Why is LR a Russophobe? Why aren’t YOU?

Sometimes people ask La Russophobe why she’s a russophobe. Her answer is often: The question is not why is she one, but why aren’t you?

Calling yourself a “russophobe” is a wonderful way to bring out the best in a “russophile.” A russophile is someone who says we need to “understand” Russia’s bad points and give Russia “time” to overcome its bad luck, because there is so much that is wonderful about Russia. Yet, russophiles have no such “understanding” or “time” for russophobes. Isn’t it ironic?

And we should define “russophobe” before deciding whether we are one or not. This is a person who hates what Russia is today, and hates most of all that it is the Russian people themselves who are responsible for making Russia what it is today, yet they accept no blame and receive virtually none from patronizing, cowardly outsiders. This is a person who wants Russia to change radically, to become unrecognizable and hence unworthy of hatred — in short, a success. Or, at least, to last out the century.

Next, we should deal with one of the most common Russophile attacks on the Russophobe, namely the bizarre claim that telling the truth about Russia will only alienate and polarize Russians — i.e., you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. The very notion that Russians are capable of suddenly turning to dicatorship and cold war, but if they hear the right sweet words will not do so, is so utterly repellant an idea, and so patronizing to the Russians, that it can only come from the crazed Russophile camp. Sounds just like what Chamberlain said about Hitler. La Russophobe will not go there. Does the world treat America this way? Of course not. Do russophiles call for such treatment? Of course not. Yet suddenly America should deal with Russia with appeasement and flattery? Please. Give La Russophobe a break.

Here, then, are La Russophobe‘s Top 10 reasons for being a russophobe (readers are welcome to add more, or to try to put forth reasons why one should be a russophile):

10

Russian cuisine is wretched. Russian cuisine is so gross and unreformed it can’t even make headway in New York City, with a giant population of Russians. Most dishes which it claims as “Russian” are in fact merely coopted from other countries. You would think that a cuisine so insanely unhealthy would at least be full of guility taste pleasures. Think again.

9

Russians are greedy and arrogant. Impoverished Russia has the world’s highest-paid female athlete, Maria Sharapova, but she donates less than 0.5% of her astronomical income to charity and virtually nothing to Russia. Nobody says a thing about it, and Russia chose Sharapova to front its recent Olympic bid.

8

Russia is sick and doesn’t care. By 2020, 10% of the Russian population will be infected with AIDS. 300,000 people are killed by cigarettes each year, which cost less than a quarter a pack. President Putin barely mentions these topics in his speeches and does nothing serious about them, yet his support continues at nosebleed levels even as Russians become extinct.

7

Russians are lazy and inefficient. Russia’s GDP is smaller than that of tiny Netherlands. Its per capita GDP is exceeded by Uruguay.

6

Sports and Russia are like oil and water. FIFA. Tennis. Waterpolo. Figure skating. Ice Hockey. Disasters, everywhere you turn.

5

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The man actually said once with a straight face that there is not one single person in the whole FSB who could be capable of having planted bombs in Russian apartment buildings to stir up support for the war in Chechnya. He stole his PhD disseration. He has a secret resume. He’s the worst possible thing for Russia imaginable.

4

Russians are crazed authoritarians. In a recent public opinion poll, no candidate received more support to become Russia’s next president than the maniacal Vladimir Zhirinovsky (who, by the way, Russians also named their country’s sexiest man).Russia has never once in a thousand years transferred power between rival political factions by means of an election. Russia is still singing the music of the anthem of the USSR, a totally failed state that caused the deaths of far more Russians than all the country’s foreign enemies combined. Two-thirds of Russians believe that Vladimir Putin will break the Constitution and continue in power, so they conclude the Constitution should be changed to let him remain in power legally.

3

Nobody likes Russia. America, supposedly loathed by the world, has five times more international tourist arrivals than Russia.

2

Russia is insanely aggressive and militaristic. Russia still has the draft and a giant nuclear arsenal. Russia has been fighting a war against Chechnya for years, and is supplying rogue nations with weapons, including weapons of mass destruction. Russia is providing aid and comfort to terrorist regimes in Iran and Palestine, yet any support by foreigners for Chechnya is viewed as outrageous.

1

Russia hates families, especially women and children. Domestic violence kills one Russian woman every 40 minutes. Ten times more Russian women are killed by their husbands than American women by theirs, although America has twice Russia’s population That means a woman’s chances of being killed by her husband are twenty times greater if she is a Russian. More than 1,200 adopted children have been murdered by their parents in Russia since 1991. The general murder rate in Russia is the fifth highest in the world even though the secret police run its government.

UPDATES

#11
35,000 people are killed on Russia’s highways every year, which based on the relatively few cars impoverished Russians are able to afford is a shocking number. Judged on fatalities per car on the road, Russia has ten times more fatalities than countries like Germany and Great Britain.

#12
Russia is literally going extinct; at least 750,000 people are lost from the population each year, and that is only if you trust the Kremlin’s numbers. If not, it’s a million or more.

#13
Russians think that Anna Kournikova, who never won a single singles title in her entire professional tennis career and who, though touted as a great beauty while she was playing promptly disappeared from the face of the earth when she stopped, makes them look good. Can you imagine who Russians think makes them look bad?

#14
Just in case you doubted the Number One Reason to be a Russophobe, here’s more evidence of Russian hatred for the family: Russia and its kissing cousin Belarus lead the world in destruction of the family through divorce, with two out of three Russian marriages ending that way.

#15
The education system! Russian diplomas are for sale, from every university including Russia’s versions of Harvard and Yale. Meanwhile, Russia go on haughtily proclaiming that it is the outside world, especially Americans, who are ignorant. Russian professors are paid slave wages, often much less than the national average of $300 per month, making them easy prey for bribery. Even many Russian experts agree that the quality of the resulting graduates is a joke.

#16

Russians are horrible at foreign languages and couldn’t care less. Russians translate Huck Finn without his grammar errors, butcher reams of other foreign material, and yet scream to high heaven with indignation whenever foreigners mess up Russian and pretend to be more literary than Americans. Their inability to communicate successfully with the outside world is legendary, yet Russians do virtually nothing about it.

#17

Russians actually like crazed dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and they don’t care who knows it.

#18

Russian unites all ideologies . . . in contempt of Russia. Here is what the ultra-liberal Amnesty International has to say about Russia in a nutshell: “Almost 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is still far from the democracy many hoped it would become. Since coming into office in 1996, president Vladimir Putin has consolidated executive power, eliminating the election of regional governors, squashing freedom of press, harassing human rights defenders, and continually abusing civilians in the guise of a war on terror in the North Caucasus. In addition, the harsh economic and social transition has given rise to increasing domestic violence and racial hate crimes. Speaking in Washington, D.C. in October 2005, Moscow Helsinki Group founder Liudmilla Alexeevna warned that she hoped there would be no “color” revolution in Russia soon, because it would more likely be brown than orange.” Here is what the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation has to say about Russia in a nutshell: “As NGOs feared, the regulations issued by the government agencies in response to the law have introduced harsh restrictions on NGO performance. From now on, NGOs will have to report every detail of their activities. An activity report form is seven small-print pages long and includes accounts of performance, both of the substance of an NGO’s work and its expenses. If money is spent on putting on events, the NGO must detail their number, the topics, and participation. Foreign organizations, such the Heritage Foundation’s Moscow office, also must indicate the cost of office supplies. The regulations will significantly increase an NGO’s expenses.Russian rights organizations are unanimous in their belief that the worst expectations of this new law are justified. If an NGO cannot be banned directly, the red tape, all-out control, endless check-ups, and a stepped-up financial burden could smother it.”

#19

Russia is fundamentally corrupt and appears to be proud of it. In 2005, the Transparancy International review ranked Russia tied the 9th most corrupt nation on the face of the planet, yet virtually nothing is being done to reform this atmosphere and most Russians laugh it off.

#20

Toilets. About a third of Russian homes still have an outhouse. And as for public toilets, port-a-potties are state of the art. Russia has few public restrooms.

#21

Suicide. One Russian person kills him/herself every ten minutes in Russia (that adds up t0 60,000 per year or 41 suicides per 100,000 people — only Lithunania has more). That just about says it all, doesn’t it? This figure is four times higher than for the United States.

#22

Fire. Do you want to be burned alive? Then Russia is the place for you. If not, stay clear. Russia records about 18,000 fire deaths a year, AP reports – 10 times more than in the US. Since the U.S. has twice as many people as Russia, your chances of being burned alive are twenty times greater in in Russia than in America. Is that tour of Moscow’s “Golden Ring” still worth it? Didn’t think so.

#23

[your item here]

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Desperate, Petty, Pathetic Russians Will Stop at Nothing to Undermine Georgian Democracy

The Georgia Messenger reports that, not content to attack Georgia by denying Russians its wne and water, the Kremlin is now going after money transfers between family members. How low can you go? Welcome to the Neo-Soviet Union.

The president of Russia denied his government plans to put restrictions on money transfers to Georgia, saying he did not issue any instructions about it.

“Georgians temporarily living in our country transfer USD 1.5-2 billion to their homeland annually,” Vladimir Putin noted talking to journalists on June 13 in St Petersburg after meeting with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

However, the National Bank of Georgia questioned Putin’s figures, naming USD 300 million as the actual annual amount of transfers from Russia.

The central bank asserts that USD 403 million has been transferred from foreign countries to Georgian commercial banks through different money transfer systems like Western Union, MoneyGram, and Anelik in 2005. Only USD 253 million from this amount was transferred from Russia.

Apart from transferring money through these systems, Georgians living abroad also send cash through countries with direct road connections with Georgia such as Turkey and Russia.

The National Bank estimates that annual total money transfers from Russia will amount to USD 300 million, instead of the astronomical USD 1.5-2 billion president Putin claimed.

Russian opposition MPs came up with an initiative to restrict international money transfers to Georgia in April.

The president of the Georgian National Bank, Roman Gotsiridze, called this initiative “unserious” and said that it would be technically impossible to stop such money transfers in this era of electronic accounting. He added that the attempted implementation of this idea would result in serious damage to Russia’s financial system, both for its reputation and in terms of practical consequences.

“First of all, Georgians working in Russia are creating considerable wealth for Russia, as they are contributing to the economic development of that country,” Gotsiridze said back in April.
The number of money transfers through commercial banks has been steadily increasing in Georgia for the last two years.

According to the National Bank of Georgia, in 2003 money transfers from abroad totaled USD 55 million, in 2004 they totaled USD 200 million, and in 2005 USD 403 million.
During January-April of 2006 the total amount of money transferred equaled USD 138.2 million-a far cry from Putin’s estimate.

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Kremlin Spins All as Argument for Totalitarianism

Australian media reports on a documentary about HIV infection in Russia show the Kremlin’s efforts to use such issues as HIV and Islamic terorrism as an argument for even more government power, when in fact the problems only exist because the government is far too powerful and incompetent and the problems only get worse and worse. The USSR tried this for years, spinning every fact as an argument in its favor no matter the consequences, until it simply disappeared.

This persuasive documentary about HIV infection in Russia shows how the fall of communism has come at a price: the growth of a pleasure-seeking economy afflicted with unemployment, corruption, prostitution and drugs, all of which have contributed to an HIV epidemic affecting a million people. Russia has the world’s highest growth rate of the virus; up to 12 million Russians could be HIV positive by 2020.

The attitudes of police and politicians, along with Russia’s limited health care and social services, are blamed for this situation. Moscow Mayor Yuri Lushov has banned needle-exchange programs because he believes needles lure people into addiction. Addicts hide needles in public places because they know they’ll be arrested if caught with them. The government refuses anti-retroviral therapy for addicts and some specialists even welcome the HIV epidemic as a biological solution to a social problem.

It’s a tragic, but familiar, story, told here through interviews with sex workers such as Oksana, a heroin addict who shares needles. “If you’re different here, you’re also bad,” says the director of Medecins du Monde, Alexander Tsekhanovitch, who tries to encourage safer drug use among the mini-skirted women trawling the frosty streets of St Petersburg.

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Here Comes Evil Empire Redux

Relying on a Reuters report and quoting Defense Expert Pavel Felgenhaur, India news media are reporting on war-mongering Russia’s efforts to supply dangerous weapons to the rogue regimes of the world. If Russia is doing so well economically, why does it need to sell these weapons? If it isn’t, now can it afford to alienate the entire free world just as the USSR did, ultimately causing it to collapse?

Missiles to Syria and Iran, warplanes to Venezuela and Myanmar, helicopters to Sudan, Russia goes its own way when it comes to selling arms, seemingly immune to ethical debates that affect the industry elsewhere, reports Reuters.

While European Union members argue over whether to lift a weapons ban against China, almost half of Russia’s billion arms sales last year went to Beijing. As the White House struggles to persuade Congress to approve a US-India nuclear deal that some lawmakers fear could spark an arms race, Moscow is completing two atomic plants for New Delhi.

Russia’s arms industry is one of the few national manufacturers that can compete with western firms on equal terms, and it is a both a source of prestige and key to Moscow’s drive to gain new markets for its exports. “Let’s have no illusions, if we stop sending arms to export, then someone else will do it,” Sergei Chemezov, head of state arms export monopoly Rosoboron export, said in a rare interview with Itogi business magazine last year.

The trade in weapons is too profitable for the world to refrain from it. Happily, Russia has understood this. The period of democratic romanticism has changed into a period of business pragmatism,” said Chemezov, a close friend of President, Vladimir Putin since they served together in the KGB.

But this pragmatism has drawn international criticism, and some experts say the apparent health of Russia’s arms exports actually conceals an industry in decline, still making money from the leftovers of the Soviet military past. Russia earns around billion a year from the weapons trade -a figure dwarfed by its exports of energy, metals and timber.Its main clients are India and China, but it has also received orders from Iran, Syria, Venezuela and the Palestinians -buyers some Western countries shy from dealing with.

Russia says it abides strictly by international embargoes, and does not engage in trade with banned regimes. But rights groups criticise it for not unilaterally limiting itself. The International Action Network on Small Arms, IANSA, says Russia has sold weapons to states whose forces have committed abuses.

“In Russia’s export control system, there is virtually no reference to controlling arms exports for reasons connected with respect for international human rights and humanitarian law,” the network of agencies said in a June briefing paper. Rosoboron export officials declined requests for an interview for this story, but customs figures show Russia’s arms exports -of which it controls 90%, have grown by almost 70% since Putin established the agency in 2000.

The Kremlin hopes the increasingly aggressive consolidation of the industry at home will make the export trade a cornerstone of its system of state capitalism, before the post-Soviet decline that has plagued production becomes irreversible.Some experts say that point has already been reached. “The industry is in deep, terrible crisis. I believe it is beyond recovery because no components are produced. They use old components. The industry has disintegrated, and they have sold the equipment,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent analyst who closely follows the Russian arms trade.

Very few new weapons were being designed and more importantly, component factories had closed for a lack of new orders and their skilled workers had dispersed. He said, “This is not an industry, it is a trade. There is no growth in this industry. The Soviet stockpiles were large enough to keep selling for years and years to come, but the trade was not creating employment or any long-term growth.”

“This is a sell-off. These are good weapons for Sri Lanka, say, or Africa. They are easy to use for badly trained personnel,” he said. “As for the future, it depends where war will happen.” General Yuri Baluyevsky, head of Russia’s General Staff, said last year he feared the domestic weapons industry might not be large enough to supply the armed forces by 2011.

That, experts say, has led the Kremlin to forge a state arms champion out of Rosoboron export, originally an export agency. It has taken control of Russia’s top carmaker Avto Vaz, has been eyeing truckmaker, Kamaz and is in talks to buy into VSMPO-Avisma, the world’s top titanium maker, reportedly to get hold of Russian firms with easy access to a metal that is key to the aerospace industry.

“It is a kind of state capitalism. Rosoboron export controls all military exports and we compete well in this sphere, but we need to keep working at it,” said Gennady Raikov, a member of parliament who worked for decades in rocket design and aviation.

He said the new consolidated system reinforced in March, when Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov was put in charge of the whole industry, was a return to the Soviet system of having a single over seer of the military-industrial complex. “To perfect our technology, we need to pull together,” said Raikov, who said Russian scientists could create systems as good as Western powers but that investment was needed.

Russians couldn’t win Cold War I when they were part of a much larger entity, the USSR. What lunacy makes them think they can do so now?

Already, concerns are being reported that Venezuela will become an arms exporter, a neo-Cuba. The Seattle Times for instance:

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez’s plans to build the first Kalashnikov factory in South America are stirring fears that Venezuela could start arming leftist allies in the hemisphere with Russian assault rifles.

Chavez denies such ambitions, saying his government bought 100,000 Russian-made AK-103 assault rifles and a license from Moscow to make Kalashnikovs — commonly known as AK-47s — and ammunition to bolster its defenses against “the most powerful empire in history” — the United States.

Some political opponents and critics suspect Chávez, a former paratrooper, has other intentions, such as providing allies like Bolivia and Cuba with arms while forging an anti-Washington military alliance.

“Our president has always had a warlike mentality, but now it appears this mentality is turning into a mission that could easily extend to other parts of Latin America,” said William Ojeda, a presidential candidate who hopes to run against Chávez in the December election.
Chávez has said “Venezuelan blood would run” if the United States tried to invade Cuba or Bolivia, though he has not said his government would provide those nations with weapons.
The Bush administration also is concerned about Chávez’s intentions.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday that Venezuela appeared to be in the midst of an “outsized military buildup for a country of that size and the nature of the threats” in the region.

“They’ve already purchased 100,000 AK-103 assault rifles from Russia. So I’m not quite sure what else they might need a factory for,” McCormack said. “It certainly raises serious questions about what their intentions are.”

The first 30,000 of those rifles have arrived in Venezuela, with the rest due by year’s end.
“If the president says he’ll send Venezuelans to defend other Latin American nations, nobody should doubt that he’s willing to send them weapons as part of his anti-imperialist vision,” Ojeda said.

Ojeda pointed out that Bolivia’s new socialist president, Evo Morales, referred to Chávez as his “commander” during a recent ceremony marking the 78th anniversary of the birth of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the revolutionary who was captured and executed in Bolivia 39 years ago.

Chávez has provided a helicopter and pilots to Morales to ferry him around in the weeks ahead of a July vote for a constituent assembly that will rewrite Bolivia’s constitution.

Chávez vehemently denies that Venezuela’s recent defense deals worth an estimated $2.7 billion constitute a military buildup or that he poses a threat to regional stability, as U.S. officials allege.
His military advisers argue that Venezuela needs new rifles to replace outdated weapons such as Belgian-made FAL assault rifles — and to have enough guns for up to 2 million reservists.

Gen. Alberto Muller, a Chávez adviser, said the Kalashnikov factory would be able to produce 20,000 to 30,000 rifles a year. Construction is expected to begin within four to five years, he said, but Chávez may want to build it sooner.

The Kalashnikov is manufactured in more than a dozen countries, including Egypt and Poland. Imitations are also widely produced. It is used by the armed forces of more than 50 countries as well as militant groups from Afghanistan to Somalia.

Muller said there are no plans to export guns because Venezuela will need all the rifles it produces.

But defense analysts say corrupt officials in Venezuela’s low-paid armed forces raise the possibility that weapons and ammunition could wind up in the wrong hands — a likely concern in neighboring Colombia, where leftist rebels have been battling the government for more than four decades.

“Colombia will certainly be concerned about the ammunition factories to be built in Venezuela,” said Anna Gilmour, a Latin American defense expert at the London-based Jane’s Information Group.

Unlike assault rifles, ammunition lacks serial numbers and is thus untraceable.
Then there is the issue of Venezuelan civilian militias.

“I understand the FALs are to be diverted to the new civilian militias, in which case they will be extremely hard to keep track of,” and might be quickly resold in the country or abroad, Gilmour said.

Military authorities have said strict controls, including serial numbers inscribed on each rifle, prevent them from being stolen or sold.

Venezuela is also buying 15 Russian helicopters for $200 million, and Chávez said last week that his government would buy 24 Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets.

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RFE Says Killing Sadulayev Will Not Strengthen Russia’s Hand in Chechnya

Radio Free Europe reports that if Russians think they’ve made progress in Chechnya by killing rebel leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, they’d better think again:

PRAGUE, June 17, 2006 (RFE/RL) — Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov announced on June 17 the death during a special operation in the town of Argun, east of Grozny, of Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, who succeeded Aslan Maskhadov as Chechen president and resistance commander following Maskhadov’s killing in March 2005. Akhmad Zakayev, whom Sadulayev named foreign minister of the Chechen Republic Ichkeria (ChRI) on May 27, confirmed Sadulayev’s death in a telephone interview with RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service later on June 17.

The Chechen resistance leadership has not yet confirmed Sadulayev’s death. Predictably, both Kadyrov and pro-Moscow Chechen administration head Alu Alkhanov have termed Sadulayev’s demise “a major success” in the campaign to stamp out continuing resistance to the pro-Moscow regime installed in Chechnya six years ago. But in military terms, the impact both in Chechnya and in those neighboring republics of the North Caucasus where the Islamic resistance operates is likely to be negligible, at least in the short term. In an interview with the Bulgarian weekly “Politika” (published in the issue for June 9-15 and posted on chechenpress.org on June 17, the morning that his death was announced), Sadulayev noted that in the same way that a session of the War Council in the summer of 2002 formally confirmed him as Maskhadov’s successor, he had publicly designated as his own successor veteran field commander Doku Umarov, whom Sadulayev named vice president exactly one year ago. Sadulayev stressed that the legality of his decree naming Umarov cannot be contested. In his interview with the Bulgarian weekly, Sadulayev downplayed the possibility of his own death, saying that “there was someone [to command] before me. And if through the will of Allah I meet my death, there is someone to continue this task even better.” Umarov too has commented that the death of a resistance commander, while regrettable, has minimal impact on the resistance as there is always someone willing and competent to take his place.

Field Commanders

Sadulayev also created last summer a network of emirs, or field commanders, responsible for the various sectors of the North Caucasus. The commanders of the Daghestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria fronts liaise on a regular basis with Umarov and with radical field commander Shamil Basayev, who has overall responsibility for military operations across the North Caucasus, Umarov told RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service in an interview in April 2006. Sadulayev likewise in his interview with the Bulgarian weekly stressed the unity and coordination between the various resistance groups, saying that it is growing stronger and more extensive daily.

Umarov, who was born in 1964, is one of the most experienced Chechen field commanders, having fought since the beginning of the first Chechen war in 1994. And crucially, he has never been identified as having participated in any resistance operation branded “terrorist” by the Russians. What’s more, in an interview one year ago with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, Umarov categorically rejected inflicting on the Russians the same atrocities that they routinely inflict on the Chechens. “If we resort to such methods, I do not think any of us will be able to retain his human face,” Umarov said. He added that the Chechen resistance en masse does not consider the 2004 Beslan hostage taking was a legitimate response to Russia’s actions in Chechnya. That rejection of terrorism as a tactic is reminiscent of the prohibition imposed by Maskhadov on conducting military operations against Russian civilians or beyond the borders of Chechnya. But Umarov, in contrast to Maskhadov, affirmed one year ago that the resistance considers it appropriate to expand its activities to other regions of the North Caucasus.

Major Operations

Sadulayev too in his interview with the Bulgarian weekly “Politika” affirmed unequivocally that “in our state we do not consider it acceptable to conduct operations that entail the seizing of hostages, civilians.” That affirmation calls into question Chechen Prime Minister Kadyrov’s claim, quoted by regnum.ru on June 17, that at the time of his death Sadulayev was planning a series of major terrorist attacks in Argun.

If Sadulayev’s death poses any threat at all to the cohesion of the resistance, that danger lies in the possibility of a major disagreement between Basayev and Umarov over the acceptability and expediency of staging a major operation — like the hostage-takings in Moscow in 2002 and Beslan in 2004 — to focus the world’s attention on the ongoing war of attrition in Chechnya. (That war is being increasingly waged by pro-Moscow Chechens against their fellow Chechens.) But as RFE/RL North Caucasus Service director Aslan Doukaev pointed out in a May 31 commentary in the “International Herald Tribune,” since Beslan, Basayev has not directed a single operation against a Russian civilian target, possibly because he has finally understood that killing innocent civilians only fuels Moscow’s rejection of a negotiated end to the fighting. Nor is it clear whether the timing of the operation to kill Sadulayev was fortuitous. Maskhadov was killed just weeks after he unilaterally declared a cease-fire and proposed unconditional peace talks with Moscow on ending the war. In an interview with RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service in late May, Akhmed Zakayev, a London-based former close associate of Maskhadov whom Sadulayev had just named foreign minister in the Chechen Republic Ichkeria government, said he knows that Russian government officials are currently discussing the possibility of peace talks to end the war. Dukkvakha Abdurakhmanov, speaker of the lower house of the Chechen parliament and a close associate of Kadyrov, immediately warned Moscow against any such talks, especially with Zakayev.

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