Moscow thought that its pitiless war was won. That myth died with the bomb victims

The return of terrorism to Moscow has brought horror back to the lives of ordinary Russians and represents a defeat for the Kremlin’s strategy of containing an Islamist insurgency inside the confines of the Northern Caucasus.

If claims that a Chechen group was behind the suicide bombings prove true, then it will be a particularly bitter blow. President Medvedev lifted a state of emergency in Chechnya last April, convinced that his security services had broken the insurgency that had raged for a decade in the Northern Caucasus republic after the two bloody separatist wars of the 1990s.

Mr Medvedev’s new representative to the region had been so confident about its prospects that on Friday he presented the President with a $15 billion (£10 billion) plan to turn the region into a centre for tourism.

The strike at the heart of Moscow destroys that myth — and also represents a chilling affirmation of a boast by the Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov to take the war to Russia. He threatened last month: “Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their cities.”

The bombings on the Moscow Metro are a direct challenge to Mr Medvedev, who will be under pressure to emulate his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who launched a pitiless war on Chechnya in 1999 in an effort to crush the separatists.

Mr Putin has sought to “Chechenise” the conflict since then by relying on the local strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, whom he installed as Chechnya’s President, to pursue the guerrillas in the region’s mountainous terrain.

That strategy had been a success, to the extent that Mr Kadyrov once boasted that he had made Chechnya the “safest place in the world”. However, it came at the price of pushing some insurgents into the neighbouring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia, fuelling unrest there, as well as the rise of local terrorist campaigns against the authorities.

Mr Medvedev’s recognition of Georgia’s breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, after Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, gave a further boost to rebel movements in the North Caucasus. Mr Putin had reduced much of urban Chechnya to ruins in an attempt to uphold the principle that separatists could not change the map. Mr Medvedev’s decision contradicted that.

If the rebel leader Umarov was responsible for recruiting the female suicide bombers, or “Black Widows”, who detonated their bombs to such deadly effect yesterday, then the fear will be that more are on their way.

The latest blasts were the worst attack on the Russian capital since February 2004, when a suicide bomber killed 41 people and injured 250 on a subway train. Female suicide bombers were also responsible for downing two Russian passenger aircraft on the same day a few months later, killing 90 people. The aircraft had taken off from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.

Russia had been free of fatal terrorist attacks outside the North Caucasus until December, when a bomb derailed the Nevsky Express train between Moscow and St Petersburg, killing 26 and injuring more than 100. That attack was claimed by militants linked to Umarov, who styles himself the “emir” of a selfproclaimed Islamist state stretching across the North Caucasus.

Umarov, 46, fought in both of Chechnya’s wars against the Russian army in the 1990s and has waged a guerrilla campaign against the security services for the past decade, claiming to lead an army of 1,000 fighters. The Russian military has repeatedly claimed to have killed him, most recently in June last year, but he has eluded them each time.

The explosion at the Lubyanka Metro station was clearly aimed at the offices of the Federal Security Service (FSB) directly above, based in the notorious former headquarters of the Soviet-era KGB.

The FSB has been at the forefront of the effort to find and kill terrorist leaders in the North Caucasus, enraging residents who have seen relatives subjected to kidnappings, brutal interrogation methods and even executions as the security services seek to extract information about insurgents.

The second Metro station, Park Kultury, is a less obvious target, although it is not far from the Foreign Ministry. At rush hour, however, it is one of the busier stations, because it connects the Red Line to the Circle Line, which runs around the centre of Moscow.

Despite the presence of large numbers of police at entrances to Metro stations, the apparent ease with which the bombers were able to penetrate the network will alarm the authorities and the public. Securing the system against future attacks is all but impossible, given the vast numbers of passengers who use the Metro every day, and the risk of repeat operations will be on everybody’s minds.

The railway celebrates its 75th anniversary in May and is a particularly symbolic target. It was built under the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who deported the entire Chechen people from their homeland in 1944 as punishment after accusing them of collaborating with the Nazi invaders during the Second World War.

With Moscow preparing to stage celebrations in Red Square in May to mark the 65th anniversary of victory in the war, the possibility that this is the start of a new terror campaign in the capital will be at the forefront of the Kremlin’s concerns.

The temptation will be high for Chechen terrorists to remind the world of their cause by trying to steal the headlines at Moscow’s most important celebration for years.

The question urgently facing the FSB is whether insurgents have the capacity to mount a sustained campaign — and what security agents can do to prevent it.

Mr Medvedev has pledged to fight terror “until the end”. He has recently backed efforts to improve social conditions and to create jobs in the North Caucasus to drain the pool of terrorist recruits among disaffected and unemployed youth.

He must now balance the public’s desire for a crackdown against the need to avoid stoking the fires of anger in a region where heavy-handed reprisals would send more young men and women into the arms of the insurgents.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 810