Under the Gun

This is Putin's most belligerent statement to date. His previous comments have concentrated on calling for Georgia to allow joint operations to restore order in the gorge and to hand over Chechens to the Russian justice system, and on highlighting Georgia's changed attitude to the risk posed by the Pankisi Gorge. Until this year, Georgia had denied Russian claims that Chechens were using the gorge as a base.

Similarly, while Putin's letter to the UN strives to legitimize any military action, it also signals a more unilateralist approach. While there have been voices calling for unilateral action, most Russian calls on Georgia have suggested either bilateral security operations, or a peace-enforcement effort, possibly including the United States and the United Nations.

Putin's actions prompted hectic activity in Tbilisi. Shevardnadze went on the air to tell his countrymen that there were "no grounds for panic," while parliament appealed to the UN, NATO, and other international organizations to help it in the face of this "threat of aggression." In comments addressed to Georgia's Prime News agency and quoted by RFE/RL, a foreign-policy adviser to Shevardnadze, Shalva Pitchkhadze, said Tbilisi should "activate its search for a new security umbrella" with NATO.

Whether Russia will do more than rattle its saber remains to be seen, but the timing suggests that the statement was political — and may, some argue, also limit the possibility of a large-scale operation. Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Moscow-based defense analyst, was quoted by the Russian news service Gazeta.Ru as pointing out that by October there will be snow in the Caucasus, largely restricting Russia's options to bombing.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]The timing of the toughened Russian stance may mean that Putin is going beyond his usual equation of Chechen rebels to al-Qaeda. In 2001, Putin mirrored a U.S. ultimatum to the Taliban by issuing a 72-hour ultimatum to Chechen fighters to cut links to al-Qaeda. On this occasion, Moscow's claim that it has the right to take unilateral action mirrors U.S. arguments regarding the possibility of strikes against Iraq.

This has prompted speculation that there may be one of three Iraq-related motives for the statement. Putin could be trying to persuade the United States not to attack Iraq, or, fearing a strike is inevitable, trying to wrest concessions from Washington — or he may simply be seeking to placate domestic opinion. Moscow has made plain in the past month that there is blue water between it and Washington regarding the international "axis of evil" identified by Bush in January.

Shevardnadze, meanwhile, says Putin should be concentrating on the underlying cause of instability in the north Caucasus: the war in Chechnya. "It was not we who created the Pankisi problem," he told a meeting of Georgia's national security council last week.

In his letter to the U.N., Putin said the "military aspect" of the task of "liquidating the terrorist infrastructure" in Chechnya had been "fulfilled," thereby suggesting that Chechen bases in Georgia are the principal obstacle to forcing the Chechens to put down their arms after three years of war.

Amid the hostile talk, senior Chechen, Russian, and U.S. figures in late August met to put together a proposal aimed at bringing peace to the republic. Ruslan Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen and a former speaker of the Russian parliament, helped draft the plan in April. It was then endorsed in April by the representative of Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected Chechen president in 1997, before being approved in Liechtenstein in August. The plan was put together after discussions involving Ivan Rybkin, a former speaker of the Duma, former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

However, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, said on 9 September that Washington views Maskhadov with "increasing skepticism." His statement, quoted by Reuters, that Maskhadov "was clearly part of the group which launched an attack on Dagestan" in August 1999 suggests Washington may be increasingly willing to accept Moscow's view that Maskhadov is a "terrorist." Vershbow, however, said he did not want to "label" the Chechen rebel leader.

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