RUSSIA: The Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin, angrily rejected western encouragement to open negotiations with Chechen separatists yesterday, writes Daniel McLaughlin
He spoke after the region's most notorious warlord claimed responsibility for the school siege in North Ossetia.
Mr Putin said exhortations from the US and EU to seek a political solution to the Chechen conflict reminded him of efforts to appease Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and warned instead that Russia was planning pre-emptive strikes on terror bases.
"A patronising and indulgent attitude to the murderers amounts to complicity in terror," Mr Putin said, voicing his anger at western pressure to review his, apparently stymied, hardline policy in Chechnya and seek talks with moderate rebels.
"I call on you to remember the lessons of history, of the 1938 Munich accord [with Nazi Germany].
"These are, of course, different situations . . . but there are striking similarities," Mr Putin told a conference of city mayors.
"You cannot think that by dealing with terrorists we can make a deal for them to leave us in peace. Every concession leads to more demands and multiplies our losses."
His speech came after Russia's most wanted man, Shamil Basayev, claimed responsibility for the attack on the school in Beslan, where more than 330 hostages died in a chaotic end to the two-day siege. Almost half the victims were children.
Basayev also claimed to be behind a suicide bombing in Moscow and explosions that blew two Russian airliners out of the sky almost simultaneously last month, killing 100 people in total.
In what he called a "letter to Putin", Basayev urged the former KGB agent to withdraw his troops from Chechnya and grant independence to the republic.
In return, the rebels would "guarantee that all Russia's Muslims would refrain from armed struggle against the Russian Federation, for at least 10-15 years, on condition that freedom of religion be respected."
The offer seemed designed to undermine Mr Putin's warning that independence for Chechnya would prompt a series of other separatist demands across the world's largest country.
Basayev also rejected the Kremlin's claim that Chechnya's separatist movement was little more than a front for international, Islamic terror groups like al-Qaeda.
"I don't know \ bin Laden," Basayev said of the al-Qaeda leader. "I don't get money from him, but I wouldn't turn it down."
The warlord, who Russia claims has killed several times and is believed to have lost a leg in a landmine blast, said his fighters would continue to use any means necessary to force Moscow's troops out of Chechnya.
"We regret what happened in Beslan. It's simply that the war, which Putin declared on us five years ago, which has destroyed more than 40,000 Chechen children and crippled more than 5,000 of them, is now back where it started," he wrote.
"\ is fighting us without any rules, with the direct connivance of the whole world, and we are not bound by any circumstances, or to anybody, and we will continue to fight as is convenient and advantageous to us, and by our rules," Basayev said in the e-mail posted on the kavkazcenter.com website.
Lithuania said it would shut down the website, which is run from the capital, Vilnius, after it posted a $20 million reward for Mr Putin in response to Moscow's $10 million bounty for Basayev and Mr Aslan Maskhadov, a fugitive separatist leader who has condemned attacks on civilians.
In Poland, the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State, Mr Richard Armitage, denounced Basayev, saying: "He has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is inhuman.
"Anyone who would use innocents for political aims is not worthy of existence in the type of society that we endorse."
Mr Putin irked Russia's neighbours in the volatile Caucasus region yesterday by claiming to be "seriously preparing to act preventively against terrorists."
The Kremlin has repeatedly accused Georgia of letting Chechen guerrillas use its remote Pankisi Gorge area to regroup and re-equip.
Security analysts suspect that money, messages and supplies get to the guerrillas through Azerbaijan.
In Azerbaijan, the President of the EU Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, expressed fears for Russian democracy, after Mr Putin said he would appoint regional governors personally and overhaul electoral procedures to help strengthen Moscow's own "war on terror".