More than two weeks after the bloody end of the Beslan school siege, Russia's escalating war of words with the west risks coupling a painful domestic tragedy with an isolationist shift in foreign policy.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has come in for criticism from George W. Bush, the US president, and Chris Patten, the European Union commissioner for external affairs, over the political plans he set out in response to the Beslan siege. Mr Bush expressed concern that Moscow's centralising of power and tightening grip on parliament and the regions threatened democracy.