Putin's Wars
Page 27
When Yeltsin started the First Chechen War he had two objectives: first, to end the political instability in this region, and, second, to safeguard his reelection. The purpose of the Second Chechen War was to defend the interests of the Kremlin, especially of the “Family,” the group around Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. This group included oligarchs, such as Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, but also Aleksandr Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration, and his two predecessors Valentin Yumashev (who would marry Tatyana in 2002) and Anatoly Chubais. On May 25, 1998, Vladimir Putin was appointed first deputy head of the presidential administration. Three months later, on July 25, 1998, he became director of the FSB, the secret service. Putin was considered by the members of the Family to be one of them. He certainly was one of them, although he had his personal agenda.
Panic in the Family
In the spring of 1999 the Family had a sense of urgency that was bordering on panic. This time the situation was even more pressing than in 1994—before the start of the First Chechen War. Soon, in December 1999, there would be elections for the State Duma, followed by the presidential election in the spring of 2000. According to the constitution, Boris Yeltsin, having served two terms, would have to leave the Kremlin. This imminent change of the country’s leadership was extremely threatening. Yevgeny Primakov, who was appointed prime minister in September 1998 under the pressure of a hostile Duma, was working closely together with Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. Both men had a good chance of winning the parliamentary elections in December. And one of them could become the next president. Primakov had already threatened to sue all oligarchs who illegally had enriched themselves. This happened at the same time as the Swiss authorities had opened an investigation into the so-called Mabetex affair. Mabetex was a construction company that was said to have paid $15 million in kickbacks to Yeltsin, his two daughters, and senior Kremlin officials, in order to receive a renovation contract for the Kremlin buildings. At the same time US investigators alleged that $10 billion in funds from Russia had been illegally deposited in the Bank of New York. It was suspected that part of it came from a $20 billion loan the IMF had paid to Russia since 1992 to stabilize the economy. Members of the Family were not only afraid that the new leadership would strip them of their newly acquired wealth, but—even worse—they feared that they could end up in prison. There were ominous signs on the wall. Russia’s highest investigator, Procurator General Yury Skuratov, had already begun a series of investigations that included the Mabetex affair and irregularities at Aeroflot and the Russian Central Bank, which were all connected with the Family.[2] It was in this context of a regime in panic that felt itself increasingly cornered, that the search for a suitable successor to Yeltsin began.
In his memoirs Yeltsin wrote about his attempts to find a suitable successor, where “suitable” meant a person who was capable and strong-willed, and at the same time trustworthy enough to give the Family a guarantee that its members would not be persecuted in the courts after Yeltsin would have left office. However, whether or not such a successor could be found in time was very uncertain. Therefore Yeltsin and the Family also prepared for a second option: to declare a state of emergency, disband the Duma, ban the Communist Party, and postpone the elections. On May 16, 1999, however, the option of such a Bonapartist coup d’état was dropped. On this day the Communist opposition in the State Duma failed to muster enough votes to start an impeachment procedure against Yeltsin. (One of the five charges against Yeltsin was, ironically, that he had started the first war against Chechnya.)[3] Immediately after the vote Yeltsin sacked Primakov as prime minister and appointed Sergey Stepashin, minister of the interior and former FSB chief, in his place. It seemed at first that Stepashin was Yeltsin’s ultimate choice for “Operation Successor.” But Yeltsin soon had doubts about the new man. “Stepashin was soft,” Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs, “and he liked to pose a bit. He loved theatrical gestures. I wasn’t certain he could hold out to the end or display that tremendous will and resolve needed in a fierce political battle. I couldn’t imagine a president of Russia without these tough character traits.”[4] Within three months Stepashin was sacked and, on August 9, 1999, he was replaced by the reserved and uncharismatic apparatchik Vladimir Putin.
Whatever option the Family would choose: a Bonapartist coup d’état or “Operation Successor”—in both cases an appropriate climate would have to be created in Russia: in the first case to justify a state of emergency, in the second case to boost the popularity of the Family’s presidential candidate.[5] And again—as in 1994—the Chechen option was chosen. At the end of March 1999 a meeting of the “power ministers” was held in which Sergey Stepashin, at that time still minister of the interior, Igor Sergeyev, minister of defense, Anatoly Kvashnin, head of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and Vladimir Putin, director of the FSB, participated.[6] They adopted a plan to intervene militarily in Chechnya. The original plan, considered in March 1999, was more modest than the one that would ultimately be chosen. It intended just “to seal Chechnya off” by creating a cordon sanitaire around the republic. The plan included the occupation of about one third of the Chechen territory north of the river Terek—but it did not include the capture of the capital, Grozny. Additionally, the border zone of Chechnya with Georgia would be occupied. In April the Russian Security Council approved this plan. At that point, this council had, for only a few days, been headed by Putin.
However, in May 1999—after the dismissal of Prime Minister Primakov, who had been critical of an intervention in Chechnya—this moderate plan would be changed and another, more radical plan adopted. This was a plan to reconquer the whole Chechen republic and bring it back into the Russian Federation. It is unclear how far these changes were affected by developments on the ground in Chechnya. Radical Wahhabists within the Chechen government, led by Shamil Basayev, convened, in April 1999 in Grozny, a Congress of the Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan to discuss the unification of the two republics into a caliphate. In May a group of about sixty radicals crossed the border into Dagestan and wounded eleven servicemen and two policemen before retreating. This led to the first attacks by the Russian air force against radical positions in Chechnya since the first Chechen War.[7] However, it was clear that, in order to start an all-out war, a more serious casus belli had to be found.
A Real or Constructed Casus Belli? The Alleged Chechen Attack on Dagestan
This casus belli was a second and more important incursion of Chechen rebels into Dagestan. A Chechen attack on another Caucasian republic that was—unlike Chechnya itself—an undisputed part of the Russian Federation, could not be accepted, and clearly justified a counterattack. On August 8, 1999, an incursion took place involving about one thousand Chechen fighters, led by the jihadist rebel leader Shamil Basayev and his Saudi ally, Umar Ibn al-Khattab, leader of the foreign mujahideen in Chechnya. The Kremlin immediately declared Russia to be under attack by international terrorism. Yeltsin sacked Prime Minister Stepashin and, on August 9, appointed Putin as his successor. He indicated that he considered Putin a worthy successor to become the next Russian president. The Chechen attack on Dagestan was presented by the Russian authorities as a complete surprise. But how spontaneous and “unexpected” was this Chechen attack? In early August 1999, just after the incursion took place, the investigative Russian weekly Versiya published a report alleging that, some time before the incursion into Dagestan,[8] the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had purportedly met in France with Shamil Basayev. The meeting allegedly took place in a villa on the Côte d’Azur, which belonged to a Saudi citizen, Adnan Khashoggi, a rich international arms dealer with a dubious reputation. The meeting was, allegedly, arranged by a middleman, Anton Surikov, a retired officer of the GRU (Glavnoe Razvedivatelnoe Upravlenie), the intelligence service of the Russian army. Surikov and Basayev would have known each other and would even have been on friendly terms since 1992, when they fought together on
the side of Abkhazia in the war against Georgia. In this period Shamil Basayev, his brother Shirvani Basayev, and their Chechen fighters worked closely together with the GRU. They were even trained by this organization. “There is little doubt,” wrote Martin Malek, “that Basayev worked together well with [the] Russian secret services in Abkhazia (where Basayev’s men are said to have played soccer with the heads of killed Georgians).”[9]
The reason behind this secret meeting on the French Riviera would seem to have been that—however implausible this might seem at first sight—the Kremlin and Shamil Basayev shared parallel interests. Basayev was a Wahhabi jihadist who wanted to establish a Caucasian emirate in the North Caucasus. He was a fierce opponent of the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, a moderate Chechen nationalist, who considered Basayev’s expansionist jihadism a danger to Chechnya’s independence. A small war was in Basayev’s interests, because it would destabilize Mashkadov and at the same time enhance Basayev’s status inside Chechnya, opening up political prospects. The Kremlin equally urgently needed a small victorious war in its “Operation Successor.” In the alleged meeting on the French Riviera the Russian side is thought to have promised that there would be no real resistance in Dagestan (as a matter of fact some weeks before the conflict the Russian border troops would be withdrawn from Dagestan’s borders—to the great surprise of the local authorities). It would be a “Potemkin war,” a quasi-war, a theatrical, hardly serious armed exchange, so that in the end both sides could claim victory.[10] Are these allegations of a secret understanding between Basayev and the Kremlin true? We don’t know, because until today definitive evidence is lacking. It is clear, however, that if Basayev had trusted a Russian promise that the conflict would remain restricted to a theatrical skirmish, he would have fulfilled for the Kremlin the role of a “useful idiot.” After the Chechen incursion into Dagestan Putin immediately declared an all-out war as an answer to the Chechen provocation.
Storm in Moscow
But would Basayev’s attack on Dagestan be enough to trigger a wave of public anger in Russia? For the average Russian citizen the events in Dagestan were far from home and certainly had nothing to do with daily life in a country that was just recovering from the deep financial crisis of 1998. It was clear that in order to succeed, “Operation Successor” had to be accompanied by more powerful measures. Then, suddenly, in the first weeks of September 1999, in the Russian Federation there began a series of terrorist attacks. On September 4, a massive bomb exploded at a military housing complex at Buikansk in Dagestan, killing eighty-three people. On September 8 and 13 there followed explosions in working-class apartment buildings in south Moscow, leaving 228 people dead. On September 16 a truck exploded in the southern town of Volgodonsk. These explosions were real massacres. Hundreds of Russian citizens—men, women, children—were killed, dismembered, and maimed, when bombs, placed by unknown criminals in the basement of the apartment buildings, exploded. The explosions always took place early in the morning to kill a maximum of victims. In just a few weeks over three hundred people were killed and over one thousand wounded. The wave of terrorism led to widespread panic and fear in the population. And for everybody it was clear who was the culprit: it was the work of Chechen terrorists.
A Strange “Exercise” by the FSB
Then something strange happened. On the evening of September 22, 1999, a bus driver, returning home in Ryazan, a city about 130 miles southeast from Moscow, saw two suspicious-looking men carrying big sacks into the basement of the apartment building where he lived. On the license plate of their car was pasted a piece of paper with the number 62, the region code of Ryazan. The man immediately called the police, and when the policemen arrived they discovered in the basement three 50 kg sacks of a white powder. The sacks were connected to a detonator, batteries, and a clock with the timer set for 5:30 next morning. Immediately thirty thousand residents in the neighborhood were evacuated. The sacks contained the highly explosive substance hexogen that had also been used in the previous bombings. The local police, analyzing mobile telephone calls that were made immediately after the event, arrested two men in connection with the terrorist attempt. To the great surprise of the policemen, the two suspects showed ID cards of the secret service FSB. It took the FSB some time to react. But on September 24 FSB chief Nikolay Patrushev announced that it had only been an exercise to test the vigilance of the police and the population. The substance of the sacks, identified by experts as hexogen, was said to have been just ordinary sugar. This version, however, was contested by Yury Tkachenko, the explosives expert who had defused the bomb. In an interview in February 2000 with Pavel Voloshin, a journalist of the paper Novaya Gazeta, Tkachenko insisted that the vapors coming from the sacks had been analyzed by a sophisticated gas analyzer and that the device had clearly indicated the presence of hexogen. Also the detonator was a professional one, one that was used by the army.[11] According to the paper Kommersant an explosion in the twelve-floor building in Ryazan would have killed about 240 people.[12]
Foresight or Leaked Information?
Other strange things happened in this period—even before the wave of explosions started. There were, for instance, two Western journalists, who—quoting anonymous sources—announced the events two months before they actually took place. On June 6, 1999, Jan Blomgren, the Moscow correspondent for the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, wrote that one option being considered by the Kremlin and its associates was “terror bombings in Moscow which could be blamed on the Chechens.”[13] A similar statement was made by Giulio Chiesa, the Moscow correspondent for the Italian paper La Stampa, who wrote an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta of June 16, 1999, with the title Terroristy tozhe raznye (There are also different kinds of terrorists), indicating that terrorist methods can be used, not only by rebel groups, but also by governments.[14] In a second article, written after the explosions, Chiesa emphasized the plausibility of the latter option, pointing to the extreme professionalism of the terror attacks. According to him, for the nine explosions that were planned the terrorists needed more than two tons of hexogen and “in Russia hexogen is produced only in a factory in Perm, in the Urals,” which would mean that “tons of explosives disappear from a top-secret factory and circulate throughout Russia.”[15] Chiesa also stressed the fact that the explosives “were positioned in an extremely professional way, under the bearing structures of the buildings, in such a way as to make them collapse like a house of cards.”[16]
Not only these two foreign correspondents, but also Russian journalists predicted with unmatched foresight the coming events, hinting at involvement of the highest political authorities. On July 22, 1999, Aleksandr Zhilin published an article in the Moskovskaya Pravda with the title Burya v Moskve (Storm in Moscow).[17] In this article Zhilin wrote that “the city is awaiting great shocks. The performance of loud terrorist acts (or attempts at terrorist acts) is being planned involving a number of government establishments: the buildings of the FSB, MVD [Ministry of the Interior], the Federation Council, the Moscow City Court, the Moscow Arbitration Court, and a number of editorial boards of anti-Luzhkov publications.”[18] In a second article, published after the bombings, Zhilin wrote that he possessed a leaked document on which his first article was based. He said he had showed the document to the deputy premier of Moscow and to colleagues from the TV: “Everyone said that this could not be true,” he wrote. “Today I understand that those journalists who rejected even the theoretical possibility of the existence of a plan of destabilization in Moscow, one that included terrorist acts, were reasoning like normal, decent people. They could not understand in their minds how, for the sake of some political goals, someone could commit such barbaric acts.”[19]
Another Russian journalist, Yelena Tregubova, who had close contacts with the Kremlin at the time, wrote that, as early as September 1998—this is one year before the apartment explosions took place—the head of the presidential administration, Valentin Yumashev, warned her “that we have received s
ecret information from the special services that the country finds itself on the eve of mass rebellions, in essence on the verge of revolution.”[20] Tregubova considered this an indication that a “Storm” scenario had already been envisaged. It is clear that the real truth could not emerge in this climate of rumors, predictions, alleged leaked documents, and so-called exercises in which FSB agents were caught while putting sacks of sugar in the basement of an apartment building. There was only an “official” truth, and this truth was that Chechen terrorists were responsible for these acts. Sophie Shihab, at that time the Moscow correspondent for the French paper Le Monde, returned later to these dramatic and fateful weeks. She wrote about a young French businessman with close contacts with Berezovsky, who had called the bureau of Le Monde in Moscow in September 1999. “On the telephone,” wrote Shihab, “he has lost his considerable self-assurance and renounces his friend: ‘Boris is announcing more attacks. He has gone mad. It is finished, I’m having nothing more to do with him. He must think that by creating chaos he can put his strong man into power.’”[21] Strange? But there were other strange things that happened in this period, although it would take two and a half years before these emerged in the press.
One of these strange things was the fact that Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the Duma, was informed of the explosion in Volgodonsk three days before the explosion actually took place.[22] It happened on September 13, 1999, during a session of the Duma and LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told how it happened: “Somebody from the secretariat brought a note. Clearly they had called to warn the speaker about such a turn of events. Seleznev read us the news on the explosion. Thereafter we waited for announcements about the event in Volgodonsk on the TV news. But when this only happened three days later, I was the only one who asked the speaker about it at the plenary session of September 17, 1999.”[23] Seleznev did not answer: he simply turned Zhirinovsky’s microphone off. When, in October 1999—after the war had started—a Russian GRU officer, Aleksey Galtin, was captured by the Chechens, the man declared on a video, received by The Independent: “I know who is responsible for the bombings in Moscow (and Dagestan). It is the FSB, in cooperation with the GRU, that is responsible for the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow.”[24] The Russian authorities immediately claimed that this confession had been made under torture and contained no truth. But after his return to Russia, Galtin repeated his version of the facts in an interview with the opposition paper Novaya Gazeta, and this time he could not be accused of making his statement under pressure.