Staunton, April 13 – Statements by Russian security officials and actions by siloviki [law-enforcers] including declaring a new counter-terrorism operation against an area of 4,500 square kilometers with some 368,000 people show that Dagestan has become “the northern front” of the Islamic State, according to Anton Bredikhin. In a study on the Kavkazoved portal, the […]
Staunton, April 6 — Tajikistan is being pressured to shut down the Islamic Rebirth Party, something that will drive its members into the underground and make the Islamist threat there greater; and Dagestani leaders want to adopt an earlier Tajik policy and call home those from that republic now studying in Muslim schools abroad, something […]
Staunton, April 3 — Vladimir Putin has chosen a Duma deputy from Sverdlovsk with an FSB background and service in the notorious Alpha Group during his Chechen wars to be the head of the new Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, an indication of how the Kremlin leader intends to use this new tool and why […]
Welcome to our column, Russia Update, where we will be closely following day-to-day developments in Russia, including the Russian government’s foreign and domestic policies. The previous issue is here. Russian law-enforcers have killed a suspected Islamist militant in Dagestan who was said to have sworn allegiance to ISIS. UPDATES BELOW Special features: – Alexey Navalny […]
Staunton, February 1 — It is unclear which should disturb the Kremlin more — that Muslims in the Russian Federation are now sufficiently angry that they are thinking about taking part in public protests or that these same Muslims feel that they should ask not what Russian law says about such meetings but rather what […]
Staunton, February 25 – Between 2002 and 2010, the number of schools offering non-Russian language instruction has declined by more than 65 percent, and the number of pupils studying in these languages has declined by nearly 80 percent, according to Olga Artemenko, a senior scholar at the Education Ministry’s Federal Institute for the Development of […]
Welcome to our column, Russia Update, where we will be closely following day-to-day developments in Russia, including the Russian government’s foreign and domestic policies. The previous issue is here, and see also our Russia This Week stories Ultranationalists Angry over ‘Capitulation’ of Minsk Agreement, ‘Anti-Maidan’ Launched by Nationalists, Cossacks, Veterans, Bikers, The Guild War – […]
Staunton, December 6 – The violence in Chechnya this week has led many Russian and Western commentators to suggest that the unrest there is about to spread to other parts of the North Caucasus, but such analyses are wrong: unrest throughout the region has been there all along. It has only been exacerbated in recent […]
Staunton, November 22 – Under the impact of Moscow media, Russians have become accustomed to thinking that anti-Russian militants in the North Caucasus are bearded men who fight in the forests. But recent events in Dagestan suggest, Vladislav Maltsev says, that in that republic, they are now an urban street movement capable of fighting local […]
Staunton, October 29 – Officials in Dagestan, the most linguistically diverse republic in the Russian Federation, are preparing a new language law that calls for official support of 28 languages and effectively makes the others “illegal” by depriving them of any chance for support and in some cases for survival, according to Kavkazskaya Politika. While […]
