Saint Petersburg, Apr 11: Russian President Vladimir Putin today welcomed the fall of the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but said it had been wrong to "bring him down by force." In his first public comments on this week's events in the Iraqi capital, the Russian leader said, "It is good that the Saddam Hussein regime has fallen. The fall of a tyrannical regime is a positive thing.” "We said for a long time that he had to be brought down. We did not defend him, but said it should not be done by force," Putin said after talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The comments were Putin's first since US marines swept into Baghdad on Wednesday, three weeks after US and British forces launched an invasion in Iraq to oust Saddam and strip Iraq of its alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The Russian leader deplored "the means" that had been used to bring down the regime, stressing that "the destruction, the deaths, were a bad thing."

He commented that "80 percent of the world's countries were in a similar situation to Iraq.”
Putin and Schroeder were holding bilateral talks prior to a three-nation summit with French President Jacques Chirac, at which the three leaders were to discuss the postwar situation in Iraq. Bureau Report