Posted Sunday, September 28, 2003; 12.48BST
There's a neat symmetry to Putin's Chechenization scheme. The Chechen war waged in 1994 by Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was supposed to be a brief punitive action against a small unruly republic. But it ended in August 1996 with at least 80,000 Chechens dead, Russia humiliated and Chechnya independent in all but name. The experience was as scarring for Russia as Vietnam was for the U.S. In late 1999, after a series of apartment bombings in Moscow that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen terrorists, Putin, then Prime Minister, ordered the reinvasion of Chechnya, making the conflict a key theme of his presidential election campaign. By February 2000, Russian jets had crushed the resistance in Grozny by reducing it to rubble. Putin's promise to bring the rebellious republic back into line got him elected President. He has no intention of letting the place unmake him now.

But with a Russian victory no closer today than it was three years ago, Putin desperately needs a credible Plan B. As many as five to seven Russian soldiers are being killed every day in Chechnya, according to close observers of the war. Moscow rarely publishes its losses, but last February the Kremlin admitted to almost 4,600 soldiers dead since late 1999 — more than it lost in the first Chechen war, but still considered a gross understatement. Musa Doshukayev, the Deputy Premier of the Russian- appointed administration in Chechnya, told TIME that the official Kremlin count "causes only mirth among security specialists." No one has counted the Chechen civilian dead, though a conservative estimate is 10,000. While Moscow talks of wiping out the last 3,000 guerrillas — something they were promising to do to the last 2,000 fighters three years ago — the rebels have retained control of large swaths of territory. And all the while Chechen civilians continue to live in fear and squalor, without water, sanitation, electricity or jobs.

Putin's Plan B may work, at least as far as Russian public opinion is concerned. Most Russians prefer not to think about the war, and hostility toward Chechens and other people of the Caucasus is endemic. And Putin has been relentless in enforcing a media blackout. The war only appears on TV if there is an incident too large to ignore — like the destruction in August of a military hospital in the neighboring republic of Northern Ossetia that killed 50 — or when ministers boast that the bandits are on their last legs. Russian media owners know that critical coverage of Chechnya is the quickest way to get shut down, and foreign media are only allowed there on closely controlled government trips.

The "Chechenization" strategy is intended to remove the war as an issue in president Putin's re-election campaign

While Russian leaders claim that the republic is gradually returning to normal, the conflict is in fact spreading: to the west into Ingushetia and to the north into the Russian heartland as far as Moscow, where suicide bombings at a rock concert and an attempted bombing on the capital's main thoroughfare in July have unnerved the public. In Chechnya itself, the guerrilla movement is split between traditional separatist fighters loyal to President Aslan Maskhadov and newer, deeply fundamentalist militants backed by Arab money and a sprinkling of volunteers from the Islamic world. The fighters inflicting the most damage are local Wahhabis, who welcome the idea of martyrdom and hope to push out the Russians and create a Caucasian caliphate. Among them are radicals affiliated with al-Qaeda, some of whom slipped across the border from the Pankisi Gorge after authorities in Georgia shut down a base there last year.

When the Kremlin put Kadyrov in charge of Chechnya in June 2000, many assumed he would be a transitional figure. But he has consolidated his position, in part by arguing forcefully that only Chechens can wipe out anti-Russian insurgency. To help him with this, the Russians have built up the Chechen police into a well-armed force that needs to be expanded, Kadyrov told TIME in a brief, ill-tempered interview at his campaign headquarters: a neat, new prefabricated building protected by high walls and Russian armored personnel carriers (APCs). "The main task is to get the [police] up and running," he said. The corridor was buzzing as visitors crowded into Kadyrov's antechamber, waiting for an audience. Campaign workers rushed in and out bearing signs like sociological group. It's all for show, said an official whom we'll call Kerim. "This place will be empty the moment he leaves."

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