Russia and the United States agreed Saturday to bolster cooperation in their fight against terror in the wake of news that two ethnic Chechens were suspected of organizing the deadly Boston Marathon bombings.
Russia and the United States agreed Saturday to bolster cooperation in their fight against terror in the wake of news that two ethnic Chechens were suspected of organizing the deadly Boston Marathon bombings.
The Kremlin said Russian leader Vladimir Putin called the US President Barack Obama to once again express his condolences and discuss ways the two sides can work more closely on security in the runup to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.
"Both sides underscored their interest in bolstering the close cooperation of Russian and US special services in the fight against international terrorism," the Kremlin said in a statement.
"I think that contacts will be conducted between our intelligence services," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in separate televised remarks.
The White House also issued a statement saying that Obama thanked Putin for the condolences "and praised the close cooperation that the United States has received from Russia on counter-terrorism, including in the wake of the Boston attack."
US authorities said that the two young men who set off twin bombs Monday that killed three people at the Boston Marathon and then shot dead a policeman on Friday were ethnic Chechens from Russia's restless North Caucasus region.
The 26-year-old older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot and killed by police while his 19-year-old sibling Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested near Boston on Friday evening.
Respected security analysts Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan wrote in the Yezhednevny Zhurnal online daily that Russia's powerful Federal Security Service has been closely watching social media since 2010 -- two years longer than the United States.
They added "that there was never any close cooperation" between the two intelligence services except for one joint operation conducted since sides agreed to work together on security in 2004.
"It looks like that US intelligence services will have to urgently review the level of their cooperation with the Russian security agencies," Soldatov and Borogan said.
