Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party
The old saw about Oxbridge rowers goes that they can run very fast, but only in a straight line. Training on rowing machines has given them powerful legs but failed to develop the smaller muscles needed to turn. So it is with Russia’s internal security services: excellent at cracking demonstrators’ heads, they struggle when faced with a new terrorist threat.
It is another aspect of Russia’s Potemkin security forces. The Wagner coup exposed just how few it has left uncommitted to battles in Ukraine. Ukrainian saboteurs cause chaos behind Russian lines, leading to unexplained fires at munitions factories, and act as spotters for the relatively basic Ukrainian drones that make their way around Russia’s purportedly sophisticated air defences. Pro-Ukrainian units of Russians raid border areas from time to time, and even hold towns for hours, if not a few days.
Russia has faced a significant Islamist terrorist threat since the 1990s. Only some of the attacks — the apartment bombings according to Anna Politovskaya, and possibly the siege at Beslan if accounts reported by Catherine Belton are accurate, were staged by the FSB for political purposes. Moscow has managed, helped by its alliance with Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, to keep a lid on Islamist attacks emanating from the Caucasus.
‘Isis-K’, the slightly inaccurate acronym for the group styling itself “The Islamic State in Khorasan Province”, an offshoot of Daesh, named after an ancient region stretching through Afghanistan and Tajikistan, is a relatively new threat to Russia. The group brackets Moscow as a “crusader” enemy along with the United States and other Western countries. It appears to recruit among the millions-strong Central Asian immigrant community, attracted by Russia’s extremely tight labour market: difficult demographics are made harder still by the Army’s appetite for cannon fodder and the defence industry’s need for workers.
Russia’s security service will now have to turn some of its attention to infiltrating and intimidating the community. The first efforts, involving arresting some men (who may or may not have anything to do with the attacks) and sending them to court bearing the signs of torture do not suggest they know what they are doing. Though useful for extracting confessions in show trials, torture produces intelligence of poor quality (people tell people what they think their interrogators want to hear), and, universally, angers other members of the victims’ community. Perhaps there is some idea that they have to show they’re capable of the same public brutality for which ISIS themselves are notorious.
Ill-considered this may be, but it is not as mad as trying to pin the blame for the attacks on Ukraine. That insanity does not originate in the fact that it won’t be believed (though combing social media accounts to look for people repeating this particular lie gives us another way to identify Russian stooges) but in its complete inconsistency with what Russia needs to do to protect itself from this threat.
That would require building an intelligence network within Central Asian communities, and collaborating better with Central Asian states – which it has been alienating – to tackle their common enemy. It will find it hard to focus resources and attention on Central Asian Islamist terrorism while it pretends the problem is Ukrainian in origin.
There’s of course the serious risk that the attacks will be used to justify a crackdown, whether by reintroducing the death penalty, declaring martial law, or increasing the proportion of cannon fodder from Muslim-majority areas of Russia. But a successful full-scale mobilisation is still far-fetched.
Russia is still resource-constrained (most obviously in personnel), and a full call-up would be extremely unpopular, diverting more security forces from counter-terrorism to the suppression of dissent. Nor is the advanced equipment operations need easy to come by: adept as Russia has become at evading sanctions, a Mercedes, or even a washing machine, imported from Kazakhstan is still rather expensive packaging for guidance system microchips.
Helped by Western indecision, particularly that of Germany’s Olaf Scholz, Russia has concocted a strategy with some chance of wearing down Ukrainian forces until the Czech-led artillery supply comes on stream. Alongside increased European artillery production, this will give Ukraine just enough of what it needs to hold the line even if American aid does not materialise. But Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine is struggling to decide how to mobilise more personnel.
Moscow needs to be able to keep the pressure on Ukrainian forces by throwing large numbers of relatively under-equipped men under artillery cover at Ukrainian defences. To have a chance of matching the resources of even the more engaged Eastern and Nordic European countries it needs to be able to concentrate its efforts on its “special military operation”. A new source of terrorism will drain a proportion of those resources and make things more difficult for the Russian state.
It would be unwise for the West to find ways to support this particular anti-Moscow organisation — backing Islamist radicals, whether the mujahideen in Afghanistan, or Netanhayu’s enabling of Qatar’s funding of Hamas, has backfired in the past — but it should provide another reason to increase pressure on Moscow by further intensifying military support for Ukraine.
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Author: Garvan Walshe
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