DISTANT ECHOES – Reminders from The Template Website

TEMPLATE ANALYSIS

Last night’s BBC documentary Putin, Russia and The West contained perhaps the most powerful and disturbing footage broadcast on terrestrial television yet.

A boy from a village in Chechnya is dragged out of his home by Russian soldiers, he is heard screaming for his life – ‘hy-aa Allah’ – and the narrator tells us that his body was found much later buried in a Russian base.

The pictures which were shot before the Moscow Theatre siege, and of course much earlier than Beslan, are perhaps also the first hard proof of what Russia’s soldiers were doing as they attempted to reconquer Chechnya for their president, Vladimir Putin.

Russia’s military doctrine when it comes to conquering and reconquering its restive Muslim provinces has been simple – the harder you hit them, the less likely they are to come  back again.

Russia’s soldiers were of…