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Article: Boris Yeltsin's fatal folly. (war in Chechnya)(Column)
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- July 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Society for the Advancement of Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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TWO GREAT FAILINGS stand behind Moscow's relentless suppression of Chechnya: greed and folly. The former is endemic to a new system of quasi-criminal economics that has arisen from the post-Soviet shambles; the latter is a strange inability, author Barbara Tuchman once observed, "to perceive that a given policy is harming rather than serving self-interest."
Greed is harder to document, especially in the murky world of contemporary Russia where the LUKoil company has emerged as one of the largest oil companies in the world and an uncounted player in Russia's national politics. LUKoil is critical to Moscow, providing cheap fuel for the military in exchange for deferred ...