January 30, 2000    
This Date's Issues: 4078 4079

Johnson's Russia List
#4079
30 January 2000
davidjohnson@erols.com

[Note from David Johnson:
1. Reuters: DAVOS-Albright says worried over ex-Soviet poverty.
2. AFP: Putin loses luster one month into Kremlin term.
3. Reuters: Russian official criticises government over HIV.
4. Newsday: Michael Slackman, Putin's Shadowy Past/Back-door deals marked his time as a city official.
5. Baltimore Sun: Will Englund, Ex-Soviet agent may be tied to politician's shooting death. Latvia detains veteran of special police unit, but Russians uninterested. (Re Starovoitova murder)
6. The Times (UK): Killing time instead of the Russians. Alice Lagnado in hiding with Chechens in their village 'prison'.
7. The Electric Telegraph (UK): Edward Luttwak, Putin cannot hope to end the rebels' threat, only reduce it.
8. Ira Straus: Russia-NATO - another run around the same circle?]

*******

#1
DAVOS-Albright says worried over ex-Soviet poverty
By Elaine Monaghan

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 30 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine 
Albright said on Sunday the failure of democracy to bring prosperity to many 
people in former Soviet states raised the risk of increasing support for 
authoritarianism. 

"Such frustrations raise the risk there and elsewhere that public confidence 
in elected government will erode -- and support grow for failed remedies from 
the past, including protectionism and authoritarianism," she said in a speech 
at the World Economic Forum. 

But the answer was to bring more countries into the global economy and give 
all who deserved it a place at the table of democracy, Albright said on the 
eve of a visit to Moscow. 

"That is a mighty tall order. But there is no better time than the start of a 
new century to design a great mission," she told some of the world's most 
powerful and richest people. 

She vowed not to become complacent in efforts to increase the number of 
countries with universal suffrage and fair elections, which had grown from 
zero a century ago to 120 now. 

It was "balderdash" to see corruption as democracy's "evil twin" just because 
some democracies had failed or fallen because of it. 

Under Communism -- which the Czech-born stateswoman's family fled before 
settling in the United States -- the elite had enjoyed much broader unfair 
advantages, such as the exclusive areas filled with country houses or dachas 
on the prettier edges of Moscow, Kiev and other former Soviet cities. 

"With its Party-based privileges, private dachas and stores reserved for the 
elite, Communism became a synonym for corruption," she said. 

"And dictators from Marcos to Mobutu robbed their countries blind," she said, 
referring to Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko, ousted leaders of the 
Philippines and the former Zaire, respectively, who enjoyed Western support 
in their heyday. 

UNDERSTANDING FOR RUSSIA'S DIFFICULTIES 

Her comments on the former Soviet Union seemed to represent an expression of 
understanding for the difficulties many Russians face at a time of increasing 
anti-Western sentiment in in the declining former superpower. 

They were also a pointer to Russia to maintain economic reform and seek 
increased economic openness as the country prepares to elect a replacement in 
March for Boris Yeltsin who resigned as president on New Year's Eve. 

She has described Acting President Vladimir Putin, the former KGB man who is 
hot favourite to win and who she is due to meet for the first time on 
Tuesday, as a leading reformer. 

But U.S. officials say they will wait to see what his policies will be before 
drawing broader conclusions. 

In the interests of market democracy, Albright said companies also had to be 
far-sighted in the way they behaved. 

She praised a Louisiana sugar company, F.C. Schaffer, which had given the 
Ethiopian government free technical assistance on how free markets work. 

She also piled praise on Xerox of Brazil for setting up a library to preserve 
the South American country's history. 

"The United States has a strong interest in adding to the ranks of stable and 
prosperous democracies," she said. 

"We have not the slightest interest in imposing our culture on others or in 
turning foreign nations into Xerox copies of ourselves." 

*******

#2
Putin loses luster one month into Kremlin term

MOSCOW, Jan 30 (AFP) - 
Just one month into his Kremlin term, the luster has worn off acting 
President Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB spy once welcomed by Russians as an 
encouraging replacement to the aging Boris Yeltsin.

The brutal war in Chechnya has stalled at the gates of Grozny. Putin has 
witnessed an embarrassing boycott of parliament by some of his own former 
allies. And his sky-high ratings are starting to slide.

Political analysts do not question whether Putin will be elected president in 
the March 26 elections, but they wonder how long he will hold on to power 
once he is.

"There is no such political entity as Vladimir Putin. He exists solely as a 
Kremlin invention," said Boris Kagarlitsky, an analyst with the Russian 
Academy of Sciences' Institute of Comparative Political Studies.

"Yeltsin as a politician was able to follow his own line. He played the 
various interests off of each other, creating an equilibrium. But Putin has 
no control over things. Right now it's a free-for-all."

The interests Kagarlitsky speaks of range from the natural gas giant Gazprom 
to media and oil holdings of tycoon Boris Berezovsky, recently elected to 
parliament.

They also include such people as former economy chief and current energy tsar 
Anatoly Chubais, a liberal with hawkish views on Chechnya.

All, at times grudgingly, rallied behind Yeltsin in the past. But few believe 
that Putin can forge the warring clans into one.

"He cannot hold on to a country like Russia, not in the state that it is in. 
He is not a politician," Kagarlitsky said. "Right now Putin is only an 
illusion, a propaganda invention."

Yeltsin named Putin his favored successor before retiring December 31, and 
the former spy-master's election chances today are immense. He still picks up 
more than 50 percent support in opinion polls, leaving opponents like 
Communist Gennady Zyuganov and liberal Grigory Yavlinsky in the dust.

Yet Putin has shown cracks. Strategists suggest that Putin had little to do 
with a political alliance in parliament between his favored Unity faction and 
the Communists.

Most say it was a Kremlin ploy to keep other Putin opponents out of power. 
But it backfired dramatically when nearly a third of the State Duma staged a 
boycott, while pundits wondered what to make of the Kremlin-Communist bridge.

Putin looked uncomfortable when first broaching the subject after staying out 
of the public limelight for nearly a week. More importantly, he no longer 
looked untouchable, with politicians openly discussing his faults.

Several western economists in the meantime noted that Putin may in fact be 
much less independent from shadowy and unpopular tycoons like Berezovksy than 
thought previously.

More trouble came when a television poll showed that support for the war in 
Chechnya has waned to a meager 25 percent. The study was not scientific, but 
it clashed profoundly with a similar poll at the start of the ground 
offensive in October, which put public support at more than 70 percent.

And this month, the first reports emerged questioning the very essence of 
Putin's tough-guy image -- his KGB past. Several former counter-intelligence 
experts noted that his career as a spy was probably a bust, and that he had 
been headed for early retirment.

What most suggest now is that political harmony in Russia will last only 
until Putin is elected president. After that, some say, the country may 
degenerate into political chaos again.

"You can only keep up a certain image in the media for one or two months," 
Kagarlitsky said. "Putin has nothing to back that image up with."

*******

#3
Russian official criticises government over HIV

MOSCOW, Jan 29 (Reuters) - A top Russian health official criticised the 
government on Saturday for not taking measures to prevent a rapid rise in the 
number of new HIV cases in the vast country, Interfax news agency reported. 

It quoted Gennady Onishenko, a senior public health official, as saying cases 
of HIV more than trebled in 1999 compared to 1998. He said 14,980 new cases 
of HIV, the human immunodeficiency illness which causes AIDS, were recorded 
last year out of a population of about 147 million. 

In a report, Onishenko said the main reason for the surge in HIV was the 
government's lack of activity in fighting drug abuse and prostitution -- two 
of the main causes of the spread of the illness. 

The report showed that 75 percent of infected people between the ages of 15 
and 29 were drug addicts who used needles. 

Onishenko also expressed concern over the spread of infection in hospitals 
where the illness is passed on through blood transfusions and said certain 
centres should take more thorough measures in checking donors' blood. 

HIV has spread in Russia at a time when infection rates have been steady and 
declining for a number of years in Europe and North America. Few Russians can 
afford the expensive new treatments that have been discovered in the past few 
years. 

******

#4
Newsday
30 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Putin's Shadowy Past / Back - door deals marked his time as a city official
By Michael Slackman. RUSSIA CORRESPONDENT 

St. Petersburg, Russia-Valery Kramnick is nothing if not 
direct,so when a top city official asked him in 1995 how to win seats in 
parliament for a new Kremlin-backed party, the political consultant laid out 
a 
blunt strategy: "I told him he would have to wage a very aggressive campaign 
and be willing to falsify results."

Kramnick stood motionless, staring into a blank face, unsure how his advice 
would play. Then the official cracked a broad smile and said: "With such a 
consultant I will talk."

That official was Vladimir Putin, now Russia's acting president. While 
Putin's 
career as a KGB spy leaves his ideas and beliefs shrouded in mystery, he did 
take a six-year turn as a government bureaucrat through St. Petersburg, where 
he left a trail of clues that illuminate what Russia, and the world, can 
expect from a Putin administration.

As first deputy mayor in the 1990s, and as the day-to-day manager of city 
business, Putin was the most influential person in city hall at a time when 
rampant corruption took hold of the city. While he cannot be solely blamed 
for what happened-nor can it be said whether he personally profited-St. 
Petersburg,
once the grand capital of the czars, became Russia's crime capital under his 
watch.

"I have no grounds to say Vladimir Putin had some personal interest in the 
corruption," said Alexander Belyaev, a former chairman of the city 
legislature,
who frequently clashed with the administration. "But obviously he tried to 
reach his goal by taking shortcuts. I think to some extent that method 
automatically delivered a system of corruption."

Newsday has reviewed a variety of deals that Putin helped implement at a time 
when Russia was shaking free from the centrally controlled Soviet economy. 
Though Putin was technically the No. 2 man in St. Petersburg, by many 
accounts 
he was the one running the city, in many ways eclipsing his mentor, Mayor 
Anatoly Sobchak.

Putin the city bureaucrat had a penchant for making unilateral decisions, 
viewing as unnecessary such steps as competitive bidding. In this way he was 
instrumental in giving away city-owned housing for such a low price that the 
court eventually ordered a building returned; locked the city into a 
$2-million
construction loan that was never repaid and the project never built; issued 
export licenses that were supposed to generate income for the city, only to 
see
oil and minerals being sold at below market costs; and entered a financial 
deal with a hospital that eventually cost the city millions of dollars in 
lost revenue.

Details of these and many other deals that went awry in St. Petersburg during 
Putin's tenure were difficult to come by because officials refuse to make 
public certain records and because of a strong sense of fear among many with 
firsthand knowledge.

"We will think about your security," Roman Tespov, a former KGB agent whose 
private security firm had provided protection for Putin, said to a Newsday 
reporter, adding that the reporter might end up in the hospital in "intensive 
care."

Putin's press office refused three written requests for comment about his 
activities in the mayor's office. Sobchak also refused to be interviewed or 
to respond to written questions.

But despite the corruption that swirled around him, Putin also developed a 
reputation as a tough negotiator and as a strong, effective and pragmatic 
leader.

In this time of economic and moral decay in Russia, many Russians seem to 
want 
just such a strong leader, someone who can offer a quick fix to the country's 
problems whether or not he uses democratic or legally acceptable means to get 
things done. 

"It was a time when a new system was being constructed, and no one knew how 
it 
should work," said Sergei Nikiforov, a former member of the St. Petersburg 
city
council. "By his activities, Putin took control. I got the impression, Putin 
is a very good manager."

Putin first became a manager when he returned to his native St. Petersburg 
from
years of working as a spy in East Germany as the Soviet Union melted away. 
He went to work as an adviser to Sobchak, his law school professor. Sobchak 
was elected to the city council in 1990 and a year later was elected mayor. 
He gave Putin an influential economic post, and by 1994 Putin was the first 
vice mayor
and, according to many, had to sign off on every contract, deal or piece of 
legislation. Sobchak was a celebrity, traveling the world, giving speeches 
and writing books, while Putin was left to run the government.

"You cannot say that Putin worked for Sobchak," Tespov said. He said Putin 
answered to no one.

As Sobchak's other aides were either fired, arrested, or in one case, 
assassinated, Putin grew stronger, taking control of most economic activity 
and coordinating activities among all security forces, including the army, 
customs
and the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. He took sole control of 
establishing the gambling industry in the region, creating a system that 
ensured the state owned 51 percent of every casino it licensed.

"Putin happened to be practically the only one who preserved his position 
under
Sobchak," wrote former city legislator Boris Vishnevsky in a 1998 edition of 
the paper Nezavisimaya Gazetta, suggesting there was truth to the rumor that 
Putin had actually been assigned to Sobchak by the KGB. "Putin had become, de 
jure and de facto, one of the most evident and influential figures in city 
politics."

These first post-Soviet days were difficult for the city. It had little hard 
currency to help buy goods abroad and experienced shortages of everything, 
especially food. From 1990 to 1992 the city rationed food, including meat and 
bread. With this as the backdrop, St. Petersburg won the right from the 
federal
government to issue licenses for exporting oil and nonferrous metals as a 
way 
to earn hard currency to pay for food imports. Putin was in charge of the 
program.

After the licenses were issued, city council members wondered where the money 
was going, and why affordable food was not showing up in stores. The council 
called for an investigation and appointed lawmaker Marina Salie to head it. 
According to Salie and two other members of the council, the investigation 
concluded that Putin had arranged for the export of materials at below market 
cost, while allowing food to be imported at above market cost. Salie said her 
group also found that some of the businesses who received the licenses were 
based in Moscow, which defeated the goal of bringing revenue to her city. The 
council presented its findings at a public meeting in which it called on 
Sobchak to fire Putin.

"Putin had no humanity," Salie said in a recent interview. "He is a very 
careful person. Very careful. But he didn't care about food." Former council 
member Nikiforov was at the same meeting and confirmed the findings. But he 
said he was impressed with the manner in which Putin handled himself. He said 
Putin acknowledged that mistakes were made and promised to fix them. To 
Nikiforov, Putin's performance was extraordinary. He said it was the first 
time
he had ever seen a member of the executive branch engage the legislature in 
dialogue and respond to their legislators' concerns. "Putin showed to us 
concern and a willingness to cooperate," he said.

The mayor did not fire his chief aide, and the council turned its findings 
over
to a federal oversight agency, which never brought charges. Nobody ever 
determined publicly who was getting rich from the scheme.

The following year, Putin was involved in implementing a deal that would come 
to represent one of his government's most public blunders-a deal formalized 
by 
Sobchak but, former officials said, involving Putin. The city agreed to lend 
a private company, Trust XX, $2 million directly from the city budget for 
three years at a below-market interest rate of 6 percent. The goal was to 
build the Peter the Great Tower, a business, shopping and hotel center that 
was supposed 
to be the biggest in the city. But the building was never built, and the loan 
was never repaid. After Sobchak was defeated in 1996, the new administration 
attempted to recover the debt, but the company filed for bankruptcy and 
reportedly transferred all of its assets to another corporation.

Even before the deal went sour, the city had run into trouble with Trust XX, 
headed by Sergei Nikeshin, a building magnate who is now on the city council. 
Vishnevsky, a former council member who still works on the staff of the city 
legislature, said that in 1992 the city transferred to Trust XX a dormitory 
complex at far below cost-a sale that a court eventually deemed illegal. But 
Trust XX said that if it were to return the property it wanted $20 million, 
what it estimated the property was worth years later. Or, it offered the city 
the property back in satisfaction for the loan. Vishnevsky said nothing has 
been resolved.

In 1995, Putin again found himself in the center of a murky financial 
scandal, 
one that cost the city a valuable piece of real estate and millions of 
dollars 
in rental income. A hospital had asked Sobchak for a $3 million loan to buy 
imported medical equipment. Sobchak refused the loan but agreed to have the 
city secure a bank loan and assigned Putin to help work out the details, 
according to Vishnevsky and news reports from the time.

The city entered into a contract that gave the hospital its money while the 
city posted as collateral a sprawling complex on the Square of Proletarian 
Dictatorship. By spring, 1996, the loan had not been repaid and the bank 
called
in its debt-which it estimated at $12.2 million. City council officials had 
no idea about the deal and went to look for a contract, but learned none had 
been
filed as required. Eventually, the building was handed over to the bank, 
rent free, for 49 years, and the local media bemoaned the loss of a city 
treasure.

The final insult continues to this day, with the hospital advertising 
expensive
medical services, using the equipment the city building had bought.

That same year, Putin got his first real political assignment. The Kremlin 
had 
created a new party called Our Home is Russia, which was designed to support 
President Boris Yeltsin's agenda in the Duma. Putin was put in charge of the 
party's St. Petersburg operation. That's when he called on consultant 
Kramnick for advice.

Kramnick said Putin was delighted by his advice, invited him in, even offered 
him a consulting job. 

"I cannot say he did this," Kramnick said of his advice to falsify election 
records. "But he was happy to speak about it. He is a pragmatist." 

Putin's efforts eventually proved unsuccessful as the party failed to meet 
its 
goals in St. Petersburg. A year later Sobchak was defeated for re-election 
and 
eventually fled the country to escape a corruption probe. He returned to 
Russia only when Putin emerged in August as prime minister.

What comes next? "Who knows what will happen in the first year of a Putin 
presidency?" said the former KGB agent, Tespov. "You can call him a populist, 
I think he is doing the right thing."

*******

#5
Baltimore Sun
30 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Ex-Soviet agent may be tied to politician's shooting death
Latvia detains veteran of special police unit, but Russians uninterested
By Will Englund 
Sun Foreign Staff 

RIGA, Latvia -- On Nov. 21, 1998, Galina Starovoitova and an aide climbed the 
darkened stairwell of her St. Petersburg apartment house, where two killers 
carrying three guns awaited their chance to silence one of Russia's foremost 
democrats.

Starovoitova, a member of parliament, was shot dead. The aide, Ruslan Linkov, 
was gravely wounded but survived. Two guns were dropped on the stairs. The 
third was not found.

The killing was shocking and troubling. Starovoitova was one of the few 
democrats whose reputation was unblemished, a proud and courageous woman who 
believed in a quixotic fight for justice. Her killing left the unmistakable 
impression that violence had triumphed over Russia's feeble attempts to 
create a law-abiding democracy -- and the general expectation was that, like 
so many other high-profile killings, it would go unsolved.

But police in Latvia believe they may have stumbled onto someone who had a 
hand in the killing. His name is Konstantin Nikulin, and he is a former 
member of a special police agency set up in the dying days of the Soviet 
Union, an agency that dispatched its Latvia detachment into Riga to spread 
fear, disruption and violence, to keep the republic off balance and unable to 
move toward independence from Mos cow.

This police group, called the OMON, failed. Latvia proclaimed its 
independence in August 1991 and has spent the past decade trying, not always 
successfully or fairly, to deal with the heritage of Russian occupation and 
Communist rule.

Within days of independence, members of OMON were airlifted to Russia. But 
the OMON, too, has a heritage. The violence, once unleashed, has lived on. 
And it has come back to haunt the country that set these killers in motion.

The Latvian police picked up Nikulin in another case in October.

After he had been detained, they began to suspect a link to the Starovoitova 
killing. They say they sent evidence to their counterparts in St. Petersburg 
for analysis but have heard nothing since. The Federal Security Service 
office in St. Petersburg, which is investigating Starovoitova's death, 
appears to be uninterested in the Latvian discovery.

Russian investigators have made no move to question Nikulin and seem to be 
content to let him remain in Riga.

In a country where dozens of high-profile killings have gone unsolved, their 
hands-off attitude in this case raises questions about their dedication.

Group's origins

A decade ago, the Soviet Union was an uneasy, anxious nation. Organized 
criminal gangs taking advantage of the loosened economic structure, and a 
wholly unexpected burst of nationalist feeling in non-Slavic republics such 
as Latvia, led to the creation of the OMON (Special Mission Militia 
Detachment). It was tough and ruthless.

And though it was set up to fight economic crime, it soon became a handy 
instrument in the Communist Party's fight against separatism.

In October 1990, the Riga OMON started attacking political demonstrators. 
People were beaten in the streets. On several occasions from Jan. 14 to 16, 
1990, as a Soviet crackdown spread throughout the Baltics, OMON forces in 
Riga fired on barricades that had been set up on a bridge leading into the 
city. One man was killed.

On the night of Jan. 20, they assaulted the local police headquarters. Rumors 
spread that local police had been handing out weapons to nationalist groups. 
The OMON pulled up in several military vehicles and began firing. Hundreds of 
shots were sprayed in various directions. Five people were killed, one of 
them a television cameraman, the others bystanders in an adjacent park.

It had been an exercise in intimidation, and it was one of the defining 
moments in Latvia's quest for independence. But at the time no one knew where 
events would lead.

There were more attacks: on a customhouse in May 1991; on police headquarters 
again in August, when Soviet hard-liners were attempting a coup against 
then-President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Moscow; and the next day on a police 
academy.

The Soviet coup attempt collapsed, and within days Latvia declared 
independence. On Aug. 26, the Riga OMON detachment, about 150 strong, packed 
up planeloads of stolen cars and weapons and flew to Tyumen, in Siberia.

With them was Konstantin Nikulin.

Victim opposed hiring

Tyumen, an oil town, proved to hold few charms for men who had been living in 
the Baltic republics. They drifted to St. Petersburg, several seeking 
important police posts there. Starovoitova, who had been campaigning for 
democracy and the rule of law since the 1980s, strongly -- and successfully 
-- urged local officials to keep the Riga OMON veterans off the force. It is 
evident that some took up racketeering and contract murder.

Latvian police suspect that Nikulin was associated with Yuri Shutov, a former 
member of the city council who has been charged with ordering eight killings.

Nikulin's parents, girlfriend and son were living in Riga, and he began to 
move between Riga and St. Petersburg, apparently with false documents.

Over the past nine years, relations between Latvia and Russia have never been 
good on a variety of issues, and the history of the Riga OMON has become a 
symbolic rallying point for both sides. The OMON veterans -- most of whom 
were ethnic Russians -- have been portrayed on Russian television as heroes 
and martyrs.

In Riga, on the other hand, the people they killed are commemorated with 
solemn markers.

Veterans charged in Latvia

In 1997, 15 of the veterans living in Latvia, including Nikulin, were charged 
with trying to overthrow the state because of their participation in events 
in 1990 and 1991. They had been underlings; their commanders are living in 
Russia. But the point of the trial had more to do with establishing the truth 
of what happened, Judge Valdemar Zarins says today, than in meting out 
justice.

In the summer of 1998, investigators from neighboring Lithuania asked to 
interrogate Nikulin about an attack on a customhouse in the town of 
Medininkai on July 30, 1991, that left eight customs officers dead. Nikulin 
had been with an OMON detachment that was in Lithuania at that time. The 
killings took place as President George Bush was arriving in Moscow for his 
last summit with Gorbachev, and they underscored the dangerous instability of 
the Soviet Union in its final days.

After meeting with the investigators, Nikulin went into hiding, and a warrant 
was issued for his arrest. The trial continued without him. Last year, 
another defendant, Mikhail Bruy, was killed.

The remaining 10 defendants were convicted, but seven were given suspended 
sentences and three were released in November.

"It wouldn't be politically right to put them in jail when their leaders are 
walking freely in Russia today," says prosecutor Elmars Margevics.

A month before the sentencing, police had caught up with Nikulin again, and 
this time they weren't letting him go. He was arrested in a cafe in Riga, and 
police told him he was a suspect in the killing of Arnis Skistirs, who owned 
a grain alcohol business and had been shot dead as he stood outside the 
Russian Embassy.

A search of Nikulin's apartment turned up a Heckler & Koch 9 mm pistol, an 
expensive and rare weapon manufactured in Germany. Investigators knew that it 
was the same type as the gun that was missing from the scene of 
Starovoitova's death, according to Krists Leiskalns, a spokesman for the 
Latvia State Police. Leiskalns says they have other information also 
suggesting a link.

Nikulin's lawyer, Oskars Rode, says his client had found the gun but couldn't 
turn it in because he knew a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Rode 
denies that Nikulin had anything to do with Skistirs' killing, the Lithuanian 
customhouse attack or Starovoitova's death.

Asked whether Nikulin, who has been unemployed since he left the OMON in 
1991, had been a member of a criminal gang in St. Petersburg, Rode said he 
could not comment.

`No grounds to suspect him'

In October, Leiskalns says, Latvian police sent sample bullets and shells to 
St. Petersburg to determine whether they were consistent with the fragments 
recovered from Linkov, Starovoitova's aide who was wounded in the shooting. 
There has been no reply.

Nikulin has not been charged with new crimes, and the evidence connecting him 
to the Skistirs killing appears to be weak. The police say they will charge 
him with illegal possession of a weapon, and he will most likely stand trial 
on the original OMON charge. He is being held in a basement cell of what used 
to be the KGB prison in Riga. Latvian authorities seem willing to send him 
back to Russia if prosecutors in St. Petersburg request it.

Aleksei Vostretsov, a spokesman for the Federal Security Service in St. 
Petersburg, makes it clear that's not likely to happen soon.

"At present there are no grounds to suspect him in Starovoitova's murder," he 
says.

*******

#6
The Times (UK)
30 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Killing time instead of the Russians 
Alice Lagnado in hiding with Chechens in their village 'prison' 

AN ELDERLY Chechen man in a green skull cap leans on a wooden pole in his 
backyard, looking up at the sunny winter sky as the Russian jet circles over 
forests only a couple of miles south of the village. 

He watches motionless as several bombs are dropped, a heavy boom announcing 
each explosion. The aircraft disappears, and the only sound left is the 
steady drip of water from melting snow on the roof into buckets and basins. 

Indoors, in the kitchen, the scene is at once dramatic, mundane and off-key, 
and though we are in Chechnya and not in England, there is a strong touch of 
a Mike Leigh film. 

In one corner a handsome bearded fighter with sharp eyes caresses a pistol. 
His submachine gun is hidden under a bed in another room, soon to be taken 
south. Next to him is a retarded child, hair in bunches. "Helicopter!" she 
says as one buzzes in the distance. 

At the stove a short, round, elderly woman in a headscarf and thick glasses 
sits on a stool, feeding the stove with wood that her daughters have chopped. 
Sometimes the crackle of Radio Liberty can be heard from the next room. A 
younger man sits drinking tea. Last night he dreamt of killing Russian 
soldiers, and looks jealously at his brother as he prepares for battle. 

Life in the Russian-controlled territory of Chechnya divides strictly into 
two different categories: men and women. For the men who fight, time at home 
is for rest and recuperation. They drink tea, play Nar'di, a game with dice 
and counters, and watch television in the evenings when the generator is on. 
Those men who do not have the money to buy weapons chop wood or go to buy 
petrol for the generator. 

For the women, however, there is work to be done from seven in the morning 
till ten at night. They begin by sweeping the snow in the yard and chopping 
wood for the stove, a task which goes on all day. They bring water in pails 
from a tap in the village and heat it for tea, make bread, and cook heavy 
meals of plov or macaroni. Every few minutes the men come in. "One wants his 
socks washed, another is hungry. It never stops," one woman says. 

For me and for many of the young men here, the war has made the village a 
prison. They avoid leaving the house after 6pm for fear of arrest, or worse, 
by Russian troops. By day groups of them stand on street corners with no 
work, no money and nowhere to go. 

I cannot go out of my room, which is in a separate building from the rest of 
the house, without peering out to see if there are any "chuzhie", or 
strangers, about. Often, desperate for news, I wait for half an hour while 
the men finish their game of Nar'di. This morning I went outside to clean my 
teeth in the snow when I was told to come inside. 

I walked quickly into another room and locked the door. The visitors in the 
kitchen, which I had to walk past in order to reach the toilet, took their 
time and I resorted to a basin - preferable to the outside facility, where I 
bury my nose in my long skirts. Bursts of silliness are common here, and in 
this case I cannot help thinking of characters in Beano comic strips with 
clothes pegs over their noses. Silliness is how my hosts manage too, and they 
need a lot more of it than I do. The other day, when my host drove us to 
another village, I sat in the back with an elderly Chechen woman and jars of 
pickled tomatoes. I was the shy Chechen bride looking down at the floor when 
Russian soldiers stopped us at checkpoints. When we got home later my elderly 
companion entertained her family with hilarious impressions of my poor 
acting. Later she shook two pudgy fists: "This is what I'd give those 
Russians!" she said, and everyone collapsed laughing. 

For the past two days the women and I have been looking forward to a special 
event. We will heat water and wash from top to bottom, something we did last 
nearly a week ago. On Friday morning I woke up hoping that this would be a 
slightly more serious affair than my attempt on Monday with half a pail of 
lukewarm water. There has been talk of a proper bath: I imagine a large metal 
basin and steaming hot water. I admire the thick black hair of one of the 
women, which still looks good after a week while mine hangs in greasy 
rats-tails. "Hair - who cares about that?" she says. "You could have gold on 
your hair and it wouldn't matter. These headscarves, they make your hair fall 
out," she said. It was not the first time I had heard the women complain 
about Muslim traditions. One said that, in her mother's day, women could wear 
knee-length skirts, but now skirts just below the knee were considered short. 
"These laws! Everything is topsy-turvy here," she said. 

Hiding behind doors and scuttling past rooms where the "chuzhie" are, I 
sometimes feel like an extra in a bad spy film. Occasionally I feel angry 
that I cannot go out and report freely. Yesterday I had to hide in the toilet 
so that my host would not see how upset I was after a fruitless trip to 
another village, then became angry for letting myself cry when the people who 
are taking great risks to look after me are watching their country being 
destroyed uncomplainingly. 

It is a relief when the handicapped girl, who is 14 but has a mental age of 
about eight, visits me in my room and I try with limited success to teach her 
to play "Snap". We sit there pulling faces at each other in the twilight, 
waiting for the generator to come on and give us some light. 

*******

#7
The Electric Telegraph (UK)
30 January 2000
[for personal use only]
Putin cannot hope to end the rebels' threat, only reduce it 
By Edward Luttwak, defence analyst 

THEY have dropped thousands of bombs, lobbed thousands of shells, killed or 
displaced thousands of civilians and lost hundreds of their own men. But 
Grozny, the Chechen capital, has not fallen. Indeed, the Russians cannot even 
reliably control the territory they claim to have conquered: Chechen 
guerrillas seem able to attack them at will.

Cold comfort: Russian soldiers try to warm themselves around a fire outside 
Grozny 
Yet Vladimir Putin, Russia's acting president, insists that the Russian 
campaign in Chechnya is going exactly according to plan. He is right: it is. 
Mr Putin's goal is not to eliminate the Chechen threat but to reduce it. That 
is the most he can hope to achieve. The Chechens are a warrior nation, 
implacably hostile to Russia. It seems that any Chechen male over the age of 
12 can become a guerrilla at any time.

Historically, empires have dealt with implacably hostile warrior nations by 
one of two methods: extermination or deportation. But neither of those is 
available to Mr Putin: the new Russia is already too democratic to pursue the 
old Stalinist policies of genocide or mass deportation. 

So all that is left to Mr Putin is a policy of containment. His strategy is 
to try to corral Chechen fighters (many of whom are career bandits) into 
pockets of mountain terrain and then to control their guerrilla activity by 
security cordons and police checkpoints. Of course, Russian success will not 
create a tranquil, stable Chechnya: the country will still be chronically 
insecure, prey to the guerrillas' random acts of violence. 

But to the Russians (and indeed to the West), containing the violence within 
Chechnya is much better than allowing the Chechen brand of Islamic terrorism, 
hostage-taking and kidnapping to spill across Asia. The Russians are 
succeeding in their aim, albeit slowly. 

Their tactics are constructed around minimising their own casualties. The 
military high command is determined not to turn Grozny into a re-run of the 
battle of Stalingrad, when entire battalions were killed in the 
floor-by-floor struggle over single apartment blocks. In the battle for 
Grozny, the Russian infantry creeps forward in small teams of fewer than 10 
men, with tanks in direct support. Whenever such a team comes under fire it 
stops and runs for cover. 

The tanks take over. Should the tanks fail to eliminate the guerrillas - as 
they will if the Chechens fire from a high-rise building, perched at an 
elevation too high for the tanks' guns to reach - the commander will call in 
larger-calibre artillery from outside the city. That artillery keeps pounding 
until the building is unusable as a hideout, with ceilings caved in, stairs 
cut and walls blasted out.

Only then do the infantry teams resume their forward march. If the building 
still cannot be won at street level it is simply demolished - and should 
tube-rocket artillery be insufficient for that purpose, the air force comes 
in and drops bombs. Russian tactics are certainly not gentle. They proceed 
with complete disregard for the safety of the civilians who remain inside 
Grozny, once a city of 400,000 inhabitants, many of them non-Chechens. 

But they are the only tactics that ensure that the Chechen threat is 
gradually contained, while keeping Russian casualties to a minimum. Russian 
troops recognise that their lives are not being wasted by the same foolish 
tactics used in the abortive campaign of 1994-5, which is why their morale is 
in much better shape than journalistic reportage suggests. 

The journalists are not misreporting. It is rather that they see and 
interview only one sector of the Russian army: the conscripts who guard the 
roads, the artillery fire bases and the headquarters. Those conscripts are 
very young, badly trained, abysmally paid and very frightened. It is 
certainly true that if all Russian soldiers were like them, Russia would have 
lost the war in Chechnya long ago. But they are not. 

The men actually fighting inside Grozny are volunteers, five-year servicemen 
from elite airborne divisions. They are slightly older, far better trained 
and periodically rotated. They are also supported by armed police from cities 
throughout the Russian Federation. These are the troops who suffer most from 
guerrilla attacks. But they are professionals, relatively well-treated and 
not interested in mutiny.

However grim it may seem, the reality is that Russia's war in Chechnya is 
going according to the Putin plan to contain the Chechen threat and to ensure 
that he wins the presidential election on March 27. There is as yet no real 
opposition, either to Mr Putin or the war. The Russian public seems to 
understand his strategy. Mr Putin is fond of challenging his opponents to 
explain "how, if we abandon Chechnya, will you protect the surrounding 
region?" 

The fact that no one can answer that question guarantees that nothing will 
stop Mr Putin's war until it achieves the strictly limited victory that is 
its aim.

*******

#8
From: IRASTRAUS@aol.com (Ira Straus)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000
Subject: Russia-NATO - another run around the same circle?

(Re: Martin Nesirky, "Russia warms to NATO," Reuters, on JRL 4074)

The new NATO secretary general will be visiting Moscow early in February. 
Russia would like for the joint communique to improve on the NATO-Russia 
Founding Act and provide for a more meaningful voice for Russia in NATO 
matters that affect it. But, as a Western diplomat told Reuters, this isn't 
likely to happen because "It is difficult to find a way to give Russia some 
kind of influence without giving them a veto." 

It is as if we're still at square one. After a decade of calling for an 
entirely new relation, we haven't been able to fight our way out of the paper 
bag of how a country can have an effective voice in NATO without having a 
veto.

This is the Gordian knot in Russia-West relations. It has got to get untied. 
It can't be simply cut, e.g., by abolishing NATO. The West is not going to 
give up NATO, no more than Russians are going to give up the existence of the 
Russian Federation.

In the absence of any ideas in NATO for untieing it, it looks like we're in 
for one more time around the same old run-around for Russia at NATO. 

Step 1 in the run-around: Russia is gingerly approaching NATO, because NATO 
is the indispensable institution for its relations with the West, no matter 
how much Russia wishes it wasn't so. 
Step 2. NATO is talking about not isolating Russia, because it knows that 
that would be a disaster. 
Step 3. Russia realizes that it needs to have a real say in NATO proceedings 
so it won't be isolated as NATO expands its membership and mission. 
Step 4. NATO is unable to arrive at any conception of how Russia could ever 
have a real say in the alliance, except by giving it a veto, which would be 
like giving a blank check to gum up all the works. The end result is to go 
nowhere, apart from pro forma joint declarations and paper agreements.

Eight years after Yeltsin wrote to NATO at the end of 1991 offering for 
Russia to join the alliance, NATO still hasn't figured out a formula for 
integrating Russia or even for making its voice meaningful. Russia in turn 
seems unlikely to propose any innovative formulas for this; it's more in a 
mood for simply demanding the veto power that NATO won't let it have. And 
even if Russia were to offer a good suggestion, NATO would probably react 
suspiciously to it and find ways to attack it as a de facto veto or a clever 
scheme to wreck the alliance.

So why not try some other organization and give up on NATO? Russia would love 
to run all European security arrangements through the OSCE instead, but the 
West isn't going to subordinate an effective NATO to an ineffective OSCE, and 
as long as the two are treated as competitors, it will also block much 
strengthening of OSCE for fear that it would lead to jettisoning NATO and 
ending up with a net weakening of security ties. The path toward 
strengthening OSCE lies through integrating Russia with NATO, not the other 
way around.

The Council of Europe? It has been threatening to throw Russia out, and 
Russia is relieved that it has just postponed the decision on that matter for 
a few months. It was absurd to accept Russia as a member of the Council of 
Europe anyway, Russia was too big and it never did meet the Council's 
standards. And the Council, unlike NATO, doesn't really have any serious 
business except to measure how well countries have met its standards. It was 
always a mismatch, having Russia in the Council; it was a divorce waiting to 
happen. 

Letting Russia into the Council of Europe was in reality just a feeble 
compensation thrown at Russia a few years ago for the failure of NATO itself 
to include Russia adequately at the time of NATO's expansion to three other 
countries. NATO is where the problem of integrating Russia ought to have been 
resolved. NATO is where the real action is. NATO inevitably has a heavy-duty 
strategic relationship with Russia, either positive or negative, and it needs 
to be positive. Russia has real cooperative business that needs to be done 
with NATO in the here and now, in Russia's existing condition, quite apart 
from any hoped-for future improvements in meeting the standards of democracy.

And so, Russia is turning back to NATO, as the only Western organization 
around that has some desire to improve relations with it. 

Sure, there's also the IMF and G-8. Relations with the IMF are not so good, 
NOT because of the financial scandals but because of the deterioration of the 
Russia-West strategic relation in face of Chechnya. The G-8 is fortunately 
still alive -- it hasn't gotten around to talking about kicking Russia out 
yet -- but it's not an organization. The G-8 might nevertheless have saved 
Russia-West relations during the war in Kosovo. A Russia-West bargain was 
reached in the G-8, after Chernomyrdin had been used to push aside Primakov, 
which looked likely to salvage the relationship. But the West proceeded to 
ignore the spirit of the G-8 agreement and try to set up the occupation of 
all of Kosovo by its own decisions without Russia's participation except to 
provide troops. Russia responded in kind, sending in its own troops first, 
and relations fell through the floor. The G-8 had no way to implement its 
decision; it was extremely useful for providing a line of communication when 
all else was failing, but far more was needed for providing some measure of 
mutual transparency and reliability in implementation. Only NATO could 
provide that "more" element; but NATO provided it only for its own members, 
Russia was on the outside. NATO was where it was at. After we run through the 
list of all the possible institutions, NATO is what's left as the only 
serious venue. It's where it has to be done.

But then we come back to the voice-veto standoff. The idea that there is 
nothing in-between a mere "voice" and a full "veto" is really quite 
extraordinary when you think about it. Most human groups operate by methods 
in-between the "voice" and the "veto". Such as the "vote". Or, in more 
primitive societies (which is the level that most international organizations 
are still on), there are various mechanisms -- approximate consensus, 
consensus of the elders, consensus minus one or two, joint commissions, 
reports from the bureaucracy that set the tone for the discussion, etc. In 
Russia, I found a method still in use among college students that I 
remembered back from elementary school days over here: when the teacher asks 
a question, the students look around and decide by eye contact what is the 
common answer that they are going to give. In international organizations, 
that takes the form of looking around a meeting table and seeing that there 
is enough support for a proposal to say that it has passed. It can be coupled 
with a procedure for voting held in reserve; in the European Union, for 
example, many decisions are taken by a "consensus" that is not unanimous, but 
formed by people looking around the table and seeing that there would be 
enough support to pass the proposal if a vote were taken. That's far from 
exhausting the ways there are for arriving at decisions without either a 
formal vote or a unanimous consensus. 

In fact, there is no legal right of veto in NATO, just a habit of consensus 
that sometimes is treated more rigidly than other times. It is depressing to 
think that, after 8 years, NATO hasn't gathered up enough energy to figure 
out how to arrange for regularly using consensus procedures that are 
non-rigid enough for allowing Russia a participating voice with a serious 
weight even while steering clear of suggesting any kind of right of veto. 

It was around 1996 that NATO came up with the formula, "a voice not a veto" 
for Russia. That already enshrined the false antithesis, as if there existed 
no term at all like "voting" or imperfect consensus lying in-between "voice" 
and "veto". In practice, the Russian voice, formalized in the Permanent Joint 
Council, proved nearly meaningless. NATO has even made a point on some 
occasions of not compromising with Russia's interests and positions, on the 
somewhat hysterical argument that doing so would amount to giving Russia a de 
facto veto and would castrate the alliance. This attitude did severe damage 
to Russia-West relations in the course of the war over Kosovo.

Earlier, in 1994-95, it had become a mantra in NATO circles to speak of a 
partnership with Russia on a basis of "no surprises, no vetoes". The West 
failed to apply this formula at all consistently, however. True, it did 
consistently oppose any right of veto on the part of Russia, or even 
imaginary Russian vetoes or acceptance of Russian suggestions, which already 
in that period started getting labeled paranoiacally as a "giving Russia a de 
facto veto". But it did not say anything against vetoes on the part of 
individual NATO member states. Indeed, it invited in three new members and 
spoke as if each of them got a new right of veto as well.

I would imagine that the failure to get past this hurdle would be 
incomprehensible to ordinary people. Most groups everywhere know how to give 
their members an effective voice, or even give a newcomer an effective voice, 
without handing out vetoes. The failure is made the more absurd by the fact 
that there is no legal right of veto inside NATO, it is only a rhetorical 
habit to speak in NATO as if there were such a right and as if Russian 
membership meant a Russian veto. To be sure, it has been a habit of 
diplomatic politeness in NATO to wait on most occasions until there is 
consensus. What is strange is that this habit has become enshrined as a fixed 
point in NATO rhetoric, to the point of evidently making it impossible for 
NATO to do serious thinking about how to move forward with Russia.

For anyone who hasn't experienced how stuck up NATO people tend to be on 
their rhetoric about everything being done by consensus and every member 
having a veto, the failure to find a compromise role for Russia must seem 
like a really incredible story. 

How the NATO people got so stuck up on this is a long story. How to get them 
unstuck is our problem. Unless they get unstuck, the Gordian knot in 
Russia-West relations will never get untied. 

Ira Straus
(U.S. Coordinator
Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO)

*******

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