns. Hardly surprising, since the Chechnya campaign is the neophyte prime minister?s prime opportunity to make...
...really driving the war machine is not military necessity or strategic calculation or even the fear of terrorist attack. It is the Kremlin's politics of survival. Russia's leaders are waging a war of succession, designed by Kremlin imagemakers to prove to the Russian electorate that Prime Minister Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel hastily slapped into office by Yeltsin two months ago, is a real man, capable of leading Russia as President when Yeltsin steps down next year. The Kremlin logic is clear: Putin fights a short, brilliant war, his popularity rockets, and Yeltsin backers pump millions...