Bloody war to continue under peace plan, warns Chechen rebel leader

Russian President Vladimir Putin has pinned his hopes for peace on a last month’s contested referendum, but observers have doubted the Kremlin’s claim that most Chechens turned out and voted to approve the constitution which sets the republic’s place as part of Russia.

“With this referendum, the Russian leader will have made the war last for two or three years more,” Mr Maskhadov said in recorded comments sent to AFP.

“The war will continue,” he said, calling the referendum a mere ‘spectacle’ that would not bring peace to the war-shattered southern republic.

The relative peace that Chechnya enjoyed in the weeks leading up to the March 23 referendum was shattered on Thursday, when at least eight people were killed after an explosion ripped through a passenger bus in the centre of the capital Grozny.

Mr Maskhadov’s London-based envoy Akhmed Zakayev denounced the attack, which pro-Russian Chechens immediately blamed on the republic’s separatist rebels.

“To stop the war, Putin has just one path: sitting down at the negotiating table,” Mr Maskhadov said.

“But he has chosen war. Through this act of ignorance, not only is he not guarding his interests in the Caucasus, but he is ruining Russia,” the rebel leader warned.

Mr Putin has repeatedly refused to hold talks with Mr Maskhadov, who was elected to the Chechen presidency in 1997, following the end of the republic’s first separatist war.

He was later disavowed by Moscow, and has urged Mr Putin to open peace talks.