RA’s Daily Russian News Blast – August 19, 2009
According to the BBC, President Medvedev has appointed a new interior minister in Ingushetia, Viktor Zhirnov. Russia’s Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev’s has slammed local police for failing to act on a tip-off they received about the bombing. Medvedev has sent ‘battle-hardened’ Deputy Interior Minister Colonel-General Yedelev to Ingushetia to put the region ‘in proper order’. Reuters reports on the ‘Afghan-isation‘ of the North Caucasus where the Kremlin’s policy of ‘liberal use of oil money’ has not been enough, analyst Svante Cornell suggests, to curb insurgency. The Telegraph examines a report by the United States Cyber Consequences Unit claiming that attacks last year on Georgian websites were executed by ‘independent groups of civilian hackers with a special relationship to the Russian government’.