Chechnya Gun Battle Kills at Least 11

Just before Vladimir Putin gave his State of the Union speech at the Kremlin, gun battles broke out early Thursday in the capital of Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya, leaving at least three traffic police officers and seven gunmen dead, authorities said. The fighting punctured the stability brought by years of heavy-handed rule by a Kremlin-appointed leader. Security officials and the leader of Chechnya said militants traveling in several cars killed three traffic police at a checkpoint in the republic’s capital, Grozny. State news agency RIA-Novosti cited an unidentified law-enforcement source as saying that five police officers were killed. In his speech, Putin referred to events in Ukraine as a U.S.-backed coup, and called his annexation of Crimea the “Crimea Spring.”