Weapons Flooding into ‘Bandit Formations’ in North Caucasus, Bortnikov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 10 – In reporting on his organization’s success in countering the influx of arms into the hands of North Caucasus militant groups, FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov unwittingly highlights why there are so many guns in private hands there and why groups are coalescing into what he calls “bandit formations.”
    The FSB chief’s words (stav.aif.ru/save/glava-fsb-mezhdunarodnye-terroristy-oslozhnyayut-situaciyu-na-severnom-kavkaze and chernovik.net/news/obstanovka-na-severnom-kavkaze-oslozhnyaetsya-zayavlenie-direktora-fsb-bortnikova), of course, allow him to attack Ukraine and the West and suggest why his organization remains so important.
    But the statistics he gives of FSB confiscations of more than 100,000 guns and more than 5500 explosive devices and “neutralization” of more than 38 bandit groups with some 1700 members casts doubt on the optimism about improving conditions in the North Caucasus that  Moscow has long insisted upon.
    Bortnikov doesn’t give any figures for the number of guns and explosives not confiscated or the number of bandit groups and bandits not neutralized, but it strains credulity to think that the FSB has gotten them all or even a majority of them – and that suggests the situation in the region is not only “becoming more complicated” as he says but more unsettled as well.