Carnage in Chechnya Has West Worried

In Chechnya, terrorism may be in the eyes of the beholder. Russian forces, purportedly on a campaign against Chechen terrorists, fired missiles into a crowded market place and a maternity home in Grozny Thursday, reportedly killing more than 100 civilians. Although Moscow denied that any civilians had died in what it called a strike on an arms depot, Western reporters inside Grozny reported seeing scores of broken bodies strewn across the marketplace and the corpses of a large number of women and babies at the maternity home. The U.S. expressed concern over the civilian casualties, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held tense talks on the crisis at a meeting on aid with European Union leaders in Finland Friday — the E.U. urged Moscow to halt its offensive and negotiate, but Putin stuck to his guns. Hardly surprising, since the Chechnya campaign is the neophyte prime minister’s prime opportunity to make a name for himself ahead of next year’s presidential election. "The war against Chechen terrorism is Putin’s election platform," says TIME Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge. "And for the moment, it’s doing just what Kremlin image-makers had hoped — boosting Putin’s macho image and his popularity in the polls."

So however Moscow chooses to manage the public relations fallout from the Grozny attack, it’s unlikely to change course in the face of Western hand-wringing. And with financial assistance to Russia already considerably diminished and military intervention unthinkable, there may be little the West can actually do to restrain Moscow. Russian troops are closing in on Grozny, and the missile attack fits their pattern of using air and artillery strikes to drive out civilians ahead of sending in ground troops. "Russia’s triumphal procession through Chechnya's sparsely populated northern plains has ended," says TIME Moscow bureau chief Paul Quinn-Judge. "The real war, for the towns and villages of the rugged south, has begun, and its bloodiness could soon eclipse even the Grozny marketplace attack."