Video Transcript:
Fred Burton: Hi, I'm Fred Burton with Stratfor. And I'm here today with Lauren Goodrich, our senior Eurasia analyst, to talk about the security surrounding the Sochi Olympics and the ongoing militant threat in the Caucasus in Russia. Lauren, there's been a lot of discussions going on concerning the security for Sochi, and we certainly covered it a lot. And I think people have a lot of different assessments as to what are the real problems surrounding the Olympics. So how do you view the Caucasus and the impact to the potential Sochi Olympics?
Lauren Goodrich: Well, I would start off by saying that the militant threat inside the Caucasus is just nothing new. It's something that Russia has struggled with ever since Russia actually got the Caucasus within its own territory back in the late 18th century. The Caucasus threat has been there ever since. The people of the Caucasus are just not integrated into Russia. They are of different ethnicities; they're of different nationalities; they're of different language and religions. And so because of that, there's always been this nationalist push up against the Kremlin and the Russian authorities for centuries. For example, in the 1940s and 1930s, Stalin had a really big problem with the Chechen population pushing up and saying, "We're not a part of Russia." And because of that, he decided to take 100,000 Chechens and put them in other parts of the Soviet Union in order for them to not have this unified Chechen threat be able to rise up against the Soviet authorities. And so because, because of that, whenever the fall of the Soviet Union occurred, I mean, it was just inevitable for civil wars, for major independent movements within the Caucasus, to rise up against the authorities, which led to the first Chechen war. And so, the fact that there is militancy in the Caucasus is just, it's just nothing new; it's a part of what Russia is. But the evolution of who these militants are is continually sort of changing.
Fred: Do you see the -- any nexus with the recent bombings in Volgograd, with the train station and on the bus, link to the Boston Marathon bombing in any capacity?
Lauren: I think there are hints. The current militant group inside of Russia, the Caucasus Emirate, is an umbrella group that has a lot of very small, disjointed cells all throughout Russia. And there is some hints that there was a linkage between the Boston bombers into certain people who are no longer alive that fell underneath the Caucasus Emirates.
Fred: I know in our discussions before the video shoot here today that we were chatting in the office about the potential bombmaker that was, that the Russians perhaps picked up the bombmaker that made the recent suicide devices that were used at the train station bombing as well as the bombing with the Black Widow on the bus. Is there any indications from what you’ve been able to see that that in fact happened because that is significant if the Russians have been able to kill or capture the bombmaker?
Lauren: It's possible. The Russians have stepped up their raids not only in Dagestan, which is kind of the hub of the current militant umbrella, but also in Volgograd, where the recent bombings took place. And so they’ve picked up various so-called militants that were technical support. But there's no indication exactly what their role was within the support.
Fred: I think there's a lot of confusion on the part of a lot of people in the media surrounding the actual threat there is as it pertains to the Chechen militancy. And I think you’ve got a good explanation as to how Putin has managed that problem. Can you explain that for people so they understand that phenomenon?
Lauren: Yes. There's been a lot of discussion publicly with the Sochi Olympics coming that the militancy that we're seeing in Russia today is the same militancy that we saw in the late 90s or mid-to-late 90s and the early 2000s that carried off astonishing, very large-scale terrorist attacks. And they aren’t the same groups; it's very different groups. So what happened was at the end of the First Chechen War, a group of militants who had been fighting in other parts of the former Soviet Union (in Azerbaijan and Georgia) who had a much more pan-ideological, more of a pan-Islamic philosophy -- they weren't nationalists, they had a philosophy to them that was beyond just Chechen nationalism, which was the nationalists who were fighting inside of Chechnya at the time. And it was these guys who went and trained in Afghanistan and actually got really deep training, funding and their creative spark pretty much. And when they came back to Russia and to Chechnya during the first war, they were able to pull off a terrorist attack in 1995 that Russian authorities had never even thought could be possible.
Fred: Which one was that?
Lauren: It was the hostage taking of 2,000 hostages in a hospital with 100 militants. Having that many militants be able to take over a hospital with that many hostages -- that had never happened in Russia before.
Fred: And then we had the Chechen, the Chechen attack at the Moscow theater?
Lauren: Yes, and it was the same group ended up pulling off the theater siege and then Beslan as well in which they took over the school and killed over 300, mostly children.
Fred: And from a practical standpoint, the KGB, the FSB, has been able to take these militants into the fold, so to speak? Or how has it worked? How has Putin been able to pull this off?
Lauren: Well, what happened was that after these large-scale terrorist attacks started to become very common, especially in 2002 to say 2004-2005, the Kremlin shifted strategies. And what the Kremlin ended up doing was they said, OK, all those nationalists that were rising up and just looking for Chechen or Dagestani nationalism, we're going to co-opt them into the Chechen fold -- pretty much pay them off.
Fred: Sure.
Lauren: And give them the option of being rich and alive or being crushed. And then all of those that had the ideology that kind of went underneath Shamil Basayev's group, those are the ones that the Kremlin just wiped out.
Fred: So in essence, we don't see, at least here at Stratfor, the group that pulled off these strategic strikes such as the hospital hostage taking, the Moscow theater event, as having any kind of tactical capability to pull off something like that at the Sochi Olympics. Is that correct?
Lauren: Yeah, we have not seen any capability out of the current Caucasus Emirate group to be able to pull off anything large scale. Every attack that they’ve done has only been a handful of people versus the previous groups in the mid-2000s in which you had, you know, 50 to 100 militants grouping together and organized and trained and ready to pull off large-scale attacks.
Fred: So we've got a very small fractured-like cell here that may be nothing more than a half a dozen, dozen people perhaps, that were responsible for the more recent bombings. And from what I understand from some of our contacts in Washington, the alleged Black Widow threat may not be as credible as some had originally thought. Though I'm sure all the agents that are out there as well as the Russian FSB are on pins and needles just trying to get through opening ceremonies. I certainly know how that feels.
Lauren: Very much so. And there is a concern that the current militant groups and cells have just been holding now. And I'm sure that you're --
Fred: You mean that they have bombs that they're just waiting to explode?
Lauren: I would say more that they haven’t shown their capability because they don’t want the Kremlin to know how sophisticated they are. Unlikely, but it's a possibility, of course. I think that the example that you and I were discussing earlier of the bomb within the foundation that took place in 2004, I think that that case I thought was particularly interesting.
Fred: Yeah, that was a fascinating case where the actual improvised explosive device was embedded in the concrete on the parade stands where Kadyrov had actually seated and then they were able to blow up the entire event with a very sophisticated bomb. And I think from a protective security standpoint, the challenge in preventing that would be -- and I know in the back of the agents' minds will be -- have the Russians been capable of screening all the different venues to eliminate that kind of threat? And I know that's a challenge just due to the size and the scope of operations in trying to put one of these things together. But I do think the more probable scenario would be the kind of suicide-type devices that we've seen at soft targets away from the Olympic venues as part of the transportation hub, coming into or leaving that kind of venue.
Lauren: Yes, I agree. And I believe that the transportation hubs -- pretty far from Sochi, that you have to get into Sochi with, I think that those are the locations that we're more likely going to see in an attack. Places like Moscow, Volgograd, St. Petersburg, Kazan. Because that's where you come in via train, air, bus. And it's impossible to protect those zones compared to Sochi, which is so heavily fortified.
Fred: Well, thank you for this fascinating read and bringing us up to date on the militancy there in the Caucasus.
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