Happy Friday! In January, I published an in-depth report on patterns in terrorism and state responses in the North Caucasus in 2024. That report drew on a unique, multi-source dataset of incidents that I compiled. If you’ve not read it already, you can dowload it here. It’s now the start of April, so it’s a good time to look at what has happened in the first quarter of the year and whether the trends are positive or negative. So that’s what I’m going to do in today’s newsletter! What I’ll...
22 days ago • 3 min read
Happy Friday! This week I’m going to provide a work-in-progress biography of Khuseyn Mezhidov, one of the Chechen commanders that Reuters identified as possibly involved in the Bucha massacre. There are a lot of unfilled gaps in his story — in part because I’ve mainly been focused on client work this week, and I’m taking a long weekend! — but some of the thus-far unanswered questions are interesting in and of themselves. What I’ll cover this week: Some background on who Mezhidov is Evidence...
29 days ago • 4 min read
This week, I want to talk about a new side project I’m launching: An in-depth investigation into Chechen involvement in the Bucha massacre in March 2022. I’m going to be working on (and therefore talking about) this for a while, so I want to give you a little insight into the reasons behind it, and where I’m starting from. Full disclosure: I am NOT good at sharing work in progress. On the one hand, I’m too much of a perfectionist to let something out of the door unless I’ve dotted every i and...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Happy Friday! I hope your week has gone well. This week, I’ve been super busy working on evidence for a corporate raiding case and reworking an academic paper, so I’ve not had much time to think to devote to delving into the darkness of Russian security. However, one story has been bothering me all week. It concerns a recent counterterrorism operation in Dagestan, where the authorities claimed to have killed four suspected terrorists and arrested a fifth. The biggest problem with the incident...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Welcome to the very first issue of Tracing Patterns, the newsletter that takes a particular story from the world of security and unpacks it — examining the relationships of those involved, analysing the underlying trends, exploring the broader context, and explaining the meaning of it all. In case you missed the announcement on Wednesday, this is what will be replacing Threat Dissection/Threat Monitor, in an effort to bring even more value to your inbox! This week, I’ll be focusing on the...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hello! I hope your week is going splendidly! I'm dropping in to your inbox today to explain some of the changes to the newsletter that I am implementing, starting…this week. I have been thinking a lot about the newsletter’s goals and what people appear to find valuable. As a result, I’ll be making some changes to content and structure that I hope will lead to something you find even more valuable 🤞. The TL;DR version The thematic focus on Russian security issues will be the same, but the type...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The costs of the war in Ukraine for the North Caucasus Russian investigative media outlet Mediazona have published their latest dataset on Russia’s losses in its war on Ukraine. The headline figure is that they have identified 95,300 soldiers killed, including foreigners and volunteers. But what does the data say about the costs of the war for the North Caucasus? First, let’s look at the geographical distribution: Stavropol leads the way with 1,480 casualties, slightly ahead of Dagestan...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
Prediction is a fool’s game. Try scenario planning instead. Policy makers often want to know what will happen. The problem: even experts aren’t very good at guessing. People can be right for the wrong reasons, and wrong for the right ones. They can be either the proverbial stopped clock or suffer the fate of Cassandra. There is a lot of analytical shooting-from-the-hip out there, and plenty of people offer pretty awful predictions without any sort of mea culpa when they don't come true (I...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
The North Caucasus is at risk of going dark Finding out what is happening in the North Caucasus has long been a challenge. Western interest in the region has declined sharply since the Chechen wars of the 1990s and 2000s. As a result, English-language media coverage is typically limited outside of major events, like a major terrorist attack. The Russian-language domain is better, but not by much. Most federal media outlets no longer employ correspondents devoted to the region, and they tend...
2 months ago • 6 min read