If one goes back to the days of the struggle in Afghanistan, and shortly therafter, one finds that the original leader of the Chechens was a Soviet air force generla posted in Estonia.

This is speculative to some degree, but it appears that some of the Baltic govenrments gave support to the Chechen separatists as a way of relieving any military pressure which Russia might apply to them - a diversion, if you will.

This particularly beocmes apparent when one tries to track Al qaeda's sources for SA-7 surface to air missiles. No full counts are as yet publicly available.

At the time, and subsequently, both the US and the EU looked the other way while this was going on. While everyone has changed their policies, the consequences of these earlier bad decisions are carrying over to today -

have a real nice day -
ep