MOSCOW — Clad in fatigues and a beret, the Chechen commander laughs, kicks one prostrate Russian soldier, waves a pistol in the air, then steps up to a kneeling soldier and shoots him in the head.
Salautdin Temirbulatov, 41, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison Thursday on evidence created by his own men: an April 1996 videotape of him executing the soldier, Sergei Mitryayev.
Temirbulatov, known as "the Tractorist" from his days as a tractor driver on a Soviet collective farm, is the only notable Chechen rebel commander in the current conflict to have been captured and convicted by Russian authorities.
Arrested last March in what the Russians claim was a special operation, he was charged with four murders, several kidnappings and fighting in a rebel group against Russia. He was convicted Thursday on all counts.
Such tapes were readily available in Chechnya after the first war, which ended in the summer of 1996 with the Russians' withdrawal from the separatist republic. But after countless screenings of the Temirbulatov video on Russian television in recent months, he has become one of the most notorious Chechen commanders.
Tamara Mitryayev, 70, has watched her son's last moments replayed many times on the TV news.
"I don't remember how many times I saw my dear little son Seryozha die on the screen," she said, sobbing throughout a telephone interview at the phone exchange in her town of Lesogorsk, near Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow. She has no phone at home.
"I can't think of anything else. When I close my eyes, I still see him on his knees in the mud with his hands tied behind his back. I see it and I cry and cry and cry. Did I bring him into this world for this?"
Russia has suspended use of the death penalty, and Tamara Mitryayev is angered by the life sentence.
"They decided to spare this beast's life," she said, weeping. "I want him to be killed, publicly executed. I want to see it on the video the way I saw my son's death a dozen times on television."
For Russia's authorities, bogged down in messy military action in Chechnya, the Tractorist video helped ignite public outrage against the Chechen rebels and engender support for the war.
The Russians have failed to capture more prominent rebel leaders such as Shamil Basayev; the warlord Khattab; or Aslan Maskhadov, leader of the former Chechen government. The Temirbulatov trial became a symbolic court case against a captured rebel.
