The Sochi Winter Olympics is underway. This week, The Interpreter’s managing editor James Miller is joined by Boston College Professor Dr. Matt Sienkiewicz and a Northeastern University professor Max Abrahms, a terrorism expert, to discuss the state of security at the Olympics. Will there be a terrorist attack? Did Russian security agencies adequately prepare for the threat? Will holding the Olympics […]
Readers might get the idea that the number of terrorist attacks in Russia is increasing because of a series of well-publicized suicide bombings in the central Russian city of Volgograd in December and earlier in the fall. With the Sochi Olympics coming up in February, a view of the map of terrorist bombings in the Russian Caucasus yields a sense […]
At least 32 people have been killed in two bombings over the space of less than 24 hours in the southern Russian city of Volgograd. Updates are below. Click here to jump to a summary. UPDATES: 1726 GMT: A total of 34 people have now died in due to the two bombings in Volgograd. ITAR-TASS […]
The man recently installed to head Chechnya’s Investigative Committee — a body tantamount to Russia’s FBI — has been sacked by Vladimir Putin in a high-profile embarrassment for the Committee’s overall head, Alexander Bastrykin. It appears that Sergei Bobrov has been relieved of his duties for attempting to do his job properly in Kadyrov’s murky […]
The following was published in the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta. It suggests that Russian militants traveling to Syria to fight for the opposition could face a stiff prison term. Of course, the language in the Constitution does not specify which conflict foreign fighters would face penalties for participating in — nor which side of conflicts […]
On October 21, a bus bombing killed six people in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. The perpetrator of the crime was, according to Russian authorities, Naida Asiyalova, wife of 22 year old Dmitry Sokolov, a known Dagestani militant and bomb maker. This incident was the latest chapter in what is essentially an insurgency moving at a near-glacial […]
News of the stabbing death of a 25-year-old ethnic Russian by a non-Russian, and the subsequent rioting in Biryulyovo, a district of Moscow, was not particularly surprising – Russia has been experiencing inter-ethnic violence and subsequent protests with alarming frequency. What set the Biryulyovo pogroms apart was both the extreme nationalist catharsis that characterized the events […]
Izvestia has deep ties to the Kremlin, and if anyone is unclear about Izvestia’s motives, a sense of history and a quick read of their editorials will quickly shed light on their ideology. This article, for instance, was published on the front page this week, and claims to explain the historical causes of the tragic […]
There’s been no shortage of political controversy surrounding the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympic Games. But the tensions are obscuring a potentially vitally important security issue: Could the Sochi 2014 Games become another Olympics where terrorists exploit it to propagate their political views? In 1972, the Olympic spirit of peace and international cooperation was shattered with […]
In Chechnya, the Electoral Commission registers anyone who wishes to participate in the parliamentary elections, which resulted in a record number of candidates for parliamentary seats. The majority of registered parties do not have their offices in the republic and are not going to spend money on campaigning. “Spoilers” will help to strengthen the position […]
