Dagestan Airport Riot: Another Sign Of Waning Russian Power?
Is Moscow Losing Control Over Russia's Periphery?
Aside from the bloody events of October 7 itself, perhaps the most disturbing scene arising out of the recently-erupted Israeli-Hamas war came at Dagestan’s Makhachkala Airport, where a mob of Dagestani Muslims stormed the tarmac after the arrival of a flight from Tel Aviv, looking for Jewish travelers.
The riot, at an airport in the regional capital of Makhachkala 66 miles (107 km) from Derbent, saw hundreds of Dagestanis, mostly young men, rampage through the terminal building and onto the tarmac hunting for Israeli citizens and Jewish people who had just flown in on a flight from Tel Aviv.
Apparently caught off guard, the authorities managed to evacuate the passengers to safety, but not before a bus carrying them had been chased around the airport by a mob angry over Israel's bombing of Gaza in response to the slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7.
While the video images of that riot are quite disturbing, we must also note that it was by no means an isolated incident. Anti-Israel demonstrations, protests, and riots have been occurring throughout Russia’s North Caucasus region.
The unrest followed several other anti-Israel incidents in North Caucasus sparked by Israel's war against Hamas militants in Gaza. The Dagestani government said early on Monday that it was strengthening security measures across the republic, which is home to about 3 million people.
While pro-Palestinian gatherings are hardly uncommon, particularly in the Western world, it is uncommon that there would be a spate of violent protest of any kind in autocratic Russia. We must remember that last year Russians choosing to protest Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were arrested and charged as criminals.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked protests around the globe, including in Russia where cities have become flooded with angry citizens who denounce President Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war.
But unlike in other countries, thousands of Russians have been plucked from the street by police.
Breaching the public peace in this fashion is generally not seen as a positive or even benign activity in Putin’s Russia. Yet it is happening, and it is happening throughout Russia’s North Caucasus region, which is a majority-Muslim part of the Russian Federation.
Comes now the question: Is the Dagestani airport riot yet another sign Putin is losing his grip on his Russian empire?
One of the more surprising comments made about the Dagestani riot came from Dagestan’s head, Sergei Melikov, who was apparently surprised by the riot.
The head of Dagestan, Sergei Melikov, was surprised by the “search for Jews” in an airplane turbine at Makhachkala airport on the day of the riots.
Earlier, a video circulated on social networks and Telegram channels in which one of the riot participants looked into the aircraft’s turbine. Subsequently, social network users turned this video into many memes.
One has to marvel that the local head of the Republic of Dagestan would have been blindsided by this spasm of anti-Semitic violence. There were apparently warning signs across social media platforms such as Telegram for weeks before the riot.
A false rumor about the resettlement of Israelis in Dagestan that incited a violent mob at its capital airport Sunday was shared online for longer and more widely than previously reported, according to a New York Times analysis of Telegram posts.
The false narrative was spread across multiple, popular Dagestani Telegram channels in the two and a half weeks before the riot, illustrating the power and danger of disinformation in areas far from the Israel-Gaza war.
Given Russia’s ability to crack down on anti-war protests and Vladimir Putin’s low tolerance for disorder, this building up of anti-Semitic anger and hatred in a more or less open fashion simply should not have happened.
Curiously, when Melikov was questioned about what would happen to those people who were arrested during the riot, he indicated that many would received leniency or might even get away scot-free.
Earlier, Melikov, commenting on the call of the former champion of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Khabib Nurmagomedov to forgive the rioters, said that not everyone would be punished, but only those who destroyed the airport, used violence against police officers or disseminated false information. According to him, first of all, the organizers and provocateurs who involve people in the riots should be brought to justice, while those who “simply stood with the Palestinian flag” will not be punished.
Melikov’s intimations of leniency for the airport rioters is in stark contrast to earlier comments he made, whereby he promised “no forgiveness” for riot participants.
Russian authorities won’t let anti-Jewish rioters in the southern region of Dagestan get away with taking part in an illegal and violent rally, the region’s head, Sergey Melikov, has claimed, denouncing the unrest as a “betrayal.”
Melikov at that time also claimed that the Telegram postings which have been blamed for fomenting the riot were the handiwork of Ukrainian intelligence services.
According to Melikov, the “attempts to destabilize the situation in Dagestan” by inciting ethnic and religious division were “carried out by our enemies.” He explained that the calls to join the illegal protests were being spread by Ukrainian nationalists.
“Today we have received absolutely reliable information that the Utro Dagestan (‘Dagestan Morning’) [Telegram] channel is administered and controlled from Ukrainian territory, by traitors, Banderites,” he claimed.
Nor was there any shortage of irony in Melikov’s commentary, who accused the participants in the airport riot of “stabbing in the back” the Russian military forces currently fighting in Ukraine:
Melikov also claimed that those involved in the protests were “stabbing in the back” the Russian military. “While some are fighting against our enemy, others took part in the so-called protest, playing into his hands. This can only be called treason.”
The “stab in the back” myth and metaphor was popularized in Germany after the end of World War One as an explanation of how Germany came to lose that conflict1, with German Jews being particularly singled out as the ones having betrayed the German military. Whether Melikov was deliberately playing into this historic anti-Semitic trope is of course, unknown and unknowable, but given the parallels between the attritional and bloody First World War and the attritional and bloody war in Ukraine, that particular choice of metaphor is nothing if not striking and even a bit odd.
Melikov’s seeming coincidental use of an anti-Semitic trope when speaking about the Makhachkala airport riot does serve to highlight another awkward aspect of the unrest in that particular Russian Republic: the warming relations between Moscow and Hamas, as well as between Moscow and Iran.
Even as Israeli forces continue to attack Hamas positions within Gaza, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been receiving members of the Hamas leadership along with their Iranian sponsors in Moscow.
Russia has been condemned for rolling out the red carpet in Moscow for senior leaders of Hamas and Iran — which one alarmed expert called proof President Vladimir Putin is forming a new “axis of terror against the West.”
Russian Foreign Ministry officials met with Hamas leaders Bassem Naeem and Mousa Abu Marzouk in Moscow on Thursday, just weeks after their terror group stormed Israel and slaughtered at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected allegations Russia was siding with Hamas and Iran over Israel, insisting that Russia was maintaining contacts with “all sides”.
“We consider it necessary to continue our contacts with all parties and, of course, we will continue our dialog with Israel,” Peskov told reporters.
Putin has, since the beginning of this latest phase of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, attempted to chart a somewhat neutral course between Israel and Hamas, specifically avoiding condemnation of Hamas while simultaneously criticizing Israeli activities in Gaza.
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, Putin has played a delicate international balancing act, putting himself forward as a potential mediator and calling for restraint on both sides – a position that has won praise from Hamas.
And in his remarks on Monday, Putin made his most pointed critique of Israel to date, saying that “horrifying events” in the Gaza Strip “cannot not be justified” and added that “your fists clench and you get tears in your eyes” when you see photos of “bloodied, dead children.”
As the recent visits by Hamas leaders and their Iranian sponsors illustrate, Putin is also potentially seeking warmer and closer relations with Iran, who has been providing Russia with drones for use in Ukraine.
Analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency told a small group of reporters during a briefing on Friday that the drone-manufacturing facility now under construction is expected to provide Russia with a new drone stockpile that is “orders of magnitude larger” than what it has been able to procure from Iran to date.
Russia favoring Hamas could be a way of strengthening ties to a necessary ally in an effort to sustain the Russian military machine in Ukraine.
Yet if Russia is leaning towards Hamas to appease Iran in return for more drones for use in Ukraine, the Dagestani riot may have also exposed how badly Russia needs Iranian support, and how draining the war in Ukraine has been for the Russian military.
It is striking that Dagestan is in that same Caucasus region as Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan, of course, recently exploited a lack of military muscle behind Russia’s peacekeeping effort in Nagorno-Karabakh to finally annex the territory which for thirty years has been an Armenian separatist enclave.
Is the unrest in Dagestan unleashed by events in Gaza a further sign of Russian weakness and lack of control in the region?
At a minimum, the unrest poses a challenge for Russia, for if any unrest continues in Dagestan, Putin might have to use scarce military resources to restore order, lest the unrest metastasize into an uprising against Moscow, possibly fomented by majority Muslim Azerbaijan which would definitely benefit from a weaker Russia in the region.
While it is too soon to tell, the unrest in Dagestan could prove to be another step towards Russia’s next battlefield after Ukraine being in the North Caucasus.
Yet simple geography means that the future problems and conflicts in the Caucasus region will inevitably be in some form or fashion Russian problems and Russian conflicts. If it ignores them it risks having at a minimum UN peacekeeping forces near its border. If it ignores them it risks various conflicts and tensions in the region escalating into additional regional small wars literally on its border—not something that promotes one’s own security.
Muslim unrest in Dagestan, which borders Azerbaijan, could very quickly become the sort of internal political crisis which Azerbaijan could exploit while pursuing its disputes with Armenia, making it both more difficult for Russia to position additional troops in the North Caucasus region and more necessary.
If unrest in the North Caucasus continues, Russia might quickly find its hands full with more fronts and more conflicts than it can handle.
Already, there is more than a few indications the war in Ukraine is stuck in a stalemate.
Sharing his first comprehensive assessment of the campaign with The Economist in an interview this week, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conflict of a century ago. “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he says. The general concludes that it would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
Note that a stalemate presumes the forces on either side of the front line are in rough parity with each other, so that neither side has even numerical superiority. Depending on the accuracy of western intelligence assessments of Russia’s capacities and reserves for and in Ukraine, the stalemate in Ukraine may already represent a “high water” mark for the Russian military.
If Russia is already at its maximum military potential in Ukraine, then any crisis in the North Caucasus which forces Putin to deploy troops means those troops have to come from the Ukrainian front lines, which could be a weakening of those front lines, which could finally provide Ukraine with the breakthrough it has been seeking.
There is no clear way to extrapolate the true status of Russia’s military strength from either the Dagestani riots or Azerbaijan’s forced annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh. However, the unrest in Dagestan is yet another spasm of violence on Russia’s border in the North Caucasus, and thus is another reason to question Russia’s capacity to maintain security and order in that distant yet strategically important region.
Muslim unrest in Dagestan is at the very least another problem for Vladimir Putin, at a time when he likely does not need any more problems. The question whose answer will only be revealed in time is how big that problem truly is.
London Jewish Cultural Centre. Stab-in-the-Back Myth. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/stab-in-the-back-myth/.