Two Decades On, Smoldering Questions About The Russian President's Vault To Power

[TomSea]

Two Decades On, Smoldering Questions About The Russian President's Vault To Power


Russian President Vladimir Putin with his Belarusian and Ukrainian counterparts, Alyaksandr Lukashenka (left) and Leonid Kuchma, at a service marking the defeat of Nazi Germany near the southern Russian town of Prokhorovka in May 2000.

One month after then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked a security agency official named Vladimir Putin from obscurity and made him prime minister, an explosion leveled a nine-story apartment building on Moscow’s outskirts.

The predawn blast on September 9, 1999, reduced the building to a smoking pile of rubble, killing more than 100. A second building, less than 6 kilometers away, was rocked by an explosion on September 13, killing 119.

Days earlier, a car bomb exploded in a small town bordering the war-ravaged region of Chechnya, where reignited fighting was already spilling into neighboring regions. That blast, outside the apartment building in the town of Buynaksk, killed dozens.

Read more at: https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-russia-president-1999-chechnya-apartment-bombings/30097551.html