Putin Orders Agents to Hunt Russians’ Killers

President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday ordered special services to hunt down and “destroy” the killers of four Russian hostages in Iraq.

The Kremlin did not specify whether Russia’s top security agencies, the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Security Service, or others would take the lead in finding the group that said it killed the four Russian Embassy workers.

But Nikolai P. Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet KGB, said his agency would be involved.

Russia, a consistent critic of the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq, has no military forces there. But Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov has stated that Russia has the right to strike “terrorist” targets preemptively.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Krivtsov declined to say whether any Russian special forces were in Iraq, but noted that there were “people responsible for security at the embassy” in Baghdad.

Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst in Moscow, said, “We don’t have real special forces in Iraq.”

The Foreign Ministry on Monday confirmed that the four Russians who were kidnapped in early June had been killed. They were embassy third secretary Fyodor Zaitsev and staffers Rinat Agliulin, Anatoly Smirnov and Oleg Fedoseyev.

The kidnappers had demanded that the Kremlin pull its troops out of Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia where separatists have been fighting for independence.