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...hostages remain captive in a large theater complex Friday, cowering for a third day under the guns of 30 or 40 Chechens - half of them reportedly women in headscarves; all of them reportedly wearing the explosive belts of the suicide bomber - who have threatening to blow the building unless Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya. The Chechens have reportedly set a deadline of 6am, Moscow time (10pm, EST) for their demands to be met, after which they'll begin executing their captives. They have described themselves as "smertniki" - those condemned to death, or kamikaze - and have killed at least one hostage...
...more likely lie in a long-established tradition among Chechen insurgents of mounting dramatic terror strikes aimed at tilting the balance of power back in their favor. The latest siege is reminiscent of the hostage drama at Budennovsk in 1995, when Chechen rebels led by Shamil Basayev seized a Russian hospital in order, he later said, to make Russians suffer the way Chechens had suffered. Although 166 hostages died when the very same Russian anti-terrorism unit that is currently surrounding the Moscow theater stormed the Buddenovsk hospital, Basayev and his men escaped. And soon afterwards, Moscow concluded an autonomy...
...major embarrassment for Putin, because it undermines his claim - officially announced last April - that the war in Chechnya is over. By restricting media coverage, Kremlin claims of success in the breakaway republic have gone largely unchallenged at home, except by occasional dramatic events such as the killing of 119 Russian personnel when a military helicopter was shot down in August. But violence in Chechnya has been ongoing, with large numbers continuing to die on both sides. And the fact that a heavily armed group of this size was able to travel undetected from the Caucasus to the capital may increase...
...Russian leader is not wrong about links between the Chechen insurgency and al-Qaeda: Arab volunteers have long fought in Chechnya under a Saudi commander known simply as Khattab (killed in action earlier this year), who had fought in Afghanistan and was believed to have been close to Osama bin Laden. And a few score al-Qaeda operatives took refuge alongside Chechen fighters hiding in Georgia last winter. Even there, however, there were clear differences - the al-Qaeda operatives urging the Chechens to attack Western targets in Russia, while many local Chechen commanders showed little interest in global 'jihad,' seeing...
Evidence released this summer details investments made by Shleifer and his father-in-law in Russian equities, Hay’s investment in a mutual fund with holdings entirely in Russia and Hay’s involvement in his girlfriend’s efforts to create the first Russia-based mutual fund...