MOSCOW — When two bombs ripped through Moscow subway stations at rush hour on Monday morning, Russia’s leaders reached for the kind of hunt-them-down-and-kill-them statements that propelled the country through two brutal wars in the Caucasus.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev boasted that previous bombers had been “annihilated to ashes,” calling them “beasts, simply.” Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin told the police to “drag them out of the bottom of the sewer and into the light of God.”

So it was a surprise, barely a day after images of bloodied commuters flooded Russian airwaves, when Mr. Medvedev made a point of publicly discussing poverty and unemployment in the North Caucasus, which he has said are the root causes of violence there. He said that resolving those problems was “even harder than looking for and destroying terrorists,” but that he planned to continue pursuing both aims.

“People want a normal and decent life, no matter where they live,” he said, in a meeting with his top human rights adviser. “The federal authorities, along with the authorities in the Caucasus region, are obliged to create these conditions.”

Monday’s bombings came at an uncertain moment for Russia’s Caucasus policy, which had been wavering between the muscular clampdown championed by Mr. Putin as president and the cautious liberalization introduced after Mr. Medvedev took office.

If attacks become a regular occurrence in Moscow, as they were for most of Mr. Putin’s presidency, “it means war, war against terrorism,” said Aleksei V. Malashenko, a Caucasus specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center. If they are not repeated, he said, Mr. Medvedev could continue to steer away from Mr. Putin’s approach, which relied almost entirely on force.

Mr. Malashenko pointed especially to a decision Mr. Medvedev made early this year, when he appointed the businessman Aleksandr G. Khloponin — not a general or a veteran of the F.S.B. security service — as his special envoy to the region, giving him the task of creating new jobs.

“It meant they recognized the old approach was failing,” he said. “I think this is the last hope. If it fails once again, it is over.”

No group has claimed responsibility for the bombings, which killed 39 people, but the authorities have said they believe that the attackers were from the North Caucasus, the restive border region that includes Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday that two female suicide bombers and their male companion had arrived in Moscow on Monday morning on a bus that carried shuttle traders from the North Caucasus.

The official said the bus driver had identified the women from photos. He said suicide bombers had used the bus system to carry out two subway attacks in 2004, since “the passenger flow on private buses, unlike trains and planes, is virtually impossible to control,” according to Interfax.