MATTHEW FISHER ON PUTIN’S BIG ISSUES AT HOME

Homegrown terror threats concern Kremlin

Vladimir Putin’s cold heart will have been gladdened by Stéphane Dion’s eagerness for Ottawa to re-engage with the Russian dictator — a rapprochement that began with little fanfare when Canada’s foreign minister met for half an hour two months ago in the Far East with the Kremlin’s top diplomat, Sergei Lavrov.

Almost everything still appears to be going the Russian president’s way — on the surface.

Although voter turnout was feeble last week, Putin’s United Russia Party was returned to parliament with three-quarters of the seats. Russian warplanes have resumed their relentless bombing of the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo on behalf of Bashar Assad’s ghastly regime. A rickety aircraft carrier is going to wave the Russian tricolour off Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

There has also been another uptick in violence by Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine to keep the Balts and Poles wondering whether they might be next on Putin’s hit list.

Helped by the slow recovery of oil and gas prices, the Russian economy is doing a little better than it has for several years. Russian soldiers are on joint army exercises in Pakistan. There have been naval exercises with China in the western Pacific. Russian diplomats are even trying to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together for peace talks.

Concurrently, and what should be of serious concern in Ottawa, Russia has been greatly increasing its presence in the Arctic and running more long-range bombers there and elsewhere. There has also been a growing mountain of allegations that Russian hackers have been merrily trying to mess with the U.S. and German elections. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, has spoken admiringly of Putin.

All of this is part of Putin’s grand dream of making the Kremlin a major global player again. But Putin also has to watch his back.

As pointed out by Leon Aron of the Washingtonbased American Enterprise Institute, the men who carried out the terrorist attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport three months ago that killed 45 and left hundreds wounded were Russian-speaking Central Asians. The Boston Marathon bombing three years ago was carried out by a Kyrgyz-born Chechen who spoke Russian.

As ISIL, Al-Nusra and al-Qaida lose their grasp in western Iraq and Syria, some of their jihadi zealots have shifted their attention to Western Europe, the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Others are returning home to the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which like Ukraine the Kremlin has never stopped considering to be part of its informal empire, and to secessionist-minded Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, which are part of Russia. Crimean Tatars have also begun to create problems on the Black Sea peninsula that Russian forces annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

It is not well known in the West that Russia has 20 million Muslims — one in seven citizens. Nor is it generally known that as many as 7,000 jihadists are from what Russia considers its sphere of influence, including as many as 2,400 Russians, which Aron notes is far more than any western European country.

Most Russian Muslims are strongly secular. They have little interest in their religion and even less in radical Islam. But as Belgium, France and Britain have discovered, it only takes a few inspired radicals to cause hideous violence and tie up many police and soldiers.

Putin is gravely concerned by the prospect of homegrown Islamic terror spilling north from the Caucasus. And so he should be.

ISIL boasted last year of bombing a St. Petersburgbound Russian jetliner over the Sinai Peninsula in response to Russia’s intervention in Syria. All 224 passengers and crew died.

Every time there is another spasm of terrorist violence — and there have been many — Putin has given his security services greater powers and tied them more closely to the Kremlin. The Russian leader celebrated last week’s parliamentary triumph by further consolidating legal powers in a state security ministry that will include the foreign and domestic intelligence service.

The new organization, which will also oversee law enforcement agencies and criminal investigations, will include the FSB, which used to be known as the KGB. It is to be called the MGB, which was the acronym for the secret police during Stalin’s notorious reign of terror.

This move will not only help to tackle Islamic extremists. It can be used to suppress what may be the first stirrings of dissent among Russians frustrated by the country’s gloomy economic situation, as suggested by an eight-per-cent decline in Putin’s popularity this month, according to the independent Levada Center.

By continuing to press the West on a fault line that runs from the Baltic to the Middle East with little pushback from Washington, Paris, London or Ottawa, Putin has largely avoided scrutiny of the troubles that lurk in the Motherland. But they do exist and the president is obviously aware of them.

ALMOST EVERYTHING STILL APPEARS TO BE GOING PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN’S WAY.