Labour migrants from Central Asia, detained after a police raid at a market in Lublino, in Moscow’s suburbs, 2013. Photo (c): Andrey Stepin / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.
For years, the focus of Russian counter-terrorism efforts has been on the unruly North Caucasus. The Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) have built up substantial analytic and operational capacity, ready to deal with any terrorist threat. However, this has been at the expense of other strategic directions. Facing a new threat, unable to generate comparable assets over night, Russians are instead having to turn to the security agencies of Central Asia. These make the FSB look positively liberal and impartial, and as a result not only is Moscow likely to have to make concessions to its Central Asian partners, but Russians will increasingly become proxy-repressors for their strongmen and kleptocrats.
The 3 April bomb attack on the St Petersburg metro led to the inevitable initial flurry of allegations, speculation, and barn-door-closing activity by the security agencies. Suspects were named then exonerated (although for some their lives were still made miserable regardless), and scarcely a news cycle passed without footage of black-balaclava clad special forces being deployed or some new theory.
