When I heard it, it sadly sounded a little like Bush's spin on how good the war in Iraq will be for the people of Iraq.
DoreneC
--- I have problems imagining Bush alluding to war crimes committed by US soldiers and taking responsibility for it, which Putin did to his credit. Chechnya is part of Russia. They can't just go in and bomb the shit out of the place and leave.
The Second Chechen War may be in the long-term a good thing for the people of Chechnya (the alternatives having been at the time Kalashnikov tribalism and gangsterism, an Islamic state or some mixture of the time such as existed under Maskhadov's extremely nominal world. It was an extremely good thing for Chechnya's immediate (non-Russian) neighbors in the Caucasus, who supported it much more than Russians did.