President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday compared Ukraine’s incursion into Russia to the 2004 Beslan school massacre, in which about 330 more people were killed during a hostage siege.
Putin visited the school for the first time in nearly 20 years, paying tribute to the victims at memorials that included a cemetery and the site of the destroyed school, where Chechen militants took more than 1,000 other people hostage.
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Meeting with mothers who lost their children in the siege, Putin said Russia’s enemies were back seeking to destabilize the country, referring to Ukraine.
“Just as we fight terrorists, today we will have to fight those who commit crimes in the Kursk region,” Putin said, referring to Ukraine’s cross-border offensive introduced two weeks ago.
“But just as we achieved our goals in the fight against terrorism, we will also pursue them in this direction in the fight against neo-Nazis,” Putin added, sitting across from three women from the Mothers of Beslan group.
“And we will punish criminals, there is no doubt about that,” Putin added.
The Mothers of Beslan organization hopes that an objective investigation will be carried out into the attack and the reaction of the Russian authorities.
The September 2004 siege lasted about 50 hours and ended in a firefight when Russian special forces stormed the construction site following explosions in the school gymnasium, where the hostages were being held.
The siege of the Caucasus region of North Ossetia came amid a guerrilla insurgency led by Chechen Islamist separatists, classified as “terrorists” by Putin.
Putin launched a first Russian offensive to quell Chechnya’s armed bid for independence in late 1999, weeks before he became president.
The war against the Chechen insurgency helped boost Putin’s initial popularity, but in late 2019 he described the siege of Beslan as a “personal pain” that will stay with him for life.
Putin and the Kremlin were criticized at the time for their handling of the attack.
– ‘Personal pain’ –
During their meeting with Putin, the Beslan Mothers complained that the Russian investigation into the school siege was never concluded, the group’s co-chair Aneta Gadiyeva told the media outlet Agentstvo.
This part of the meeting, unlike Putin’s statements on Ukraine, was not televised.
Gadiyeva said Putin told the women he did know and that he would ask the head of the Investigative Committee to intervene.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2017 that Russia’s handling of the siege was “seriously flawed” in terms of preventing the attack and its excessive use of lethal force and called on Moscow to take steps to identify the truth.
The attack came two years after Chechen fighters took many hostages in a Moscow theater of operations, leaving more than 130 dead, at most from sleeping fuel pumped into the theater by the military. Russian specials.
On Tuesday, Putin laid red roses at the foot of a monument in the cemetery, where he bowed to “honor the memory of those who suffered the terrorist attack,” the Kremlin press service reported.
He also laid red roses at a memorial dedicated to members of the Russian special forces who died in the takeover of school number one.
An “International Cultural and Patriotic Center for the Prevention of Terrorism” was set up in the former school, the Kremlin press service reported on Telegram.
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