Spoils of war are hard to imagine for Russian soldiers confronting Islamic separatists in the southern republic of Dagestan.
The mountain villages are small, poor and inhospitable, with names that sound foreign even to Russians. Remote in summer, by late autumn the villages become prisoners of the snow and cold of the Great Caucasus.
The Russian military has lost once already in the region, the devastating 1994-96 war in Chechnya. Yet Moscow is sending more and more soldiers to fight, and to die, in Dagestan. Despite their initial bravado, Russian military officials now admit they might face a long, difficult conflict.
Winning may offer scant rewards, but Russian leaders, Western diplomats and independent analysts concur that Russia has very much to lose in Dagestan, a small, remote land at war, far removed from the glare of world media attention and widespread public awareness in the West.
Less than a decade after the Soviet Union dissolved amid the collapse of communism, splintering into 15 independent nations, Russia is under pressure across its giant territory.
Separatist movements are most visible, and most violent, in the North Caucasus. Yet even in Siberia, in the Far East, in the Ural Mountains, Russians wonder if the country can or even should remain unified.
If Russia should fail to stop Islamic militants and Chechen invaders in Dagestan, separatists elsewhere would grow emboldened. Regional leaders, already dubious of Moscow’s value, would lose more confidence. Russia’s breakup, by most accounts not yet inevitable, would accelerate.
“If the big bear is mortally wounded, even small dogs will be biting him,” said Alexander Rondeli, an international affairs analyst in Georgia’s Foreign Ministry. “Especially if the bear has been oppressing the dogs.”
Europe and the United States have much to fear from an unpredictable Russia at war with itself. The whole Caucasus region is especially important now, as Western nations seek to develop potentially enormous oil fields in the Caspian Sea and to transport the oil across Georgia and the other Caucasus nations to Western markets.
Aside from the rebels in Dagestan, few want to see Russia so weak. Few want to see another Chechnya, where the war cost more than 30,000 lives, most of them civilians.
Now Chechnya is an isolated and desperately poor republic beyond Moscow’s control but unable to establish itself as a viable independent nation. It calls itself Ichkeria and purports to be under Islamic rule, but is beset by kidnappings, arms trafficking and other criminal activities.
A full-scale war in Dagestan could bleed into neighboring Georgia, further destabilizing a nation that many consider the key to order and progress in the strategically critical Caucasus.
“You cannot have a crazy, unstable situation on your border–especially for a country like Georgia,” Rondeli said. “The Caucasus is a seismic zone, in a direct sense and an indirect sense. You have to have normal states around you to survive.”
Of those, the Caucasus is in short supply. Azerbaijan and Armenia remain poor and aimless, flirting with authoritarianism and threatening from time to time a new war over the disputed republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. In Georgia, separatist groups and political leaders control about a quarter of the nation’s territory.
The players, goals and methods have changed since the imperial days of the Great Game, the race for power in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The vast untapped reserves of Caspian Sea oil–who will pump it and ship it, and where–is now the critical economic issue. The United States has surpassed Great Britain as Russia’s chief rival for influence, and other European nations and regional powers such as Turkey and Iran have joined the fray.
“We ignore the Caucasus at our own peril,” said a European diplomat based in Moscow. “Everyone is concerned about how Russia is going to handle not only Dagestan but also the other trouble spots there.”
War in Dagestan could send refugees pouring into Georgia. The rebels, who are funded and directed by Chechen warlords, could also try to use Georgian territory to travel between their battlefields and bases in Chechnya.
Already Georgia has witnessed the dangers. This month Russian planes dropped bombs and mines on a sparsely populated area of northern Georgia, wounding several villagers.
Russia late last week apologized for the incident, surprising Georgian officials long accustomed to Russian stonewalling.
The Georgians and others in the region blame Russia for much of the tumult in the Caucasus.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow searched for ways to hold sway over a region that for more than a century had served as Russia’s southern defensive flank and listening post. But with its military might waning and few economic levers to wield, Moscow feared irrelevance.
Russia’s tactic, regional officials say, was to purposely destabilize the Caucasus to keep Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan from being able to stand on their own.
“They cannot get used to the idea that it is really over, that these are really free and independent states,” said Peter Mamradze, chief adviser to Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze.
Even now, though Russia could use help from its southern neighbors in dealing with Chechnya and Dagestan, forces within the Russian military and leadership are targeting Georgia’s government, officials charge. Moscow also is accused of being a stumbling block in efforts to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh issue and heal the rift between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Georgian officials like to trace the Chechen conflict back to the early 1990s, when Moscow gave military support to Abkhazia in its efforts to secede from Georgia. Abkhazia’s break, considered impossible without Russian help, encouraged the Chechen separatist movement. Georgian officials even say that Chechen fighters such as Shamil Basayev, now leading rebels in Dagestan, learned their skills on the Abkhaz battlefields.
Revaz Adamia, who heads the defense and security committee in Georgia’s parliament, said Moscow’s strategy was laid out by Yevgeny Primakov, the former prime minister and foreign minister who is now considered a formidable potential candidate for Russia’s presidency next year.
“The Primakov doctrine was: We will create a lot of problems for `our guys’ (the former Soviet republics) and then they will understand that they cannot survive independently,” Adamia said. “The conflicts were supported in Moscow. The mistakes were made in Moscow.”
Whether stirring up strife was Moscow’s plan or not, the war in Chechnya showed that Russia’s military was ill-prepared to deal with its eventual effects. Russian units were stitched together from various battalions before being sent off to Chechnya, only to become easy prey for the experienced guerrillas.
Some of those same mistakes are being repeated in Dagestan, critics say. Border guards are young, fresh and unwilling to challenge Chechens who brazenly cross checkpoints brandishing their automatic weapons. Infantry troops are merely “armed rabble,” as one critic put it.
“Today, as was almost commonplace during the Chechen war, competent signal officers, who should coordinate air and heavy gun bombardments, are absent at the front,” said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military analyst and columnist for the Moscow Times. “The Russian-led forces command total firepower superiority but cannot use this advantage efficiently.”
Critics also point out that Russia’s best troops are often posted abroad on peacekeeping duties. Highly trained and cohesive units are among the approximately 3,600 soldiers recently deployed in Kosovo, for example.
“Pristina? What are they doing in Pristina?” one critic wondered, referring to the Kosovar capital. “Russia’s Pristina is in Dagestan.”
Another mistake, critics say, was that Russia underestimated the Chechens. Back in 1993, a source said, Russian intelligence reports warned that Chechnya would be lost unless social, economic and military steps were taken.
Even now Moscow is accused of underestimating Chechen ambitions. Basayev has been talking for more than a year of ridding Dagestan of Russians, then uniting the two republics in an Islamic state like the one czarist Russia conquered in the 19th Century.
The Chechen leadership, struggling to overcome the isolation that their victory has brought them, is desperate for a trade and transit route out of their republic that does not go through Russian territory.
They have built a primitive but passable road from Grozny, the capital, to the Georgian border. Now they are leaning on Georgia to improve its road north from Tbilisi.
The Georgians are balking. Politically, linking the roads would symbolically recognize Chechnya as an independent state, anger the Russians and complicate Georgia’s position on Abkhazia. Georgia also fears that arms and drug trafficking and other criminal activity would rise as Chechen criminal groups moved to find other markets.
Another way out for the Chechens, then, is Dagestan. If Basayev and his fellow militants make good on their pledge to rid Dagestan of all Russian troops–a tall order, to be sure–the Chechens would have an outlet to the Caspian Sea. Indeed, about 70 percent of Russia’s shoreline on the Caspian is in Dagestan.
Despite the echoes of Chechnya, Russia has a lot going for it in Dagestan. Though predominantly Muslim, the people of Dagestan are far more ethnically diverse than those in Chechnya and presumably less likely to unite for a cause. Most express unease about, if not hostility to, the goal of independence.
Perhaps most powerful of all, in the battle for hearts and minds, the people of Dagestan and other North Caucasus republics have seen the Chechen model.
“The Chechens have performed so badly in their independence that people will look at this and say, `Well, we don’t need this, if de facto independence means a criminal society, kidnappings, an Islamic law imposed on the people,’ ” Rondeli said. “The Russians can use this to their advantage.”
For a lasting victory, Moscow will have to offer more than just aerial bombardment. New Prime Minister Vladimir Putin acknowledged Monday that military methods alone would not solve the problems in Dagestan, that social and economic changes were needed as well.
Russian authorities estimate the number of fighters in Dagestan at about 1,500. If Russian troops fail to oust them before winter, it would be a drastic blow to Moscow’s prestige and a harbinger of more problems.
Yet even if the soldiers win for now, they will have trouble holding the villages should the Chechens launch another offensive.
“It’s all very difficult to make a prognosis,” Adamia said. “Russia is the most unpredictable country in the world right now, and any extremist movement is difficult to predict.”
