Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [133]
Chechnya inspired those dark Kremlin forces that we presumed to be the villains in our conspiracy theories—from the Moscow bombings to the theater siege to Sasha’s own killing. Solidarity with the victims of Chechnya drove Sasha’s relationship with Akhmed Zakayev, who in the last year of his life became his closest friend.
Zakayev moved to England in the summer of 2002. His arrival, and his association with the Berezovsky camp, turned London into the center of the Russian antiwar campaign. This alliance also became a major irritant for Putin and the reason the Kremlin eventually declared London a staging ground for “Chechen terrorist activity.” Neutralizing the London brotherhood became Russia’s top diplomatic priority. First, the Russian government asked nicely for the Brits to give up Boris and Zakayev; when they were refused, the Kremlin decried “British double standards.” After the legal options were exhausted, the hit squads began to arrive.
Grozny, Chechnya, August 19, 2002: A rebel missile brings down a huge Mi-26 transport helicopter on its way to Russian military headquarters in Khankala, killing 119. It is the single largest loss of life among the troops fighting in Chechnya in the three-year-old war.
In August 2002, as the death toll in Chechnya mounted, I helped organize a meeting between Zakayev and former NSC secretary Ivan Rybkin, one of the few Russian politicians who stood up to Putin. We wanted to force Putin’s hand on the stalemated war.
The conflict was impossible for either side to win. Russian forces controlled most of the country—but only during the day. By night the countryside was in the hands of the rebels, who had an underground cell in every town and village. The guerrillas used road mines and hit-and-run attacks to grind down the Russian forces. Throughout the North Caucasus, the radical followers of Shamil Basayev gained strength with each passing week, an ominous trend that threatened to turn the region into a breeding ground for Islamic extremism. In the meantime, from his mountainous hideout President Aslan Maskhadov urged negotiations and let it be known privately that he no longer insisted on full independence. Within the Russian army and across the broad political spectrum in Moscow, discontent with the war was growing.
The West and the liberal wing in Russia had stubbornly refused to deem Maskhadov a terrorist. His two envoys, Zakayev in Europe and a man named Ilyas Akhmadov in the United States, moved freely through Western capitals, meeting with members of Congress and various European legislators. Western governments, including the United States, quietly pressured Putin to agree to negotiations, concerned that the Chechen crisis was fueling anti-Western passions across the Muslim world.
But Putin’s position steadily hardened. It had been his war from Day One, and he could not bear the political cost of losing it (not to mention the exposure of his generals’ war crimes that would inevitably have resulted). A settlement with Maskhadov would mean a humiliating failure for him; he insisted on unconditional surrender. Putin took the war very emotionally, and managed it personally. Journalists who interviewed him knew that Chechnya was the one thing that could make him visibly angry. On occasion, his emotions burst out publicly. When a French journalist asked him at a press conference, “Don’t you think that in trying to eradicate terrorism you’re going to eradicate the civilian population in Chechnya?,” Putin turned pale and lost his composure. “If you want to become an Islamic radical and have a circumcision,” he replied, “I invite you to Moscow, because we are a multitalented country and have specialists there. I recommend that you have the operation done in such a way that nothing else will grow there.”
On August 16, 2002, wire reports announced that Ivan Rybkin,