A deadly attack on a police station and places of worship in southern Russia on Sunday raised the specter of a new wave of violence in the country’s restive Northern Caucasus region and underlined the mounting security challenges facing the Kremlin amid the demands of the war in Ukraine.
A seemingly coordinated assault by gunmen in the two largest cities of the Dagestan region, which left at least 20 people dead, was the deadliest attack in the region in 14 years. It evoked memories of the intense violence that had gripped Russia’s predominantly Muslim region in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
That violence was caused by a combination of Islamic fundamentalism and organized crime. Suppressing it became one of the central bragging points for President Vladimir V. Putin after he came to power in 1999.
That legacy is now at risk of being undermined by a new spate of extremist violence.
In March, four gunmen killed 145 people at a concert hall near Moscow in an attack claimed by the Islamic State. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in more than a decade, and was carried out despite the fact that the United States provided Russia a fairly detailed warning of the plot.
In Dagestan in October, a mob, apparently searching for Jewish passengers, stormed a plane arriving from Tel Aviv.
And earlier this month, several men detained on terrorist charges led a short-lived prison mutiny in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. The mutineers took guards hostage and published videos — unverified — claiming affinity with the Islamic State, before being gunned down by security forces.
Russian authorities have designated Sunday’s attack in Dagestan as an act of terror, but it was not immediately clear who was responsible. The Kremlin spokesman on Monday declined to comment on the gunmen’s motives.
Despite the dearth of details, the Dagestan attacks have contributed to a sense of the Kremlin’s slipping ability to keep a lid on the ethnic and religious tensions that have long festered in the Northern Caucasus. Mr. Putin suppressed the violence two decades ago at the cost of empowering brutal strongmen, abusing human rights and showering it with outsized federal subsidies.
The challenge is further complicated now, with a draining war in Ukraine taxing the economy and the efficiency of Russia’s security apparatus.
“The region is packed with security agents, but they are unable to control the situation now, because the Russian authorities’s resources and attention are predominantly concentrated on the war in Ukraine,” said Tanya Lokshina, an associate director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, a research group, referring to Dagestan. She called Sunday’s attack “a giant failure of the intelligence agencies.”
The gunmen’s targets on Sunday included a police station as well as synagogues and Orthodox churches in the Dagestani cities of Makhachkala and Derbent. Fifteen of the victims were police officers; one was an Orthodox priest who was killed in his church. It is not known whether attackers were specifically targeting law enforcement officers.
Five attackers were eventually killed by security forces, regional authorities said.
Sunday’s plot had some characteristics of violence of the early 2000s, when gunmen simultaneously targeted police checkpoints in hit-and-run attacks, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security analyst and an expert on Northern Caucasus. But they also included some new elements, such as the reported involvement of local elites, he added, contributing to the intelligence agencies’ failure to defuse the plot.
Russian state media and propagandists said the attackers, mostly men in their 30s, included relatives of a local official and a member of a prominent martial arts club, a major sport in Dagestan. Some worked for large state companies, a lucrative position in the region.
Dagestan’s roughly 3.2 million residents are split among dozens of ethnic groups. The largest groups are predominantly Muslim, but the region is also home to a significant Christian minority, as well as a small Jewish community, one of the oldest in Russia.
In the earlier periods of violence in the Northern Caucasus, security forces came under attack on a nearly daily basis, and Islamist terrorists targeted public gatherings as far afield as Moscow and St. Petersburg, more than a thousand miles from the region.
“The trauma of the Chechen wars and terror attacks in large cities are always present in Russia; they are easily awakened,” Mr. Soldatov said.
That national trauma of Sunday’s attack prompted the Kremlin to make an usual step of reassuring Russians that it was an isolated tragedy.
“Russia today is very different,” the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in a press briefing on Monday. Its “society is much more consolidated.”
The Kremlin has been facing a range of security challenges as the war in Ukraine drags on for a third year. On Monday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry blamed the United States for a different deadly incident on Sunday: an explosion at a beach in Russian-occupied Crimea that the authorities said killed four people, including two children, and caused 82 people to be hospitalized.
Russia said the incident occurred after Ukraine fired an American-provided long-range missile at Crimea, where it was intercepted and exploded in midair. The ministry on Monday summoned the American ambassador in Moscow and claimed there was “no doubt about the involvement of the United States in this sinister crime.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukraine’s president, described Crimea as a legitimate target, with “hundreds” of military facilities that “the Russians are cynically trying to hide and cover up with their own civilians.” There was no immediate comment from the United States or confirmation that an American missile was involved.
The Crimea explosion was an embarrassment for the Kremlin, underlining its inability to protect civilians, many of them Russian holidaymakers, in a contested region that Mr. Putin has touted as a fully integrated part of Russia.
The government’s willingness to quickly blame of the United States for the Crimea explosion contrasted sharply with the reticent reaction to the Dagestan attack. The diverging responses illustrated its broader attempt to play up the external threats seemingly outside its control while minimizing the failures of the domestic intelligence services.
Without public guidance from the Kremlin, many pro-government commentators on Monday attempted to present the Dagestan attack as part of Russia’s broader lone standoff against the vague, dark forces of a hostile world. This narrative of national victimhood has become increasingly prevalent in Mr. Putin’s Russia since the invasion of Ukraine.
“We understand who is behind these acts of terror,” Sergei Melikov, the top official of Dagestan, said in an address to its residents, without specifying the perpetrators. He made a comparison between the victims of the assault and Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, saying they were facing the same unnamed, enemy.
“We need to understand that war has come into our home,” Mr. Melikov added.
The history of terrorist violence in the Northern Caucasus region, however, makes it harder for authorities to blame Sunday’s attacks on a vague, unified external enemy, said Aleksandr Baunov, a political analyst at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a Berlin-based research group.
“What we are seeing is the Russian regime’s latest episode of the loss of control in the most diverse places,” Mr. Baunov wrote on the Telegram messaging app on Monday. “Places that are often unexpected to the government itself.”
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