It had to happen

(Photo: AP )

Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin, known for his ability to report to the Kremlin about another victory of federal troops in Chechnya before other military leaders, showed up for a meeting with the president on March 29 with his head hung low. He appeared to report to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief about the monstrous crime committed in Chechnya by the commander of the 160th Tank Regiment, Yuri Budanov. Two days earlier, this colonel raped and killed an 18-year-old Chechen woman.

Coming out from the president's office, the Chief of the General Staff looked shocked. He told the journalists who met him that Budanov was a “scumbag,” “a bandit towards the civilian population.” “These types of people need to be uprooted from the army.”
This is a rare case when one cannot but agree with Anatoly Kvashnin. However, what is alarming is the fact that the Chief of the General Staff behaves as if this is the first time he has encountered such crimes. Exactly like representatives of the military prosecutor's office, who blindly tell journalists that only nine criminal cases have been opened against an almost 100,000-strong warring group of federal forces, that is, as many as are opened in any Russian division in six months. Not a single case of looting was noted by military prosecutors, which is very difficult to believe.

Colonel Budanov’s crime attracted the Kremlin’s attention primarily because on the eve of the session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, at which Russia’s membership in this organization may be suspended precisely in connection with Chechnya, the authorities decided to carry out a show flogging. Like, look, the crimes committed by the army against the residents of Chechnya do not go unpunished.

And, of course, the Kremlin cannot help but be concerned by the fact that the rapist and murderer turned out to be a senior officer, under whose command there were several hundred people (Budanov’s subordinates helped him bury the body of the murdered woman). This indicates the extreme degree of decomposition of the troops fighting in Chechnya.

The guilt of Anatoly Kvashnin himself in this tragedy is obvious. And not only because he, by definition, bears moral responsibility for everything that happens in the Armed Forces. It was the Chief of the General Staff who convinced the Kremlin of the possibility of a “blitzkrieg” in Chechnya, which, as expected, did not work out. The army got bogged down and began to decay.

On the day when Kvashnin reported to Putin about the killer colonel, the militants defeated another military column, this time of Perm riot police. The Russian army today is waging war against partisans, and this, as history teaches, quickly turns the military into punitive forces.