Staunton, August 7 – Russia’s inter-ethnic problems, which have put the country "at the brink of a social explosion,” are first and foremost the result of Russia’s still unacknowledged loss of both post-1991 Chechen wars, according to a Russian blogger who points to four other reinforcing reasons as well.
"It is perfectly obvious,” the author of the Yuri Blog writes in an extensive post last week, that Russia is in ever-greater difficulties and that a large part of this trend revolves around inter-ethnic relations, however much Moscow officials or experts try to deny or argue otherwise (yuriblog.ru/?p=10331).
Some Russians are inclined to explain ethnic conflicts by trying to decide whether there are "good people from the Caucasus” or "bad ones.” But the real question is otherwise, he suggests, "why is this happening? Why are xenophobia and ...
My family and I stayed in the village of Pervomayskoye outside Grozny through the winter and spring of 1996. I took part in the resistance along with some friends, planting remote-controlled mines along roads used by the Russian military convoys. We lay in wait for the vehicles, and set off the mines when they were near enough. In this way we destroyed several armoured cars and troop transport vehicles. One day we watched a group of young Russian infantrymen coming along the road which we had mined. I felt sorry for them – they were just young boys who had not chosen to come to Ichkeria. We let them go past, and waited until a group of mercenaries came the same way. Then we set off the mine.
