Oleg Sibukhov was 19 years old when he arrived in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, having left his birthplace of Krasnodar, Russia, behind. Krasnodar is a city that sits on the Kuban River in southern Russia and borders the Caucasus. Mr. Sibukhov, now 25, served two years as a soldier stationed in Chechnya, where he says he lost two friends to the conflict between Russian forces and local insurgents. When asked about the recent death of the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, Mr. Sibukhov said he had not heard about it. “So they finally got him, did they?” he said in Russian as he waited for a train. “Good. But there will always be another behind him.”

Basayev most recently orchestrated the 2004 takeover of a Beslan grade school, in which terrorists held 1,200 hostages for three days and left more than 300 — about half of them children — dead. In 2002, he oversaw the seizure of a Moscow theater, in which dozens of hostages were killed.

Russian officials announced Monday that special forces had killed him by detonating a truck full of explosives that was traveling as part of his convoy near the Chechen border.

Mr. Sibukhov’s reserved reaction to the news of Basayev’s death seems to be a common one in Brighton Beach, a seaside community near Coney Island that about 15,000 Russian immigrants, many of them senior citizens, have called home since the late 1970s. Most people there seem pleased about Basayev’s demise, but few say their old country will be significantly safer in his absence. The Russians of Brighton Beach seem hesitant in their appraisal of the situation, with most of them predicting that the terrorist would inevitably be replaced by a leader no less dangerous.

“I’m glad he’s dead,” said Olga, a pie vendor on Brighton Beach Avenue who declined to give her last name.”But I’m sure there are many standing in line behind him. If they killed them too, then I would be happy. Now, it’s no less dangerous. It’s just one less idiot.”

“Politics is not interesting to me here,” a construction worker in Manhattan who left his teaching job in Ukraine seven years ago, Stepan Buryy, said. “I am here to make a little money, to save up and send some to my mother. Politics, for normal people, is not needed. It’s the big people who care.”