RUSSIA: The crisis places Vladimir Putin in a lose-lose situation. Jonathan Eyal explains why the hostage crisis will damage the Russian president
Almost regardless of how the hostage crisis is resolved in Moscow, the reputation of President Vladimir Putin is guaranteed to suffer. A failed attempt to free the hostages will administer a heavy blow to the already poor morale of the Russian armed forces. However, even a happy conclusion of the affair will have its severe repercussions.
Ordinary Russians will be forced to realise that they cannot aspire to security and stability as long as the Chechen conflict continues and Western governments will be forced to admit that their indifference to the vicious war in Chechnya was at least a contributing factor to the current tragedy.
A mere three years ago, few Russians knew of Vladimir Putin, a minor former security services officer. The man who subsequently became president literally shot his way to fame on the back of another terrorist tragedy: the bombing of various apartment blocks in 1999, which resulted in heavy loss of life.
No clear evidence was ever produced on the culprits for these outrages, but the episode allowed Putin to unleash a massive military campaign against Chechnya immediately thereafter.
Within months, the Russian troops were victorious; a rebellious Muslim-dominated province which provided Moscow with an almost permanent headache for a decade appeared subdued and a grateful nation rewarded Putin with a massive victory in the subsequent presidential electoral campaign. Putin made his reputation on Chechnya and he is now risking everything on the same conflict.
The war which Putin conducted was vicious; indeed, Russian troops did not even make an effort to pretend otherwise.
Copying some of NATO's tactics in the Kosovo war which took place more or less at the same time, the Russian air force pulverised everything in sight; most of Chechnya's cities were erased and those civilians lucky enough to survive were simply chased away to the mountains by heavy columns of Russian tanks. It was a picture resembling the worst horrors of the second World War.
Behind the scenes, even worse events were taking place. Thousands of "Muslims" (which in the Russian parlance often meant anyone with a darker skin) were rounded up in Moscow by the police and expelled from the capital, simply because of who they were, rather than what they did.
This openly racist campaign, officially sanctioned by the government, continued for months. Yet with some notable exceptions among a small band of intellectuals few were perturbed by these developments; for most Russians, the Chechens remained vermin, best exterminated as quickly as possible.
As the campaign continued, Putin's popularity soared. When the Russian President promised that the "dictatorship of the law" would be his administration's motto, most of his citizens applauded but failed to enquire what this may mean.
The reality was that Putin's Chechnya policy remained a huge gamble, which is now unravelling with the hostage crisis. By unleashing the war, the Russian leader not only discarded a ceasefire which operated in Chechnya since the mid-1990s, but he also ruled out any future negotiated solution to the conflict.
Putin's gamble was that the province would ultimately be subdued by force and would remain pliant for ever: indeed, when his troops marched into Grozny, the Chechen capital, Putin triumphantly proclaimed that, henceforth, the territory would be ruled directly from Moscow, with no local autonomy. By adopting this approach, the Russian president left the Chechens with only two options: either end the fighting or be subdued completely.
The result was a swelling in the number of Chechen fighters and the consequence was equally predictable: after the initial victory, Russian troops were bogged down in daily skirmishes and casualties among Russian soldiers started to mount again.
For a while, this did not affect Putin very much. The overall number of military casualties was smaller than during the first Chechen war in the early 1990s. The casualties were also spread over a longer period of time and therefore did not create public anxiety.
Most of the Russian soldiers unfortunate enough to serve in Chechnya came from poor families in the countryside; richer Russians in the cities were able to bribe the authorities in order to exempt their sons from military service in that hellish province.
So, a collective sense of amnesia descended. Most Russians knew that the war continued and that terrible things were happening in Chechnya but few bothered to ask what was going on, provided that their sons did not serve there and that terrorism did not return to Russia's main cities.
Putin's claim that he had brought security to his country was taken at face value and his popularity continued to soar.
In a curious way, the terrorist attacks on the US initially merely strengthened Putin's hand. From the moment planes ploughed into New York's twin towers, the Kremlin's message was that the entire world was coming around to Russia's views.
President Vladimir Putin's aides were also quick to allege that the Chechen fighters and bin Laden were directly connected and planned the attacks on the US together.
Few Western governments bought this interpretation, but none wished to pick an argument with Moscow. Russia's co-operation was needed for the war in Afghanistan and is still needed for the possible war in Iraq. The Chechens, who anyway had few sympathisers in the West, were simply expendable.
For the first time in years, the Russians no longer had to contend with even the mild irritant of criticism which the West used to mete out after each Chechen campaign.
Nothing should excuse hostage-taking, but it is clear that Russian policies coupled with western indifference led directly to the latest attack in Moscow.
The Chechens know that only by hitting in the heart of the capital, a mere few kilometres from Putin's office, would ordinary Russians realise that the war is far from over. The Chechens are also determined to attract Western attention; one of the first demands of the hostage-takers in Moscow was to meet foreign ambassadors.
The Russian president's decision to postpone his travel to a summit where he was due to meet President Bush this weekend is a clear indication that Putin is only too aware of just how high the stakes are but his choices are actually limited.
He can order Russian special forces into action but the omens are not good: a similar operation to relieve hostages held by Chechens in a hospital in southern Russia a decade ago was botched and ended with the death of more than 100 people.
Select units of the Russian forces have undergone specific training since then, in order to avert similar disasters but, given the number of hostages and the Chechens involved, innocent victims are virtually guaranteed in any rescue operation.
The Russian president can try to negotiate a peaceful end to the affair, but it is difficult to see how this could be done without a major loss of face for the entire Moscow leadership.
Either way, Putin is now confronted by all the inherent contradictions of his policies. Since he came to power, he operated in the belief that the only good Muslim was a dead Muslim; the Chechens are now repaying him in kind and the man who claimed to have restored order to Russia now has to contend with the biggest act of terrorism Moscow has seen.
Jonathan Eyal is director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London