Chechnya

Apropos of the recent bollocks on the subject of Chechnya, I figure it would be a good thing to link to a timeline of the Chechnya conflict, and point out:

What can we make of all this?

Russia ought to have let Chechnya go in the first place, but after 2 years of fighting, Russia did let Chechnya go. Then Russia left Chechnya alone for 4 years. In the meantime, Chechnya started exporting terror to its neighbors and developed a reputation for anonymous mass murder that was used as a casus belli by Putin (as noted above, it was never proven that a Chechen terror/rebel group blew up the Moscow apartments, but the Chechens certainly didn't work to cultivate either a good alibi or a peaceful reputation).

So while Putin has been at least several orders of magnitude worse than Yeltsin in terms of the brutality and fierceness of the Chechnya war, it really can't be said that the root of the problem is Russia's policy towards Chechnya. Chechnya as it was, was rotten. Leaving it alone meant dead in Dagestan (confirmed) and perhaps elsewhere in Russia. The problem, as well, is that Russia is almost certainly generating more of the bad guys through its bitter destruction of Chechnya.

Russia's doing nothing/leaving 'em alone gave 'em terror. Doing something gave 'em terror.

Life sucks.

fn1. Who certainly developed and spread a reputation for themselves as being the kinds of bastards who would do something like this.