2 Decades On, Questions Linger About Putin’s Rise to Power
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 Sept. 9, 1999, reduced the building to a smoking pile of rubble, killing more than 100 people. A second building, less than 6 kilometers away, was rocked by an explosion on Sept. 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. It was followed seven days later by a truck bomb that destroyed a nine-story building in another southern city, Volgodonsk, killing 17. On Sept. 23, Putin asserted terrorists in Chechnya were to blame and ordered a massive air campaign within the North Caucasus region. When asked a day later about the campaign targeting what he called terrorists, Putin responded with the phrase that inaugurated his rise to preeminence. “We will pursue them everywhere,” he said, using a crude slang expression. “Excuse me for saying so: We’ll catch them in the toilet. We’ll …