The problem with Putin: an unreliable ally, an unlikely democrat.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns - Column

A COUPLE OF WEEKS before the U.S. presidential election, one of the Republicans' tropes--the terrorists want Kerry to win--got some unexpected support from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking at a press conference in Tajikistan after a regional summit, Putin opined that "the activities of terrorists in Iraq are not as much aimed at coalition forces but more personally against President Bush." Driving the message home, he added: "International terrorism has as its goal to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term. If they achieve that goal, then that will give international terrorism a new impulse and extra power."

This statement was met with squeals of delight on the right. "On the international theater, Vladimir Putin today said that he felt that George Bush was the right man and the evildoers wanted to work against trim," the conservative radio show host Janet Parshall crowed on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. Fox personality John Gibson picked up this theme on his own show, and bloggers Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds chimed in from cyberspace.

Among the many ironies of that moment was that the conservatives' man of the hour has been, at best, a dubious ally in the war on terror. Even as Putin seemingly endorsed Bush, Russia was finalizing its deal with Iran--widely viewed as the chief terrorism-sponsoring state--to help launch that country's nuclear reactor, despite American and European concerns that it would be used for weapons development. (To avert International Atomic Energy Agency sanctions against Iran, Russia volunteered to vouch for the peacefulness of its nuclear program.) Russia has also remained on amicable terms with North Korea and Syria, and it almost certainly circumvented the sanctions against Iraq to supply weapons to Saddam Hussein's regime right up to the invasion.

Lately, however, all that seems to have taken a back seat to Russia's status as a fellow target of radical Islamic terrorism. This perception was cemented by the horror in Beslan, the town in Northern Ossetia where armed pro-Chechen militants seized a schoolhouse on September 1, 2004, and took more than 1,000 hostages, demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya.

A two-day standoff ended in a violent climax that left about 350 hostages dead, more than half of them children. Some were gunned down by the terrorists while they tried to free after explosives were set off in the school; others were killed in the ensuing shootout...