"I would not like us to repeat what is happening now in Russia," Kuchma said Monday during the opening of a plant in northern Ukraine which was built to dismantle conventional weapons. "The future lies strictly with a professional army. It is clearly a bad thing to send off boys barely out of school and incapable of doing anything."
Wary of pro-Russian separatists in the Crimean peninsula, Kuchma and other Ukrainian leaders have confined their comments on Chechnya to expressions of concern at mounting casualties and human suffering.
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