Shadow over Sochi
Russian President Vladimir Putin walked tall in 2013, for all of Russia’s stagnant growth, official corruption and social woes.
He humiliated the United States by giving Edward Snowden asylum, bullied Ukraine into keeping its distance from Europe and brokered Syria’s chemical weapons surrender after shielding Bashar Assad’s violent regime from international sanctions.
Putin rounded out the year by boasting about Russia’s newgeneration nuclear submarine and ballistic missile program.
But from the remote North Caucasus, a shadow has fallen over Putin’s lavish $50-billion Winter Olympics in Sochi, which open on Feb. 7 and which he vowed will be the “safest ever.”
Terror bombings by presumed militants from restive Dagestan or Chechnya have shaken Volgograd, a key transit hub northeast of Sochi, and left at least 34 dead. Once known as Stalingrad, the iconic “hero city” earned its fame for its fierce resistance to the Nazis. By attacking it the militants are challenging Putin’s promise of a risk-free Winter Games season and are signalling that their own stubborn dream of independence from Russian domination endures to this day.
Inevitably, governments including that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper have condemned the bombings and vowed to work closely with Russia to secure the Sochi Games sites, airports, border crossings and other potential targets. And rightly so. The safety of Canada’s athletes is Ottawa’s chief responsibility and the bombings violate the spirit of the Olympic Truce. Security in Sochi itself is already heavy. And across Russia a police and paramilitary crackdown is now underway, with Putin vowing to “annihilate” the terrorists.
Yet for all the president’s rhetoric, terrorism remains a serious threat, fuelled by Putin’s own repressive, scorched-earth efforts to crush regional independence movements.
The North Caucasus is a region of mainly Muslim territories between the Black and Caspian seas where Russian forces have battled separatists in two ferocious wars in the past two decades. On his watch, from 1999, Putin turned the region into a graveyard where 100,000 are thought to have died, and called it a peace. Last summer a Chechen leader, Doku Umarov, urged followers to use “maximum force” to disrupt the Sochi Games.
After attacks on the Moscow theatre, the Moscow metro, a Moscow airport, the Beslan school and now Volgograd, such threats can’t be discounted.
Russians are paying a price for Putin’s dark history in the Caucasus. The world can only hope that the Sochi Games will not have to be factored into that price.