When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, he made one thing clear immediately: he would be different from his predecessors – Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union – in his response to terrorism.
That difference would be manifested in his declared determination never to wilt under pressure. Like many officers trained in the KGB and traumatised by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin was convinced the Russian state was so fragile that it could collapse at any moment if its enemies were given an inch. To Putin and his KGB friends, the famous phone call made in 1995 by Yeltsin’s prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to a terrorist leader to save the lives of hostages in a hospital in Budyonnovsk, was the worst possible way of dealing with terrorists.
