I was reading Putin's Address To The Nation in the wake of the Beslan disaster, and spotted some interesting insinuations that haven't been picked up on, especially in our esteemed Western press.

The following is taken from

http://president.kremlin.ru/eng/index.shtml ,

(full text here)

so I am assuming that the English translation is accurate and trustworthy. For those of you who's Russian is better than mine and who want to check for themselves the Russian text can be found here.

The bold is mine, by the way...

In general, we need to admit that we did not fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world. In any case, we proved unable to react adequately. We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.

Some would like to tear from us a “juicy piece of pie”. Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed.

Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these aims.
So, who is/are 'them' then?