There’s lots of media coverage out there of President Medvedev’s order to withdraw troops from Chechnya … but where will they go? These were the last two paragraphs tucked away at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal article:
Although fighting in Chechnya is now limited to occasional small clashes, violence believed to be a spinoff of the Chechen separatist movement is strong in Dagestan and in Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya to the west.
Reducing the troop presence in Chechnya could allow for soldiers to be redeployed in those increasingly troubled republics.
Ten years in, no one is under any illusion that the problems in Chechnya have been solved (if anything, the high profile assassinations seem to be on the upswing, even extending beyond the borders of Russia). Perhaps now that the Russian troops are pulling out, the mini-dictator Ramzan Kadyrov can pursue his lofty agenda of legalizing polygamy and the beatification of Vladimir Putin.