APRIL 2012

Putin Tries to Talk the Crisis out of Escalation

Protests in support of Oleg Shein in Astrakhan, Russia (Source: Itar-Tass)

Orthodox Easter was celebrated in Russia last Sunday with all the ceremonial pomp and official hypocrisy, but it has hardly produced any calming effect on the brewing political crisis. Ahead of his return to the Kremlin, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s last official address to the State Duma sought to cap his term as head of government with inevitable references to "emotional upheavals and political battles” (Kommersant, April 12). He appeared calm and confident, praising himself for steering the country through economic turbulence and setting goals for the new government in the most general and uncontroversial terms (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, April 12). The newly-elected parliamentarians, however, showed rather little enthusiasm for his course on unwavering stability, and one opposition party even dared to walk out of the hall (Ezhednevny Zhurnal, 12 April). The point of that ...

North Caucasus Turmoil Intensifies on Europe’s Doorstep

By Aslan Doukaev

March 2012

A female suicide bomber killed herself and at least five police officers on March 6, when she blew herself upat a police checkpoint in a village in Daghestan. She acted in apparent revenge for the death of her husband last month at the hands of security forces. This has become an all too familiar story, not just in Daghestan, but across the North Caucasus, where over the past decade, the initially predominantly Chechen military resistance to Russia has morphed into a militant and highly organized Islamic insurgency.

In Chechnya itself, fierce fighting last month along the border with Daghestan left 17 government troops dead and 24 wounded, state news agencies quoted Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev as telling Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. According to the same source, the insurgents lost only seven people in the clashes, which lasted for over a week. It was a highly unusual admission from one of Russia’s top security officials, who are not generally prone ...