Putin's greatest political danger is to appear soft

Imagine the outcry if this were happening in Britain. Two hundred children, some as young as five, are taken hostage by two dozen gunmen on the first day of the school year. In the capital, a car bomb has exploded close to a central underground station, killing 10 and injuring 30. And just one week before, two planes carrying holidaymakers fell out of the sky almost simultaneously, less than half an hour after take-off, killing all 90 people on board.

Imagine the outcry if this were happening in Britain. Two hundred children, some as young as five, are taken hostage by two dozen gunmen on the first day of the school year. In the capital, a car bomb has exploded close to a central underground station, killing 10 and injuring 30. And just one week before, two planes carrying holidaymakers fell out of the sky almost simultaneously, less than half an hour after take-off, killing all 90 people on board.

This is the situation that Russia is facing, with Chechen separatists taking hostages, and their bereaved womenfolk turning themselves into human bombs. And what advice are well-meaning outsiders, Britain included, offering to Russia's President? Don't over-react, Vladimir. Get down to negotiations. Appeal to them to lay down their arms, say you are open to some of what they want.

You can imagine how such advice would have gone down with British governments when the IRA bombing campaigns were at their height. But would Parliament and public opinion not be incensed at the terrorists' success? John Major's secret peace initiative was bold. But it was not done without extensive exploration beforehand of the IRA's willingness to deal.

In Russia, the mood is angry. It was fearful after the two plane crashes of 25 August. It was resentful and resigned after the Moscow Underground station bombing. An earlier attack on the underground claimed 40 lives. With the school siege, however, Russian fury has reached boiling point. Laying siege to a school breaks every unwritten rule of Russian civility.

Given this public mood, the greater political threat to President Putin comes not from letting loose more Russian troops to wreak havoc in Chechnya, but in appearing too soft. Even the most liberal strands of Russian opinion are saying that Mr Putin and his ministers are pussy-footing around a problem that needs a good old-fashioned iron fist. Restraint is easily confused with lack of authority among an impatient public.

Mr Putin can be blamed for upping the stakes in Chechnya. It was he who ordered the brutal offensive in 1999, a policy which helped him to a landslide presidential election. Comparisons can be made with Mrs Thatcher letting Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers die. Both decisions reflect a desire on the part of new leaders to project a toughness that in fact stored up trouble for the future.

But the quarrel between Russia and Chechnya, like that in Northern Ireland, did not start with one leader's decision. It has a long and complex history, with rights and wrongs on both sides. The latest spate of Chechen attacks only makes it more difficult for the Russian government to grant concessions.

A more realistic approach would be to invest in improvements to security and anti-terrorist tactics to make attacks harder to mount and less devastating in their outcomes.

Security at public buildings, with the exception of government offices, is negligible. The Russian public has not been encouraged to show vigilance in the way most Britons now do almost automatically. And when something like the school siege or the theatre siege happens, the authorities seem to have no formulated plan of action. At the school siege, there was no effective security cordon for hours. Panicked parents pushed passed, hunting rifles in their hands, to try to rescue their children. Compare this, for instance, with Britain or France, where there are contingency plans for such emergencies. So many people died in the theatre siege simply because insufficient supplies of the antidote to the gas had been brought and there were not enough trained people to administer it.

If foreigners want to help Russia with its terrorist problem, they could do worse than share their experience of protecting their civilians. This would be more productive than calling for talks.