Mr Putin’s four-day state visit, during which he will meet the Queen and the Prime Minister, is the highest level trip to Britain by a Russian leader since the 1870s.
International human rights groups are urging Tony Blair not to gloss over Chechnya, which has seen one of the bloodiest conflicts in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
In an open letter to Mr Blair Human Rights Watch said: “The human rights situation is worsening, not improving. Government statistics indicate that at least two people ‘disappear’ in Chechnya every day.” It documented 26 disappearances between late December and late February. Officials have also recently admitted the existence of 49 mass graves in Chechnya containing the remains of almost 3,000 people.
“The United Kingdom ranks among Russia’s most important partners, in part due to your long-standing personal relationship with President Putin. Your voice on this matter could make an important difference in the lives of thousands of Chechens,” the letter to the Prime Minister said.
Error processing SSI fileMr Blair was criticised for issuing a glowing statement of approval for this year’s referendum on a new constitution for Chechnya, which independent monitoring organisations believe was rigged. The referendum was approved with a Soviet-style 96 per cent majority.
The Chechen wars — fought between 1994 and 1996 and 1999 to the present — have claimed the lives of more than 7,500 Russian soldiers and about 100,000 Chechens.
This year Mr Putin has begun measures to bring peace to the breakaway Muslim republic, including an amnesty calling on rebels to lay down their arms and setting a date for independent presidential elections in October.
Although several dozen rebels have reportedly given themselves up under the amnesty, hardline groups have responded with a series of suicide bombs that have killed more than 100 people.
Opposition concerns over the conflict in Chechnya are matched by worries over Mr Putin’s tight control of the independent media. At the weekend the last remaining independent television channel, TVS, was closed down.
“And so in Russia, the era of private, national television has come to an end,” the newspaper Izvestia wrote. “From now on, national television will either be entertainment channels or state channels.”
Valeriya Novodvorskaya, the leader of the Democratic Union of Russia party, told the Echo Moskvy radio station: “It shows that there is a dictatorship in this country, despite its democratic camouflage.”
TVS had been the last refuge in Russian television for independent journalists who had left other channels when they were taken over in Kremlininspired moves to stymie criticism before the parliamentary elections in December and the presidential elections next year. The three remaining main television channels — NTV, Channel One and Rossiya — are all controlled by the Government.
President Putin’s hostility to the free press may originate in his KGB past. As an agent working in Germany in the 1980s he was absent from Russia during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost (openness) programme, during which journalists were hailed as heroes for criticising the Government and publicising the darkest chapters of the Soviet Union’s history.
With the Russian press still available as a forum for critical comment, opposition politicians now note ironically that there is freedom of speech in Russia, but not in prime time.