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Viewpoints are commentaries written by experts and authorities about specific topics. You can submit your articles to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Articles should be at least 5,000 characters-with-spaces long (maximum length 10,000). Helsinki Times reserves the right to accept or reject submissions, as well as to edit or shorten the text. The opinions expressed in this section are the writers’ own and do not represent the official policy of the Helsinki Times.
What is the price of security? Three billion US dollars, it seems, as far as the Russians are concerned. Even in the midst of an economic slowdown, they have committed unparalleled resources to protect the Sochi Winter Olympics from jihadist terrorists, who largely hail from the turbulent North Caucasus.
More than 50,000 police and troops are being deployed, and a “ring of steel” is virtually locking the Games off from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Russian forces have stepped up their counterinsurgency operations in the North Caucasus, east of Sochi, in the hope that rebels busily avoiding arrest or worse are not going to be planning terrorist attacks.
While the chances of a successful attack on Sochi are relatively low, no security plan is foolproof, and there is always the chance that an attack might get through. The news that a suspected terrorist, Ruzanna “Salima” Ibragimova, may already be in Sochi is a useful reminder of this.
Perhaps most worrying for the authorities is the fact that some ethnic Slavs – though admittedly only a small number – have been converted to extreme Islam. The police tend to adopt crude racial profiling: watching people get off a train coming into Moscow, for instance, it is striking how often travellers looking as if they hail from the Caucasus get pulled aside for document checks. So, Slavic terrorists represent an unexpected new threat.
Most likely, though, the scale of the security around Sochi will simply displace attacks to other, more vulnerable targets. For example, three new double-decker express trains that shuttle passengers between Moscow and Sochi run on a thousand-mile stretch of track. It is impossible to monitor every bridge, culvert, or nook in which a bomb could be planted. Terrorists have hit the Moscow to St. Petersburg express train twice – in 2007 and 2009 – so this new line seems a likely target.
In the past month, deadly terrorist attacks have taken place in the southern Russian cities of Volgograd, Pyatigorsk, and Stavropol, and there are likely to be more.
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