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Early setbacks suggest that a shift to even deadlier tactics may be imminent. Boston tells Yahoo News that the plan seems to have caught someone off guard. Despite a number of reported strikes on both strategic and civilian targets, the Russian military has yet to leverage its most effective weaponry, and is almost certainly prepared to unleash more violence. Yahoo News explains what to expect in the coming weeks.

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The first apartment building to come down was in Buynaksk, a Russian garrison town on the border with Chechnya, where Islamic extremists had fought the Kremlin to a standstill in a brutal two-year war. They were thought to be responsible for the Buynaksk bomb, which was placed inside a car and ripped through a building housing Russian border guards. Sixty-four people died.

A bomb went off in the basement of an apartment building in the Moscow district of Pechatniki, killing 106 people. A car bomb in a Moscow neighborhood killed more than 100 people.

A bomb went off in Volgodonsk. 17 people died there.

In all, more than 300 people died in the apartment bombings, a tragedy that many believe changed the course of Russia, putting it on a trajectory toward authoritarianism and aggression.

Vladimir Putin, against a beige wall, holds his hand out, gesturing with his fingers pointing upward.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with local veterans of the 1999 operation in Dagestan. (Alexei NikolskyTASS via Getty Images)

At the time of the bombings, the country's new prime minister was a former intelligence agent who had been completely unknown to most Russians. The prime minister promised to find the Chechens who he said had committed the bombings which sowed terror across the land.

The new prime minister promised that the perpetrators would be wiped out in the house.

His name was Putin.

The fall of 1999 would cement Putin's hold on a country that had grown increasingly aimless and chaotic under President Boris Yeltsin. Questions about whether Russia's own security services were involved in the apartment bombings are the original sin that Putin has never bothered to eradicate.

David Satter, who has investigated the apartment bombings more thoroughly than any other Western journalist, says there is no serious doubt that Putin came to power as a result of an act of terror against his own people.

Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin smile while seated at a small round table on which rest flowers, papers and pens.
Then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, right, meets with then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the presidential residence in1999. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Russia rallied around Putin after the bombings. Putin launched a second Chechen war using the bombings as a pretext, which would turn out to be longer and more brutal than the first. Putin asked American readers to imagine a terrorist attack in Washington or New York in an op-ed published in the New York Times.

Putin was appointed Yeltsin's successor on December 31, 1999. The election to be held in June to March was moved up by the new president to give the liberals little time to prepare. It didn't matter in either Russia or the West. Putin was seen as a hero, one with authoritarian tendencies but also one who was focused on democracy and capitalism.

Putin's critics are calling him a war criminal for his invasion of Ukraine, which has been a nation since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukrainians claim to have killed thousands of Russian soldiers, and international observers have confirmed hundreds of civilian deaths, with the total likely to be far higher. It's not clear why Putin decided to wage a costly and disastrous war.

Putin has always denied any involvement in or knowledge of the apartment bombings, but two decades have only deepened suspicions about his involvement, as evidence of his disregard for either human life or the rule of law has mounted.

Rescuers work on the ruins of a leveled Moscow apartment building.
Rescuers work on the ruins of a Moscow apartment building leveled by a huge explosion, Sept. 13, 1999. (Alexcander Memenov/AFP via Getty Images)

The Soviet and Russian leaders treated their subjects as chattel, expendable on behalf of State power, according to John Sipher, who worked as a Central Intelligence Agency officer in Moscow in the 1990s. Butchery and terror were expected to keep them in power. It is the same as ugly.

It would take years for Putin to shut down independent media outlets and stifle political dissent because Russia was more open at the time of the bombings. Journalists were able to quickly question the official narrative about the bombings.

The idea of Chechen involvement seemed odd from the beginning. After years of Russian occupation, there would be terrorist attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The conflict in 1999 was relatively confined. Russian forces were already on Chechnya's doorstep, making them an easy target for an attack. Terrorists were said to have driven almost 2 thousand miles past military checkpoints in cars loaded with explosives. The apartment buildings in Moscow are far from the symbols of power, status and wealth in the city.

A TV screen shows a destroyed apartment building.
A TV grab taken Sept. 16, 1999, from the Russian television channel NTV shows a destroyed apartment building in the Russian southern city of Volgodonsk following a bomb explosion. (STF/AFP via Getty Images)

There was an announcement about a bomb exploding in Volgodonsk. Three days later, a bomb would explode. Attempts to question Seleznyov were unsuccessful.

The most damning evidence of Russian involvement came from the ancient city of Ryazan, which is close to Moscow. On the evening of Sept. 22, residents in an apartment building saw a suspicious Lada sedan on the street below, its license plate crudely altered with a piece of paper. There was a bomb in the basement. It was made with a military-grade bomb, known in the West as RDX, which was only available at one heavily guarded factory in the Ural Mountains.

The details of the terror attack were lost in the reporting. The Chechen capital of Grozny was bombed by Putin the following night.

The Chechens had nothing to do with the bombing. The arrest of three officers of the post-Soviet version of the KGB for the bombing led to an excuse from the FSB chief.

A view from inside of a heavily damaged building, with someone wearing all black standing amid the debris.
A view of damaged building following a shelling in Ukraine's second-biggest city of Kharkiv. (Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images)

The announcement came as a surprise to us, and it was the kind of dissent from the Kremlin line that would soon become taboo in Russia.

Russian society moved on without an official investigation into the bombings. Some thought that Putin was cold-blooded and authoritarian when families combed through the rubble looking for loved ones.

If it can ever be determined that Putin and Patrushev orchestrated these bombings as a pretext to launch the Second Chechen War, and also launch Putin's national political career, that would be a huge victory.

Russian investigators and journalists who tried to investigate the bombings often died. One of the last remaining left-leaning outlets in Moscow is Novaya Gazeta, where Anna Politkovskaya worked. Politkovskaya was killed in her apartment building in 2006 while she was covering the Second Chechen War.

The murder of free media in Russia was the subject of the Guardian. Politkovskaya's death came on Putin's 54th birthday.

A toy and a notebook lie among crumbled bricks and other debris.
A toy and a notebook lie among the debris by the apartment block in 6A Lobanovsky Avenue, which was hit with a missile, in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)

Alexander Litvinenko was killed in London two years later after agents of the FSB poisoned his tea. He worked with Politkovskaya to investigate the Moscow apartment bombings, which he believed were carried out by the FSB.

Even as Putin's power grew, suspicions persisted that something was amiss. It was the people of Putin. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that, but no one wants to talk about it, and the magazine's American publisher was too afraid to do so.

Nobody in Russia or the West could have imagined who Putin was by 2009.

After the nuclear submarine Kursk was hit by an explosion and sank in the Barents Sea with 23 sailors still alive, it was revealed that Putin had turned down the help of Western nations. Putin vacationed at a resort on the Black Sea. 118 people were found dead on the plane. He was discomfited when he met with the sailors widows because he was complaining that they were prostitutes.

Vladimir Putin points from a table with two microphones and white cup in front of a blue backdrop.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during his annual press conference at the end of last year in Moscow, Russia. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

The Second Chechen War was turning out to be more brutal than the first. The torture at the Russian prison camp called Chernokozovo is so systematic it cannot be the work of a rogue unit.

When Bush met Putin in 2001, he was very impressed. We had a good conversation. I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.

Hillary Clinton's bungled attempt at a re-set in 2009 didn't fare much better. Putin invaded Georgia the year before. He launched his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, annexing Crimea and setting the stage for his all-out attack this year. The United States was a bystander to Putin's aggression.

Satter, who was the first Western journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War, says that every American president has gotten Putin wrong.

Four pictures showing Vladimir Putin shaking hands with U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
This combination of pictures shows Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands with U.S. Presidents (from top left) Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. (Stephen Jaffe, Jim Watson, Alexey Nikolsky, Mikhaul Klimentyev/Ria Novosti/AFP via Getty Images)

Satter says that Donald Trump's foreign policy toward Russia was better than people think, because he had an affinity for the Kremlin strongman.

The postwar peace had become fraught and Biden came into office to see it. He met with Putin in June in hopes of staving off war, but then Putin turned a standoff on the Ukrainian border into a war. It is not certain when they will speak.

There is no doubt that Putin played a role in the carnage.

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