For a president who once said that the right way to treat Chechen insurgents was to "rub them out in the shithouse", it is an astonishing volte face. After several weeks of haggling about time and place, on November 18th negotiators representing the presidents of Chechnya and Russia had their first acknowledged meeting, at Moscow's main international airport.rnRussia had to swallow hard, having always dismissed its Chechen rebels as mere terrorists on the verge of defeat. The Kremlin's spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, used to have a particularly fine line in contempt for the Chechen president, Asian Maskhadov, whom he labelled "a criminal", "insignificant", and unworthy of talks "in any circumstances", except as a defendant answering questions from Russia's chief prosecutor.
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