Apartment Bombings in Russia

• Apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities in September 1999, in which about 300 people died.
• Berezovsky, feuding with Putin since autumn 2000, threw accusations at a press conference in London, in which he offered what seemed to be extremely fragmentary and circumstantial evidence suggesting that the authorities were behind the bombings to help Putin get elected.
• Earlier, the Kremlin condemned Chechen rebels for these attacks.
• Putin previously rejected the accusation as "delirious nonsense," and a Russian prosecutor said Tuesday that Berezovsky made the accusations to distract attention from investigations into his financial affairs.

The Bombings and Political Impact

• The horrific bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buinaksk in September 1999 stunned Russia and marked a turning point in war and politics.
• Although Russian officials said their investigation pointed to Chechnya, they never found evidence or arrested the perpetrators.
• The bombings galvanized support for a military offensive against Chechnya in late 1999, and also played a key role in boosting the popularity of Putin, who was then the newly appointed prime minister.
• Vowing to exterminate the Chechens, Putin became terribly popular and far outstripped all other contenders for the legacy of President Boris Yeltsin.
• On New Year's Eve 2000, Yeltsin resigned and appointed Putin acting president.
• Putin was elected President in March 2000.

Berezovsky's Accusations

• Berezovsky, who initially supported Putin and was close to Yeltsin's inner circle, previously spread the accusation that Russian special services might be involved in the bombings.
• On Tuesday, he said he was sure Putin did not give the order for the bombings, but "at a minimum, he knew, he was aware of the FSB's involvement."
• FSB is the Russian abbreviation for the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB, which Putin headed for a year before being appointed prime minister.
• Berezovsky, who left Russia and now lives and works in London in self-imposed exile, is co-chairman of a new party, Liberal Russia, which sponsored the press conference.
• Berezovsky said his goal was to draw attention to unanswered questions about the bombs.
• He brushed off questions about his motives, saying he did not want to discuss them, but the highly specialized press conference seems like a deliberate challenge to Putin.
• Berezovsky also released a film about the bombs and presented several new hints about the mysterious explosions, but without decisive evidence.

Evidence and Claims

• Part of the material was a statement by Nikita Chekulin, at one time the executive director of a Russian scientific institute, who stated that he was recruited by the FSB to become part of a secret anti-terrorist operation.
• He stated that he became acquainted there with a secret scheme for transferring tons of extremely explosive hexogen from military bases to other, unnamed organizations, and that the hexogen was loaded under false labels, hinting that the explosives used in the bombings came from the state, not from Chechens.
• Chekulin stated that efforts to investigate these transfers were later cornered (or reached a dead end) by FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, who succeeded Putin in his post.
• Earlier, officials stated that hexogen was used in the bomb explosions.
• But Chekulin's claim does not prove a link.
• Similarly, the film "Assassination of Russia" by two Frenchmen, Charles Gazelle and Jean-Charles Deniau, focuses on many mysteries regarding the bombs but does not resolve them.
• The film was originally prepared for broadcast on NTV, an independent television station, later taken over by the partially state-controlled natural gas monopoly Gazprom.

Photo - portrait: Boris Berezovsky, former media mogul, said Tuesday that Moscow planned the bombs to lead to war in Chechnya.