By James SHERR, Head, Russia and Eurasia...

Perspective can be the greatest casualty of a grotesque and barbarous terrorist attack, and terrorists invariably hope that will be the case. Contrary to the steely and self-righteous assurances of Russia’s power structures, the country’s strategy in the North Caucasus has been failing, and the point has been made several times by Present Medvedev himself. Russia is not short of experts who, since the mid-90s, have warned that Moscow’s solution to the ‘Chechen cancer’ was more likely to metastasize than cure it. Two Chechen wars (1994-6 and 1999-2004) and the brutalities of ‘normalisation’ under Chechnya’s now virtually autonomous president, Ramzan Kadyrov, have transformed Dagestan, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria into alienated, radicalised, desolate and increasingly ungovernable places. Moreover, Russia’s power structures hoped that the August 2008 war with Georgia would confirm the homespun axiom that dominance of the now independent

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