With 37 dead from blasts in the Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro stations this morning, apparently from two female suicide bombers, it is still too soon to say anything authoritative or definitive about the tragedy. Inevitably — and I’m sure correctly — this has been linked with the North Caucasus insurgencies and, combined with the November 2009 Nevsky Express train bombings, it suggests a return to terrorist attacks outside the troubled region itself. This may be true, and it would certainly meet self-styled ‘Emir of the North Caucasus’ Doku Umarov’s assertion that “Blood will no longer be limited to our cities and towns. The war is coming to their [Russians’] cities.” However, a key question will be where these attacks originated. Although Chechnya is hardly pacified, Kadyrov’s brutal methods have managed to shatter the rebel movement. Instead, the main focus of terrorist insurgency has shifted to other North Caucasus republics, most notably Daghestan and Ingushetia. However, the movements there are more nationalist than jihadist, Islamist to be sure but not the particularly virulent form that tends also to be associated with suicide attacks on purely civilian targets (indeed, if anything they have recently sharpened their focus on those they deem enemy combatants: police, soldiers and government officials). If these bombers prove not to have been Chechens or inspired and supported by the remaining Salafist jihadist elements within Chechnya, then this might be a worrying sign of a radicalisation of the other North Caucasus insurgent movements.
First thoughts on 29 March 2010 Moscow metro bombings
Posted by Mark Galeotti on March 29, 2010
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/first-thoughts-on-29-march-2010-moscow-metro-bombings/
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Mark Galeotti
This blog’s author, Dr Mark Galeotti has been researching Russian history and security issues since the late 1980s.
Educated at Cambridge University and the LSE, he is the director of the consultancy firm Mayak Intelligence. He is also an Honorary Professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies, Ernest Bevin Associate Fellow in Euro-Atlantic Geopolitics with the Council on Geostrategy and a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI, as well as a senior non-resident fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague and an Associate Fellow of the Middle East Institute’s Frontier Europe programme. Previously he has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, head of the History department at Keele University in the UK, an adviser at the British Foreign Office and a visiting professor at MGIMO (Moscow), Charles University (Prague) and Rutgers (Newark), as well as a visiting fellow with the ECFR.
His books include The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale University Press, 2022), A Short History of Russia (HarperCollins, 2020/Ebury, 2021), We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale University Press, 2018), and several Osprey books. He is a regular contributor to Jane’s Intelligence Review and The Spectator Coffee House blog, and is a columnist for Raam op Rusland, Intellinews Business New Europe and the Moscow Times.
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