Even though in the past Putin had rarely hesitated to blame the Chechen separatists for acts of terrorism, this time he avoided linking the attack with the Second Chechen War. Instead, he blamed the crisis on the "direct intervention of international terrorism", ignoring the nationalist roots of the crisis. The Russian government sources initially claimed that nine of the militants in Beslan were Arabs and one was a black African (called "a negro" by Andreyev), though only two Arabs were identified later. Independent analysts such as that of the Moscow political commentator Andrei Piontkovsky said Putin at this moment tried to minimize the number and scale of Chechen terrorist attacks, rather than to exaggerate them as he did in the past. Putin appeared to connect the events to the US-led "War on Terrorism", but at the same time accused the West of indulging terrorists.