RUSSIA: Vladimir Putin refuses to accept that his military policy has failed, despite evidence such as the school siege in Beslan , writes Dan McLaughlin
In the early days of the Chechen war the independence leader, Gen Dzhokhar Dudayev, declared of his people: "We must live like the wolf, proud and alone." A decade after President Boris Yeltsin sent Russian troops into Chechnya to bring its rebels to heel, Dudayev's words still speak a bleak truth about his shattered homeland.
Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have died in what Mr Yeltsin hoped would be a "small, victorious war", to rein in lawlessness in Chechnya, restore Kremlin control over the strategic republic and boost his own standing and popularity.
Those aims were shared by Mr Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, when he sent troops back into the region in 1999 after a three-year truce, and the former KGB man has failed to realise them almost as starkly as did his capricious mentor.
Only in the popularity stakes has Mr Putin succeeded, winning two elections as a tough leader trusted to lift a climate of national fear that he, in fact, has helped create.
It was on December 11th, 1994, that Russian soldiers rolled into Chechnya, after months of failed Kremlin attempts to dislodge the rebellious Gen Dudayev and his allies, whom Mr Yeltsin blamed for a series of hijackings in the ever-restless Caucasus region.
Humiliated by the resistance of Dudayev, a Soviet air force officer, Mr Yeltsin dispatched bombers to pound the Chechen capital, Grozny, and "soften up" the rebels.
But as Russia soon discovered, its soldiers - mostly demoralised conscripts with minimal training - were no match for mobile, well-armed and highly motivated rebels who enjoyed much support among a civilian population that had been terrified by indiscriminate Russian bombing.
The boast of Mr Yeltsin's defence minister, Gen Pavel Grachev, that one Russian airborne division could take Grozny from the rebels in two hours was catastrophically disproved on New Year's Eve 1994.
As troops poured into central Grozny - many without maps of the city - to try and seize strategic targets, the guerrillas simply waited for their armoured vehicles to stop or become trapped before incinerating them with rocket-propelled grenades.
"It was like walking into a quagmire," recalls Eduard Vorobyov, the military-man-turned-politician who resigned as deputy chief of Russia's ground forces rather than lead the ill-prepared assault in Chechnya.
By the start of 1995, some 2,000 Russian soldiers had already been killed and Moscow's artillery and air force had begun to reduce Grozny - a modern city of 400,000 people - to rubble. By some estimates, 25,000 civilians had been killed by the end of January.
With their greater firepower and numbers, Moscow's forces finally seized about two-thirds of Chechnya, forcing the rebels into the mountainous south of the region, from where they launched high-profile hostage-taking raids on neighbouring republics.
With no end to the fighting in sight and at the start of a second Kremlin term, Mr Yeltsin withdrew his troops in humiliation in August 1996 and left Chechnya to run itself under Gen Dudayev's successor, Mr Aslan Maskhadov.
Internationally recognised elections saw Mr Maskhadov named president the following year, but he failed to make Chechnya a viable state, and it was dogged by kidnappings and constant clashes between rival clans and criminal groups.
After blaming Chechens for a series of huge apartment bombings in Moscow and southern Russia in summer 1999, Mr Putin, then prime minister, pledged to kill rebels "even in the outhouse" and sent soldiers back into the region that autumn.
Now into its sixth year, and with Mr Putin enjoying his second term as President, Chechnya is no closer to peace than it was 10 years ago.
Mr Putin refuses to negotiate with the fugitive Mr Maskhadov and persists in making the rigged election of Kremlin-backed puppets the centrepiece of his "peace process" in Chechnya. He also refuses to accept that his military policy has failed, despite such evidence as the school siege in Beslan and the daily killing of soldiers in Chechnya.
Under fire from rights groups for allowing his forces to run amok, Mr Putin has found cover beneath the banner of the US-led "war on terror", by claiming that Chechnya's separatist movement is essentially an al-Qaeda franchise on Europe's south-east fringe.
Radical Islam does have a tenuous foothold in Chechnya, but its popularity is limited in a predominantly Sufi society. What's more, the rebels' consistent demand remains independence for Chechnya, and they have not focused attacks on western targets.
Mr Ilyas Akhmadov, Mr Maskhadov's former foreign minister, wrote this week: "In the absence of political will to reach a settlement, the Chechen conflict could well rage for another decade, or until the Chechen population is eradicated."