Word: russian
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...essential to understand the reasons the Russians have adopted this strategy. In order to maintain popularity, they must minimize Russian troop casualties. It is easy to condemn this strategy and its real and atrocious human cost, but it is not unlike American justification for the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese cities during WWII. Moreover, as in all wars with guerrilla fighters, it is often hard to tell Chechen rebels from ordinary villagers...
...Chechens innocent in these conflicts. In the last war some Chechen commanders were notorious for raiding Russian territory and taking villagers hostage, in one case even seizing a hospital and its patients...
...past and present wrongs against a minority group as justification for their sovereignty. It is especially tempting with the Chechens, who have a remarkable courage and perseverance in the face of long odds, which they demostrated in the fiercely noble stand a few Chechen fighters made against the massive Russian army this decade...
...Chechnya were to gain independence in this war, the devastation would be even worse and Russian aid even less forthcoming. Life for most people in Chechens would be nasty, brutish and short. The unfortunate fact is that the rule of a distant, incompetent and corrupt government is a better way to live than the war of all against all which would ensue in an independent, but devastated Chechnya...
...keeping Chechnya under Russian control is stricken with almost as many problems. The devastation the Russian army has left in its wake has done irreparable damage to any sort of legitimacy the Russian government might have had to rule the Chechens. Russia recently tried to organize a loyalist government--the only Chechen who would co-operate with them was a former mayor of Grozny in Russian prison following his conviction for embezzlement. In every shelled village, everyone who is killed or maimed leaves behind several family members who fiercely hate the Russian army and its rule...