Why does Ingushetia need Kadyrov?

Having told Reuters that Medvedev had instructed him to lead the fight against militants, “including Ingushetia,” Ramzan Kadyrov did not say anything new about his ambitions, but he did clarify a lot about what the Kremlin understands as a state.

For Kadyrov, this situation is quite logical: back in 2004, his units received the right to operate on the territory of neighboring republics (which he immediately took advantage of, conducting several special operations in Dagestan and then Ingushetia), and the Chechen president is simply consistently expanding his zone of influence. It remains to understand why Medvedev needs this.

For at least nine years, since January 2001, the Kremlin, the State Duma and the special services have been coming up with a system for combating terrorism in the North Caucasus. For this purpose, several presidential decrees, a law on countering terrorism, and many instructions and by-laws were adopted.

As a result, the system was somehow built: for coordinating security forces from different regions - the Operational Headquarters, for announcing the CTO - the head of the FSB, for responding to terrorist attacks and militant incursions - the GROU (Operational Control Groups), for security operations - local and seconded employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs , FSB and Internal Troops units and even a separate reconnaissance group under the command of an Internal Troops officer to destroy underground leaders. Plus local departments of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, pre-trial detention centers for obtaining information from suspects, scattered across different regions, border guards, military counterintelligence and much more.

Now it turns out that the capabilities of all these headquarters, structures and centers cannot be compared with the capabilities of the President of Chechnya.

However, Ramzan Kadyrov is just the leader of one republic, the situation in which is not the simplest, judging by the suicide bombing in Grozny on May 15. And something completely unusual had to happen that such extraordinary measures were needed.

Maybe the militants used some new tactical technique that caught the security forces by surprise, as was the case in Ingushetia in the summer of 2004, when the entire republic came under the control of Basayev’s group and police and FSB officers were shot by the dozens?

Obviously not, because the President of Ingushetia has already been blown up, and in exactly this way (in April 2004, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a Zhiguli car while overtaking Zyazikov’s motorcade). Moreover, if in the case of Yevkurov there is still hope for the best, then in the case of, for example, Kadyrov Sr. there was none, and the situation in Chechnya then was no better than the current Ingush one - Basayev was still alive. However, no one at that time canceled the system of managing the counter-terrorist operation, and no one thought of entrusting the president of one of the neighboring republics with dealing with the Chechen terrorists.

Or, perhaps, right now it has become clear that the situation in Ingushetia is out of control and extraordinary measures are required? However, the crisis in the republic has not subsided for several years, since 2007 this has been officially recognized, and just an extraordinary measure was the announcement in July 2007 of the start of the Special Comprehensive Preventive Operation (SKPO), within the framework of which additional troops were brought into Ingushetia.

But perhaps we need to abandon this logic and simply admit that in the North Caucasus this entire state system of fighting terrorism, where there are special services, headquarters, units, and subordination, does not work, and you can only rely on strong personalities among local leaders to crush the underground?

However, there is one problem: strong personalities are only suitable for certain types of jobs. Such strong personalities were very useful to Russian troops in 1999 during the attack on Dagestan, when the enemy was a large group of militants (in fact, a mini-army), strangers in this territory, and it was necessary to quickly mobilize the local population, obtaining from them the loyalty and cooperation of the federal to the troops. Then local leaders were needed, albeit with a murky past and present.

However, since 1999, the tactics of the militants have changed dramatically: the armed forces of Ichkeria no longer exist, but instead there is the classic structure of urban insurgents, invented in the 60s in Latin America: cells of four to five people (named by Basayev, ironically, SOG - special operational groups , almost like the FSB), which use tactics of ambushes, shelling and explosions, and attack mainly government officials and law enforcement agencies.

It is much more difficult to mobilize the population against such an underground, and the leader of a neighboring republic is the last person suitable for the role of defender of Ingushetia, whose population constantly feels under pressure from stronger neighbors - if not Chechnya, then North Ossetia.

In addition, such underground tactics do not require the participation of a large number of people in planning terrorist attacks; for this kind of struggle you do not need to sit either in the forest or in the mountains (let me remind you that it was invented specifically for urban conditions). Therefore, raids, sweeps and raids into the forest are not very effective against it: all that is needed is painstaking and many years of undercover work, for which Kadyrov’s men are obviously not suitable.

However, after the lifting of the CTO regime in Chechnya, it is known that Kadyrov does not throw words to the wind: if he announced that he was ordered, it means that in a few days there will be confirmation from the Kremlin. Even if this decision is in no way explained by state logic.