RUSSIA: Russian President Vladimir Putin made a lightning visit to Chechnya yesterday, to visit the grave of its assassinated leader a week before his successor is elected.
But preparations for the vote were overshadowed by a series of gun battles in the regional capital, Grozny, where the Russian military said as many as 50 separatist rebels and a dozen policemen and soldiers were killed.
"We lost a very courageous, talented and exceptionally decent person," Mr Putin said at the grave of Mr Akhmad Kadyrov, who was blown up during a televised celebration ceremony at Grozny's main stadium in May.
A sombre Mr Putin, dressed in black, laid carnations in the cemetery in Mr Kadyrov's hometown of Tsentoroi, after arriving in Chechnya in the early morning on a trip that was shrouded in secrecy for security reasons.
"He had no other aim in his life but one - service to his own people," he said of Mr Kadyrov, a rebel during a 1994-6 war with Moscow who came over to the Kremlin's side when it sent troops back into the republic almost five years ago.
"He moved toward this goal on a difficult path, but was always honest. And our task - our obligation - is to carry out all that Akhmad Kadyrov planned, all his good works and initiatives."
Mr Putin then flew to his presidential villa in Sochi on the Black Sea, where he met Mr Kadyrov's son, Ramzan, and Mr Alu Alkhanov, the Chechen Interior Minister who is Moscow's favoured candidate in elections to find a new regional leader next Sunday.
Just as in Mr Kadyrov's election last year, Mr Alkhanov's main rival in the ballot has been excluded on a technicality, and rights groups and democracy watchdogs believe the vote will be rigged. No monitors of international standing are expected to be allowed to witness voting in the region, where Russian troops still die every day in bomb attacks.
Mr Putin made no mention of heavy fighting overnight in Grozny, from where contradictory reports emerged over casualty numbers and the extent of the damage. Some local officials said polling stations in the devastated city had been attacked.
Military spokesman Maj Gen Ilya Shabalkin said plans for a major rebel attack had been foiled. "Federal forces had operational information regarding such plans by the rebels. The locations of specific armed groups was established and federal units launched preventative strikes upon them," he said.
Moscow says Chechnya's separatists are funded by radical Islamic groups linked to Al-Qaeda. The rebels deny that, but have pledged to kill whoever wins next week's vote.