Free Republic

For some time now, the Kremlin has been having some real difficulties dealing with how it presents certain information to the public. It is becoming trickier to find just the right words to describe meetings between President Vladimir Putin and the leading candidates to become the next president. It has become quite awkward, for example, to present First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov when he speaks with Putin about relatively mundane affairs. The Kremlin finds it necessary to show Ivanov in a more important light -- one that is more fitting for a presidential candidate. Therefore, Ivanov has recently been...

VLADIKAVKAZ -- "You should be killed and your body thrown to the pigs!" was the daily curse that mothers of children killed in last September's Beslan school attack hurled at the sole surviving hostage-taker, Nur-Pashi Kulayev, when he went on trial in a Vladikavkaz court last month. Yet as Kulayev's version of events inside the school unfolded, it contradicted the version put forward by the authorities in crucial details. As the hearings continued, the women's attitude began to change. After having heard officials publicly lie about the number of hostages inside the school and make other contradictory statements during the...

Members of the State Duma commission investigating the Beslan tragedy said Thursday that a preliminary draft of the report indicated that an accidental explosion, not a planned storming of the school by government troops, set off the ensuing bloody firefight. Duma Deputy Arkady Baskayev, a member of the commission, told Gazeta.ru on Thursday that an accidental explosion inside the school where terrorists were holding hostages set off the firefight that led to the death of 330 people, more than half of them children. "We have the general view that the explosion itself inside the school was an accident," Baskayev told...