From the LAT:

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday ordered special services to hunt down and “destroy” the killers of four Russian hostages in Iraq.

The Kremlin did not specify whether Russia’s top security agencies, the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, or others would take the lead in finding the group that said it killed the four Russian Embassy workers.

But Nikolai P. Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, said his agency would be involved.

Russia, a consistent critic of the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq, has no military forces there. But Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov has stated that Russia has the right to strike “terrorist” targets preemptively.

Presumably what Putin meant by “hunt down and destroy” was to collect verifiable evidence of who the alleged killers were and then to present this evidence to Germany, France and other UN Countries who have been doing business with the killers to see if they can get UN Security Resolution passed that condemns the killing of its citizens. We can’t imagine that Putin would be suggesting that they might unilaterally take action in a sovereign nation.

tags: russia

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 10:31 pm by Insider and is filed under War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.