President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday likened Ukraine’s incursion into Russia to the 2004 Beslan school massacre, in which some 330 people died in a hostage siege.
Meeting mothers who lost children in the siege, Putin said that Russia’s enemies are again trying to destabilise the country, referring to Ukraine.
“Just as we fought the terrorists, today we have to fight those who are carrying out crimes in the Kursk region,” Putin said, referring to Ukraine’s cross-border offensive that began two weeks ago.
The Mothers of Beslan group has long called for an objective probe into the attack and the Russian authorities’ response.
The siege in the Caucasus region of North Ossetia came amid a guerilla insurgency by Islamist Chechen separatists, branded “terrorists” by Putin.
Putin launched a major Russian offensive to quash Chechnya’s armed bid for independence in late 1999, weeks before becoming president.
– ‘Personal pain’ – At the meeting with Putin, the Mothers of Beslan complained that Russia’s investigation into the school siege has never been completed, the group’s co-chairwoman Aneta Gadiyeva told Agentstvo outlet.
He also laid red roses at a monument to members of Russia’s special forces who died during the storming of School Number One.
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the Ukrainian invasion of his country to the 2004 Beslan school massacre, which resulted in the hostage-taking deaths of about 330 individuals.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, Putin paid respects to the dead at memorials, which included a cemetery and the location of the demolished school where Chechen militants held over a thousand people hostage.
Putin made reference to Ukraine when he told mothers who had lost children during the siege that Russia’s enemies were attempting to destabilize the nation once more.
“Today we have to fight those who are carrying out crimes in the Kursk region, just as we fought the terrorists,” Putin declared, alluding to the two-week-old Ukrainian cross-border offensive.
Situated across three women from the Mothers of Beslan group, Putin continued, “But just as we achieved our goals in the fight with terrorism, we will achieve these goals also in this direction in the fight with neo-Nazis.”.
“There is no doubt that we will punish the criminals,” stated Putin.
The Mothers of Beslan organization has long demanded an impartial investigation into the assault and the actions of the Russian government.
After explosions in the school gym, where the hostages were being held, Russian special forces stormed the building, sparking a gunfight that ended the roughly 50-hour siege in September 2004.
Putin had labeled Islamist Chechen separatists as “terrorists,” and they were engaged in a guerilla insurgency when the siege in North Ossetia’s Caucasus region began.
Weeks before taking office in late 1999, Putin began a massive Russian offensive to crush Chechnya’s armed independence bid.
Although Putin’s initial popularity was bolstered by the war against the Chechen insurgency, at the end of 2019 he called the Beslan siege a “personal pain” that would follow him for the rest of his life.
At the time, the way Putin and the Kremlin handled the attack drew criticism.
“Personal anguish.”.
Co-chairwoman Aneta Gadiyeva of the Mothers of Beslan group told Agentstvo outlet that the group’s grievance during the Putin meeting was that Russia’s investigation into the school siege has never been finished.
Unlike what Putin said about Ukraine, this portion of the meeting was not broadcast on television.
According to Gadiyeva, Putin informed the women he was unaware of this and that he would seek the head of the Investigative Committee to step in.
In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights declared that Russia had engaged in “serious failings” in its handling of the siege, including the use of excessively lethal force and failure to prevent the attack. The court also urged Moscow to take action to establish the truth.
Two years prior, during a standoff in which Chechen fighters held hundreds of people hostage in a Moscow theater, over 130 people lost their lives, the majority of them as a result of Russian special forces injecting sleeping gas into the theater.
Putin knelt to “honor the memory of the terrorist attack victims” at the base of a monument in the cemetery on Tuesday, according to the Kremlin press office, and placed red roses there.
In honor of those who lost their lives in the storming of School Number One, he also placed red roses at a monument.
At the location of the former school, a “international cultural and patriotic center for the prevention of terrorism” has been established, the Kremlin press office announced on Telegram.
