Led by President Vladimir Putin supported the Northern Alliance but rejected a new American resolution on Iraq. This was a difficult pill to swallow for the U.S.

In October 2002, a group of 50 Muslim rebels, including Chechnyan widows, took more than 600 hostages in a Moscow theatre and demanded that Putin declare that the war in Chechnya was over and said that if that did not happen, they would begin executing hostages. Russian forces gassed the theatre and took down the hostage-takers, but approximately 118 of the hostages died as a result. Russia refused to publicly state what the gas was, though it was speculated that it was some sort of opiate. The Russian press reported that the gas was based on fentanyl, a very potent opiate.