Chechen vote puts spotlight on Kremlin problem

As voters went to the polls Sunday in Chechnya, there was little doubt about who would be anointed president of the embattled Russian republic: Moscow's choice is interior minister Alu Alkhanov.

Security concerns kept many Chechens from taking part in the election meant to replace Akhmad Kadyrov, whose death in a bomb blast last May has rocked the Kremlin's strategy on Chechnya.

But analysts say that none of the seven candidates - Maj. Gen. Alkhanov included - have a fraction of the warlord reputation that Mr. Kadyrov brought to the job.

And as rebel strikes continue to escalate, questions are being raised anew about Russian President Vladimir Putin's shrinking options for getting out of the quagmire.

While officials have not yet blamed guerrillas for the bombs that brought down two passenger jets Tuesday, killing 89 people, investigators are focusing on two Chechen women passengers, and say that the explosives match those of previous Chechen attacks.

"This election is not part of a democratic process; this is a result of a terror act - the assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov," says Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Everything that has happened [since then] points to an escalation."

This year alone, Russia has been rocked by the Kadyrov assassination, a February subway bombing that killed 39, rebel raids in neighboring Ingushetia and the capital Grozny, which left scores of Chechen police and federal troops dead.

"Putin is running out of options - that's a sad fact," says Ms. Hill. While a Chechen connection to the bombed planes "gives [the Kremlin] more ammunition to keep pushing the idea that the Chechens are just one large, undifferentiated terrorist group ... it doesn't solve their problems."

The job of Chechnya's president may be one of the most dangerous: Three out of the last four have been killed. And violence is never far away. Sunday a man blew himself up outside a polling station.

"It's clear that Putin's policy had its own internal logic - until what happened to Kadyrov," says Oksana Antonenko, head of the Russia and Eurasia program at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.

That policy was based on the assumption that, five years into Russia's second brutal war in Chechnya in a decade, a military solution was possible. Another assumption, Ms. Antonenko says, was that a political process "managed completely out of Moscow that doesn't have internal legitimacy" could manage the rebels.

"We are at a point where the Russian people aren't secure, and the situation in Chechnya is insecure," so the vote is merely an "attempt to continue a strategy that has really failed," says Antonenko. "There is no new thinking at all around Putin of what to do about Chechnya."

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