The authorities have consistently searched for a Ukraine link to acts of domestic terrorism. This was evidenced by events that played out in Dagestan in October 2023. Against the backdrop of the Israel–Hamas war, pro-Palestinian rioters attempted to attack Israeli citizens arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv at Makhachkala airport. The authorities’ response was neutral, permitting the rioters to break through airport security, with Rosgvardia (the National Guard) only deployed hours later. As above, the authorities searched for a Ukraine connection, blaming external interference, without evidence.
Third, the Kremlin’s heavy-handed counterterrorism response appeared to create a radicalising cycle within the Tajik and Uzbek migrant communities that were not previously known to have IS affiliations. The Crocus City Hall attack was given the most attention due to its scale, but that year there were four other successful terrorist incidents in Russia that were not anticipated, either because resources were absorbed in Ukraine or there had been no directive from the top to prioritise terrorism. In each case, the authorities either failed to anticipate the attack, or delayed reacting, and subsequently blamed the Ukrainian authorities.
The FSB’s torture of the Crocus City Hall gunmen was widely circulated on social media channels. This, and the suspects’ visible injuries in court, was linked to a hostage crisis at a Rostov prison in June. That same month saw targeted terrorist attacks in Dagestan on an Orthodox church, a synagogue and a police post, killing at least 21 people. Although no group claimed responsibility, the attack was praised by ISIS-K. Another hostage crisis followed in August at a detention centre in Volgograd. The inmates in both prison incidents stated that their inspiration for the attack had been the state’s violent response to the Crocus City Hall gunmen.
Furthermore, the FSB’s actions were themselves a byproduct of the growing politicisation of their role, which has been to focus on political dissidents, as the real and pressing threat to Russia’s national security. Although the FSB belatedly acknowledged in October 2024 that the ISIS-K was responsible for the attack, this admission was not widely discussed in Russian media.
The way in which the authorities forced a link between the war in Ukraine and domestic IS-led terrorism highlighted Russia’s ability to manipulate political narratives in service of the enemy of the time; Putin branded the US’s warning as an attempt to ‘intimidate and destabilise our society’. This type of phrasing has become a catch-all over the past decade to refer to perceived sinister foreign-led attempts to force regime change and undermine the Russian government.
Following the Crocus City Hall attack, Putin attempted briefly to use the event to justify an increase in attacks on Ukraine, and although this did not come to pass, it highlighted how the war has influenced the Kremlin’s consideration of who to blame for its own internal failings.
Power Plays in the North Caucasus
Terrorist attacks are concrete events that can reveal specific intelligence and policy failures, but there are other political processes playing out across Russia with long-term security implications for the Kremlin. The North Caucasus is emerging as one of the most significant security areas neglected by the Russian government, in particular the potentially accelerated succession plans for the leader of the key region of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Kadyrov’s profile has been considerably enhanced since the war began – politically, economically and through his value as a security guarantor for Moscow. The basis of the relationship between Putin and Kadyrov has long been that, in exchange for maintaining the security status quo in Chechnya, Kadyrov has had a long leash to exploit the region as he sees fit, including amassing significant material wealth for his family.
The Ukraine war has had an important impact on Kadyrov’s political profile, which has oscillated in military importance. Kadyrov’s Akhmat brigade has borne the brunt of some of the bloodiest battles in the war, and its special forces are still engaged in most of the frontline fighting. As one of the regions with the highest mobilisation rate, Chechnya also has one of the highest per capita casualty rates.
Kadyrov, his family and associates have also benefited financially from the occupied Ukrainian territories and the hasty departure of Western investors from the Russian market following the onset of the war – notably taking over the Ilyich metallurgical plant in Mariupol, and buying up former French dairy company Danone in Moscow at a favourable price. Other Kadyrov associates have bought up stakes in important construction companies, as well as taking over the assets of departed US chain Starbucks.
However, the Kremlin’s focus on pulling more recruits from Chechnya – as opposed to the capital – has given Kadyrov leeway to test the equilibrium of his relationship with Putin, creating two key problems.
The first problem for the Kremlin is that Kadyrov and his associates are increasingly overreaching beyond their fiefdom. This has been most clearly demonstrated by Kadyrov’s efforts to use his armed groups to build political leverage. Early in the war, Kadyrov and former Wagner strongman Yevgeny Prigozhin criticised the government’s handling of military operations, even though they were rivals for Kremlin resources. Kadyrov severed ties with Prigozhin just before his mutiny of June 2023 – and it was Kadyrov’s forces that were ultimately deployed to suppress the Wagner troops in the south as they marched on Moscow. His attempts to increase the independence of his own Akhmat brigade from Russia’s Ministry of Defence were subsequently curtailed. Against Kadyrov’s wishes, the group was absorbed formally into the ministry, reducing its independence.
The culmination of these unspoken tensions spilled into the mainstream in September 2024, amid a shootout in Moscow over the Kremlin-sanctioned merger between Russ Group, an outdoor advertising company, and retail giant Wildberries, whose co-founder appealed publicly to Kadyrov to intervene and prevent it. The resulting standoff, involving Kadyrov-linked associates, the death of two people and links between the merger and a company connected to Suleiman Kerimov, a powerful Dagestani businessman, demonstrated several concerning details for the Russian authorities.
The standoff raised questions about Kadyrov’s growing mandate to conduct operations in Moscow. His tactic of using hired thugs to conduct extra-judicial killings in Chechnya is largely overlooked by the Kremlin, but the Wildberries operation took place in Putin’s backyard. Kadyrov’s actions further suggested that he believed he was able to openly challenge a Kremlin-approved merger, upsetting the balance of his tacit relationship with Putin. Moreover, and most pressingly, Kadyrov’s actions suggested that Putin might not have full control over Chechnya’s leadership.
Putin’s major selling point has been his ability to end the chaos of the 1990s, when shootings were an occasional part of doing business – usually targeted acts of intimidation or assassinations rather than a public attack. Kadyrov’s latitude to run Chechnya carried an implicit agreement that restricted his reach in Moscow, and the Wildberries operation tested this. Although the Wildberries incident received scant mention abroad, Putin’s inability to curtail Kadyrov’s behaviour was interpreted by some as a sign of his potential weakness.
There seem also to be other subtle attempts by the Kadyrov family to assert their autonomy and independence from Moscow. Chechnya plays an occasionally outsize role in Russia’s foreign policy, with Kadyrov and the regional elite playing a leading role in parts of Russia’s engagement with the Middle East through their religious links, including buying up assets in places such as Dubai through which to conduct semi-official business. Kadyrov is Putin’s unofficial emissary on the Middle East, trusted to project Russia’s interests abroad, theoretically with little personal independence. Yet in a departure from his role, Kadyrov appears to be conducting unauthorised conversations with other Middle Eastern countries, occasionally creating uncertainty about who is speaking for Russia. Kadyrov’s growing ambitions abroad have put pressure on his relationship with the Kremlin.
Rumours of Kadyrov’s serious ill-health – which seem to be quite genuine and to which he has been forced to respond on numerous occasions – have prompted concerns in the Kremlin about stability and succession plans in Chechnya.
The centrality and personalised nature of Kadyrov’s leadership in Chechnya is itself a considerable challenge for the Kremlin, as his family holds many regional clan relationships in check, with the clan-based system in Chechnya operating in the liminal zone of Russian law. Aside from his family and network of associates, Kadyrov has few allies in the Russian government, and there are grievances against him held by elites across the North Caucasus. This makes his position, and the possibility of smooth succession, more tenuous.
More ominously, Kadyrov appears to be making moves to insulate his family from politics: in February 2025 he removed three of his daughters from their senior government positions – one was deputy prime minister of Chechnya – and appointed one of them as the owner of Chechnya’s largest export company, the Chechen Mineral Water company. This company is under Western sanctions, and yet its revenue rose by 16% in 2023 to ₽1.4 billion. Chechen Mineral Water’s export data is restricted, but the company is an important part of Russia’s import substitution policy (to replace foreign-made goods with domestic products) and is focused on deepening Russia’s engagements abroad. All these moves suggest that Kadyrov is thinking about his family’s long-term future.
In a sense, the above questions have been an inevitable part of a centralised and personalised leadership, and the Kremlin is likely to have planned a scenario in which managed succession in Chechnya requires input from Moscow. However, it is likely that Kadyrov’s relative youth – he is only 48 – has put off the question of succession until relatively recently. There are, of course, potential successors, such as Adam Delimkhanov, who represents Chechnya in the State Duma and who has played an important role in the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine.
Kadyrov is taking ever greater risks with the autonomy that the Ukraine war has facilitated, perhaps due to his imminent incapacitation, which has not allowed sufficient time to prepare a successor. Allegations that he has offered his resignation to Putin several times – and been rejected – suggest that Moscow does not have an imminent successor in waiting, and that this emerging political issue has not been prioritised amid the war in Ukraine.
Kursk: Russia’s Soft Underbelly
Other security blind spots in Russia that have resulted from the war appear to be the product of age-old corruption problems. While the self-enrichment of public officials is not a new story, there does appear to be a shift in the preparedness of the state to hold the elite accountable for their corrupt practices if they begin to have an impact on Putin’s war goals. The Kremlin’s responses to Ukraine’s border incursions in Russia’s southern Kursk region is an example both of how the authorities can harness security concerns to their advantage, and how corruption can have more serious security implications.
Russia’s regional corruption problems came to a head in 2024, when its weak borders were tested by the Ukrainian military. The problems began over a year earlier, in June 2023, when small anti-Kremlin groups infiltrated the Russian border near Belgorod and captured several villages, probably in an attempt to probe Russia’s defences. A much larger-scale incursion by Ukrainian armed forces in June 2024 was more serious, and Russia did not regain control of its border until April 2025.
The Russian authorities’ responses to these incursions were initially limited, even after the June 2023 attack, when Russia’s civilian defences were proven to have been ineffective – locals were instead drafted in to fortify the border, many of whose salaries were not paid – and no new air defences were forthcoming. Kremlin-affiliated media maintained that if local residents had not yet seen a response, it was because Putin was biding his time for the right reaction. A belated injection of inexperienced North Korean troops months later, around the time of the US presidential elections, offered little counteroffensive, even though Russia did subsequently commit forces successfully to remove the Ukrainian armed forces.
As with many of the examples illustrated here, the Kursk incursion could have been anticipated some 18 months earlier, beginning with the Ukrainians’ first probing attack in 2023. It was unclear why the Kremlin did not refocus its military resources on regaining its border, whether due to genuine inability, prioritisation of other resources, or a grander plan to use this to its advantage. It is possible that it might have been all three.
From a personnel perspective, pulling soldiers from the front to engage in Kursk might have been detrimental to the Kremlin’s ability to push the frontline further into Ukraine. With the Kremlin eager to avoid another unpopular recruitment drive, it might not have played well domestically. Politically, the focus remained on the frontline and pressing deeper into Ukraine, and it is likely that Putin’s own eagerness to subjugate Ukrainian territory trumped the security of the small Russian border area. But the most likely reason is that Putin did not believe Ukraine’s Kursk incursion presented a grave threat to Russia’s security. He barely mentioned it, and it was not until March 2025 that he visited Kursk in military garb – a first on both counts – and only against the backdrop of negotiations with the US, sending a pointed message that Russia did not intend to halt the war anytime soon. Here, concerns that any ceasefire agreement might crystallise along a frontline that included parts of Russia itself probably drove Putin’s refocus on Kursk, which had otherwise been sidelined from the discussion.
When the incursions into Kursk became a matter of economics, it appears that the Kremlin paid more attention to them. What they did reveal was the poor defence of Russia’s southern border, and how corruption networks in the Kursk regional government had enriched themselves at the expense of civil defences.
Since the start of the war, the Kremlin had spent more than ₽10 billion on defensive structures, including dragons’ teeth (concrete pyramid-shaped obstacles to impede the movement of tanks) and bunkers to fortify the border, as well as enlisting civilian contractors to construct a more permanent border. Prior to the war, the border between Russia and Ukraine was long and largely unguarded, although it has since been upgraded with electronic detection systems and is now essentially the contact line of the conflict.
It subsequently came to light that Roman Starovoit, the regional governor (2018–24) and later minister for transport (2024–25), and his associates had embezzled billions in kickbacks from construction companies hired to deal with Kursk’s defences. Multiple criminal cases were opened against members of the regional government, who had also received kickbacks from contractors by using porous non-industrial materials. As a result, the structures crumbled in the rain and snow.
Starovoit was under investigation for several months before his apparent suicide in July 2025, as the corruption allegations against him took shape and he was fired. Despite his deep connection to the Rotenberg brothers – powerful businessmen who are personal friends of Putin and control large infrastructure projects in Russia – this was not enough to have prevented his dismissal.
