2004

Authorities seize Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos's key production unit, over alleged tax debts, in move widely seen as punishment for Yukos boss Khodorkovsky's opposition to Putin. State formally purchases Yuganskneftegaz in December.

• Beslan school hostage crisis. More than 380 people, many of them children, killed when mainly Chechen and Ingush Islamists insurgents besiege school in North Ossetia's Beslan. Prompts boost in state security powers, despite widespread public criticism of handling of siege.

• Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev is assassinated by Russian agents in Qatar

• Group of neo-Nazi skinheads stabbed a nine-year old Tajik girl, Khursheda Sultanova, to death in Saint Petersburg.

• Nikolai Girenko, a prominent human rights defender, Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian Federation is shot dead

• Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition Forbes magazine, is shot and killed in Moscow.

• Viktor Yushchenko, anti-Russian candidate for the presidency of the Ukraine, is poisoned by Dioxin.

• 2003-2013 Yukos oil boss and prominent liberal Mikhail Khodorkovsky arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud, an early casualty of President Putin's campaign to drive Yeltsin-era 'oligarchs' out of politics. In 2005 he is sentenced to nine years imprisonment, and is pardoned and goes into exile in 2013.

• 2002-2004 Pankisi Gorge crisis

• 1999-2009 Second Chechen War, Hundreds of civilians are killed and tens of thousands are left homeless as civilian targets are attacked.

• 2000- Chechen Insurgency

• 1948- Involvement to Arab-Israeli Conflict

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