My regular readers know I follow Russian politics fairly closely. This just in from Jeff Quinton, news of two airplanes:

Air controllers on Tuesday lost contact with the second airplane with 44 passengers on board, Interfax news agency reported.

It quoted Emergencies ministry as saying contacts with Tu-154 flying from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi were lost at 3 p.m. EDT when it was expected to be 90 miles from the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.

Earlier Russian news agencies said that around the same time one more Russian passenger plane with more than 40 people on board went missing near the town of Tula south of Moscow.

One Russian airplane going down would not surprise me. Two, and I'm thinking terrorism. Remember, the Russians are fighting a hot war in Chechnya and a cold war against Georgia over South Ossetia. Updates in extended entry.

Update: A few thoughts

1) Chechnya. There is an election in Chechnya Sunday. While Spain continues to deny that the Madrid bombing affected elections, terrorist organizations assuredly read the elections that way. They bomb, Spain elects a government wishing to pull out of Iraq--no brainer. For liberals making their way to this blog for the first time and who have been led to believe that war in Chechnya is a simple war of liberation unrelated to the War on Terror, I would ask them to look at this pic of what Chechens 'freedom fighters' do to Russian soldiers they capture (Warning: Very Graphic!!!). There is a vast army of jihadis in the world stretching from the Phillipines to the Balkaans and connected by common ideology, tactics, and goals.

2) While I suspect Chechens are behind this, let's not forget that Russia is involved in another war in Georgia's South Ossetia. Ossetians are ethnically Russian and have been fighting a low intensity war of independence for the past decade. In the past two-weeks, the new Georgian Prime Minister vowed to take South Ossetia back and the shooting began again. The Georgian government has accused Russia of supporting the rebels (--probably true) and both governments have warned that there could be international consequences for the escalating violence. It is not likely that these planes were brought down by Georgians, but it remains a remote possibility. Background on the fighting in Ossetia can be found in this post.

3) A bomb went off at a bus stop in Moscow yesterday. Allah in public and Jeff Quinton in a private correspondence wondered if there was a connection since the Moscow Police have stated they think the bomb was the work of terrorists. While not ruling out the possibility, it should be noted that the bus stop where this bomb went off is on the outskirts of town--or at least, not in the central district in Moscow. It would be an odd location for a terrorist to set off a bomb. Moscow is not set up like New York of Los Angeles. There are no real 'suburbs' as we think of them and the farther you get from the center the farther you get from everything. Unless the Chechens are adopting Hamas style bus bombing tactics, it seems an odd location. My experience is that the Moscow Police are quick to shoot off their mouths and to blame anything out of the ordinary on Chechens or other 'undesirables'. Think Sherrif Roscoe P. Coletrain, only a heavy drinker, slightly corrupt, and a whole lot more of a biggot--that's your average cop in Russia.

Also blogging: Command Post, In the Bull Pen, Allah, Blogs of War, Jane, Athena, Chris Short, Michelle Malkin, Freedom of Thought, M.H. King, LGF, Wizbang, James Joyner, Juliette Channel News Asia:

One Russian airliner has crashed in southern Russia and another in the centre of the country, news agencies reported early Wednesday.

A Tu-134 aircraft with 34 passengers and eight crew on board was en route to Russia's southern city of Volgograd when it disappeared off radar screens late Tuesday, emergency officials said as quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.

It was later found near the village of Buchalki in Tula region some 180 kilometers (108 miles) south of Moscow, officials said. The fate of passengers and crew was unclear.

In a separate case, a Tu-154 airplane with 44 people on board crashed near the southern city of Rostov-on-Don while on the way to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, officials said.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, last night ordered the FSB security services to begin an investigation after one passenger plane with 42 people on board crashed and another aircraft carrying 52 went missing within minutes of each other after taking off from Moscow.

The involvement of the FSB and an order for airport security to be tightened suggested the possibility that the incidents could have been caused by terrorism.

The emergencies ministry confirmed that one plane had crashed and that the second was missing after both had left Moscow.

A ministry spokeswoman said a two-engine Tupelov TU-134 with 34 passengers and eight crew flying from Moscow to Volgograd crashed after contact with it was lost at 10.56 Moscow time (7.56 BST). She said the wreckage was found near the town of Tula.

Just three minutes later, air traffic controllers lost contact with another passenger plane - a three-engine TU-154 with 44 passengers and eight crew on board - flying from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where Mr Putin is holidaying, the spokeswoman said.

Confusion surrounded the fate of the second plane last night, though Itar-Tass news agency reported emergency officials as saying that it had crashed. Quoting an unnamed air traffic official in Moscow, the agency said the authorities were not ruling out terrorism.

There was also a report last night on Interfax that witnesses near the scene of the crash of the plane bound for Volgograd had seen an explosion on board the Tupolev 134 before it hit the ground. Local officials told the agency the crash did not harm the local population.

Its wreckage was found near the town of Tula, about 100 miles south off Moscow.

Itar-Tass said the Tupolev 154's wreckage had yet to be found, raising the possibility of a mix-up. The agency added that the authorities had said terrorism could not be ruled out as a reason for the crash.

An official in the town's emergency situations department said wreckage of the 134's fuselage was scattered across the region.

Both planes were en route to southern Russia, a region under the threat of terrorist attack in the run up to elections for a new president in the war-torn republic of Chechnya. On Sunday voters will be asked to approve a replacement for Akhmed Kadyrov, former president who was assassinated in May.

Earlier this week, Mr Putin made a whirlwind visit to Chechnya, laying flowers at the grave of the Mr Kadyrov. He was in Chechnya for a few hours before returning to the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

In a separate incident earlier yesterday, a bomb went off at a southern Moscow bus stop, injuring four people, a spokesman for the capital's federal security service said.

The four injured included a woman stated to be in a serious condition at a Moscow hospital, the authorities said. A Moscow police spokesman said officials were investigating the attack as hooliganism.

A series of explosions in recent years has claimed hundreds of lives, in blasts that have been blamed mostly on Chechen separatist rebels.

In Washington, a senior US state department official said of the crash: "We are obviously concerned by the news. We are following developments closely and trying to determine the facts."

ABCNEWS: Report: Russian Jet Sent Hijack Signal

The Russian plane that went missing around the time as another jet crashed issued a siugnal indicating a hijacking or seizure before disappearing from radar, the Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed government source as saying Wednesday.

The signal came at 11:04 p.m. Tuesdau (sic) from the Tu-154 airliner that went missing in southern Russia's Rostov region, Interfax quoted the source in Russia's "power structures" as saying.

An alarm went off aboard a Russian airliner just before it went missing in southern Russia, signaling that the plane had been hijacked, a Russian official told the Interfax news agency Wednesday.

According to the source, the hijack alarm went off at 11:04 pm Tuesday (1904 GMT), as the Tupelov Tu-154 aircraft, which took off from Moscow, was flying over Millerovo near Rostov-on-Don, with the aircraft dropping off radar screens shortly after.

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