"
Russia has historically demonstrated a powerful ability to outmaneuver insurgents before they can gather sufficient momentum to exhaust Russian resources and resolve. Russian Colonel Sergey Kulikov, quoting Kennedy’s 1962 West Point address, stated that “war with insurgents…is a war where victory is achieved by
taxing and exhausting the forces of the opponent rather than by destroying him.”
[xvi] This has usually been the fleas’ goal: to
exhaust the soldiers and the will of the people in order to force the enemy to give-up and leave. However, Russia has been able to subvert this dilemma by drafting and draining the rebels to force them to stay. By pragmatically force-feeding rebel leaders a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, Moscow crafted a historically congruent counter-ideology. Russia exhausted both the rebels and locals by using brutal coercive tactics and then, once their will to fight was almost extinguished, injecting a non-violent counter-ideology.
US Marine Thomas Hammes argues that “the fundamental weapon in counterinsurgency remains good governance,”
[xvii] something that Moscow has failed to provide. Russia’s failure to link its political means and ends results in a marked inability to cope with the pressures of social and economic development in Chechnya.
Thus, it is forced to adopt an atypical strategy of winning “hearts and minds” designed around a narrative of saving Chechens from their own illegitimate government. A traditional “hearts and minds” approach was simply never tried, even though it likely would have yielded greater success, because it was alien to Russia’s historical and cultural outlook, and the Kremlin did not have the tools or resources for such a campaign. The North Caucasus’s porous borders mean total victory is never possible. Ultimately the insurgent wins if he does not lose and the counterinsurgent loses if he does not win.
The counterinsurgency story is a recurring nightmare for Russia that, like a matryoshka doll, can be decapitated one head at a time. But the illusory success is shattered by the fact that the doll can simply be reassembled time and time again." (
https://georgetownsecuritystudiesre...esReview (Georgetown Security Studies Review))
Tokkopa ne mitään ovat oppineet sitten Tsetsenian. Sama doktriini, samat tavat, jotka edes heidän mielestään eivät voi johtaa varsinaiseen "voittoon".
