Moscow fails to stop the bleeding as North Caucasus violence spreads

Chechen refugees in the town of Duisi, Georgia.

Although the South Caucasus has calmed down to relatively normal levels since the August 2008 war, the North Caucasus exploded over this last year.

Just after the Kremlin announced progress, a sharp rise in violence in the North Caucasus and the first terror attacks against Russians outside the region in five years put an end to regional and international confidence in Moscow’s strategy.

The troubling part is that no one I talked to — not even the Chechens themselves — see any prospect for stability on the horizon.

All the difficulties the United States now faces in Afghanistan — hyperlocalized tribal identities, lack of legitimate government, lack of a history of effective central authority, and a culture of revenge and retribution — are all at play in Chechya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. Luckily for the United States, Afghanistan isn’t within our borders. We can just walk away if we feel like it.

Russia doesn’t have that going for them, and they’ve already tried the “walk away” plan too. See years 1996-1999. I’l give you a preview: it didn’t go so well.

Now Moscow is seeing it’s Plan C (or D or E) go terribly awry. The idea was to empower local leaders with enough money and support to take the fight to the insurgents and hopefully do some rebuilding themselves. It was clear that he heavy-handed Russian occupation wasn’t pleasing anyone and was provoking uncontainable violence against Russian civilians across the Federation.

So, Moscow figured, as long as the local authorities could do all the killing and dying and limit the violence to the region, that was about as close to success as they were going to find. So much for that plan.

In my recent piece in the Washington Diplomat I discuss the year’s regression, and how it has even stoked diplomatic flames with Russia’s southern neighbor, Georgia.

This April, Russia proudly announced that its 15-year conflict in Chechnya was over and that all further counter-insurgency operations by federal troops would cease.

Russia had struggled to control Chechnya, an autonomous republic in the south of the country, even after two wars and several handpicked local regimes. Finally, after empowering Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov to fight the insurgency with whatever means necessary, violence in the region slowly abated.

“It would be difficult to describe Chechnya as peaceful. But Kadyrov has achieved ‘stability’ in the Russian and Chechen definition of the word,” Sergei Markedonov, of Moscow’s Institute for Political and Military Analysis, wrote in the Moscow Times in April.

But within months of the announcement of the conflict’s conclusion, violence in Chechnya and its two neighboring regions, Ingushetia and Dagestan, had rebounded to the highest levels seen in years as assassinations of local officials and devastating suicide attacks pierced the relative calm.
More recently, after a Chechen insurgent group claimed responsibility for a train bombing near St. Petersburg that killed 26 and wounded some 100 people on Nov. 27, it became clear the situation was no longer under control.

Maria Lipman, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said the gradual deterioration of the security situation across Russia is a direct result of the Kremlin’s North Caucasus strategy.

“This is a policy basically of neglect. The Kremlin does not deal with local problems, entrusting them with those rulers who are fully loyal to the Kremlin and who ensure the desired election results. Each time there is an election — whether local or federal — these leaders can be relied on that [the pro-Kremlin United Russia party] not just wins the election, but wins usually in those territories something like an 80 to 90 percent majority,” she said.

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