Publications Combined: Russia's Regular And Special Forces In The Regional And Global War On Terror
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Russian outrage following the September 2004 hostage disaster
at North Ossetia’s Beslan Middle School No.1 was reflected
in many ways throughout the country. The 52-hour debacle
resulted in the death of some 344 civilians, including more than 170
children, in addition to unprecedented losses of elite Russian security
forces and the dispatch of most Chechen/allied hostage-takers
themselves. It quickly became clear, as well, that Russian authorities
had been less than candid about the number of hostages held and
the extent to which they were prepared to deal with the situation.
Amid grief, calls for retaliation, and demands for reform, one of the
more telling reactions in terms of hardening public perspectives appeared
in a national poll taken several days after the event. Some
54% of citizens polled specifically judged the Russian security forces
and the police to be corrupt and thus complicit in the failure to deal
adequately with terrorism, while 44% thought that no lessons for the
future would be learned from the tragedy.
This pessimism was the consequence not just of the Beslan terrorism,
but the accumulation of years of often spectacular failures
by Russian special operations forces (SOF, in the apt US military
acronym). A series of Russian SOF counterterrorism mishaps, misjudgments,
and failures in the 1990s and continuing to the present
have made the Kremlin’s special operations establishment in 2005
appear much like Russia’s old Mir space station—wired together,
unpredictable, and subject to sudden, startling failures.
But Russia continued to maintain and expand a large, variegated
special operations establishment which had borne the brunt of
combat actions in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and other trouble spots,
and was expected to serve as the nation’s principal shield against
terrorism in all its forms. Known since Soviet days for tough personnel,
personal bravery, demanding training, and a certain rough or
brutal competence that not infrequently violated international human
rights norms, it was supposed that Russian special operations
forces—steeped in their world of “threats to the state” and associated
with once-dreaded military and national intelligence services—could
make valuable contributions to countering terrorism. The now widely
perceived link between “corrupt” special forces on the one hand, and
counterterrorism failures on the other, reflected the further erosion
of Russia’s national security infrastructure in the eyes of both Russian
citizens and international observers.
There have been other, more ambiguous, but equally unsettling
dimensions of Russian SOF activity as well, that have strong internal
and external political aspects. These constitute the continuing
assertions from Russian media, the judicial system, and other Federal
agencies and officials that past and current members of the SOF
establishment have organized to pursue interests other than those
publicly declared by the state or allowed under law. This includes
especially the alleged intent to punish by assassination those individuals
and groups that they believe have betrayed Russia. The
murky nature of these alleged activities has formed a backdrop to
other problems in the special units.
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