The western Ukrainian city of Lviv incured Russia's ire Wednesday after the city council approved the placement of an "informational tablet" about the late Chechen rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev. Lviv's city council had previously irritated Russia for a similar incident shortly after Dudayev's death in 1996, when it approved a request from Ukrainian nationalists to change a street originally named after 19th-century Russian author Mikhail Lermontov to be named after Dudayev. Referring to the intention of putting up a memorial plaque, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov assailed Lviv officials' "lack of understanding" and condemned plans to further commemorate "an odious personality" who supported terrorists.
| "Those people are crazy!" he said, mournfully... |
Iryna Podolyak, head of the international relations department of the Lviv mayor's office, denied a statement by a Russian official that Lviv had agreed to allow a civic organization place a memorial Dudayev at a street named after him. She said that the city council denied the request because the Chechen warlord had no historical connection to the town. However, the council agreed that an informational tablet could be placed there so that people would know who the person the street was named after was. Before his death, Dudayev was the guiding force and top commander of the separatist movement in the Russian republic of Chechnya, where the second war in a decade is in its fourth year. Some Ukrainian nationalists maintained close ties with Dudayev and even fought with the Chechen rebels in the first 1994—96 war. |