MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia is "seriously" preparing to carry out preventive anti-terror strikes, President Vladimir Putin said Friday, as he denounced calls for talks with Chechen rebel leaders as similar to appeasing Hitler in 1938.
"Today in Russia, we are seriously preparing to act preventively against terrorists," Putin told an international meeting of mayors in Moscow in televised comments.
"This will be in strict respect with the law and constitution and on the basis of international law," he added Friday.
The Russian leader also rejected pressure from the West to seek dialogue with separatists from Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya after the Beslan school tragedy that killed nearly 340 people, half of them children.
"I call on you to remember the lessons of history, of the 1938 Munich accord. These are of course different situations, not least in terms of the consequences of the Second World War. But there are striking similarities," Putin said.
In 1938 amid growing concern about Hitler's aims, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Munich to try to make a deal with Hitler.
Chamberlain returned to London announcing that he had secured "Peace in our time" with the Munich Accord giving Germany the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, but Hitler viewed it as a green light to take over the entire country and prepare for his next conquest.
"You cannot think that by dealing with criminals we can make a deal for them to leave us in peace. This will not happen. Every concession leads to aggression, wider demands and multiplies our losses," Putin said.
"We face double-standards regarding terrorism, attempts to divide terrorists into radicals and moderates," he added.
Russia on September 8 first said it was considering staging surgical strikes against terror bases to try to avert attacks such as that on a school in Beslan, near breakaway Chechnya, on September 1.
Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for the deadly three-day school hostage siege in a statement posted on a rebel website Friday.
Russian considers the rebel commander its public enemy number one and has offered a 10 milllion-dollar reward both for Basayev and a more moderate Chechen rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov.
Moscow's military policy is to permit pre-emptive strikes if it feels its security is under threat -- a policy similar to that of the United States, reinforced by President George W. Bush in his declared war on terror -- and to use nuclear weapons only if the country's very existence is in question.