Well, it's my feeling that the war was timed, nay, occasioned, by the election. That tactically untenable but awfully tempting light-armour push into Grosny last week points at such a reading, I reckon (seems to me an ambushed reccy patrol can't cop a couple of hundred casualties by definition). Anyway, wars are politically sound things to start so long as your political problem is so urgent and crucial that you can justify ignoring that they are politically fraught things to finish.
They're not gonna finish the guerillas but they have polarised Chechnya into a state of perpetual belligerence - and have probably moved a lot of people in Georgia, Azur Baijan (sp?) and Dagestan to give the old shooting irons a quick clean. The war is gonna need very careful orchestration, I reckon - either a manufactured denouement or a strategic prolongation by which good footage can be got on cue with minimal Russian casualties at any one time. Can't be done, I reckon.
Anyway, as old man Bush'll tell ya - you can make a lot of yards kicking foreign butt, but you'd better be sure to make the line before you drop the ball.
The 'commies' will probably still rule the Duma (the independents are apparently an unknown quantity, so it's a hard call), and the president-in-waiting is still on thin ice. Putin may yet find he has paid a durable price for perishable goods - and Unity is a PR spectre that can't last - either as a political entity or a public perception. From his point of view, the presidential race is still a long way off, and Yeltsin had better get really sick really soon.
I'm not sure it would have mattered how Russians voted, really - deckchairs on the Titanic and all that.
All even scarier than it is sad, for mine.
Cheers, Rob.
>A friend writes from Moscow: "The way everyone has been saying it's a
>triumph for democracy is crap -- Unity doesn't even have a party
>headquarters -- it's a complete puppet and its success is very
>depressing to me. It means voters can be totally manipulated: just
>dress the PM in a pinstriped suit, start a war, and the most massive
>machine in the entire country practically gets first place. The real
>triumph for democracy will be when the Kremlin is challenged, allows
>elections to go through, and loses."