Happy Friday!
A weekend illness spreading into the start of the week to create a general feeling of blurgh meant that I wasn’t sure I was going to get a newsletter to you this week. But it’s October, which means it’s time for a quarterly roundup of violence in the North Caucasus. So I’ve marshalled the mental energy and the data to bring you something after all!
What you’ll find this week:
- Patterns of violence remain broadly similar
- What lies beneath the figures
- Ambiguous indicators for the future
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Patterns of violence remain broadly similar
The first and most obvious conclusions to emerge from incident data* for the third quarter of 2025 is that the overall numbers are very similar — whether we take the previous quarter or the same period of 2024 as our comparison.
Let’s look first at the number of incidents: Q3 in 2025 saw 27 violent incidents across the region, compared to 25 for Q2 and 19 for Q3 in 2024. There is therefore a slight uptick year-on-year, but nothing particularly remarkable — especially when we consider that there were several interlinked incidents that are counted separately.
The casualty figures are a bit more ambiguous, but again the numbers are hardly alarming (relatively speaking, of course). The last quarter saw 15 casualties across the region, compared to 22 for the preceding quarter and only five for Q3 in 2024 (using upper-end figures). However, the numbers are low enough that a single incident can have a major impact on the overall picture.
The similarities in the pictures become even more apparent when we zoom out a little and compare the first nine months of 2025 to the same period in 2024. Here, we see that the volume of incidents is virtually identical year-on-year — 73 in 2025 compared to 69 in 2024 — and the geographic distribution is much the same too.
The casualties picture is markedly different, in so far as 2024 saw 114 casualties and 2025 has witnessed only 45. A marked improvement then, but an improvement that has a simple explanation: The June 2024 attacks in Makhachkala and Derbent. Thus, the biggest change is that this year has not seen a comparable terrorist ‘spectacular.’ Take that out of the equation and, again, 2025 looks much like 2024.
* All of these figures are based on a unique database of violent incidents that I have compiled. The database, along with the accompanying methodology, will be available to members of the Russian Security Research lab when it launches early next year.
What lies beneath the figures
Of course, top-level figures only tell us so much. What else stands out from the data? Ingushetia was the leader in terms of number of incidents, but the character of these is reflective of violence across the region. Two incidents were arms cache seizures, representing an echo of an earlier insurgency. Three were incidents involving religious officials, either being targeted by the security services or fighting each other. One was a drone attack. Arguably the most concerning events involved a mob attack on a former police officer in apparent retribution for his work and an unexplained explosion during a search that wounded a police officer. Although serious, nothing about these incidents points to a more organised threat to the authorities.
Much the same can be said of events elsewhere. In Dagestan, there were a couple of connected incidents involving traffic police that left two casualties. In Kabardino-Balkaria, another traffic police officer was hospitalised after a knife attack; one assailant was killed and another arrested. Three more suspects were killed during an attempted arrest in an unrelated incident. There were drone attacks across the region, targeting Stavropol Kray in particular; these don’t count as terrorism so much as contribute to the broader category of political violence. Chechnya saw the discovery of an explosive device in a car park and a series of arrests as the security services searched for the alleged culprits. In other words, there were plenty of low-level incidents, but nothing that serves as a harbinger of something worse.
Ambiguous indicators for the future
The data and trends on violence are, therefore, mostly ambiguous. Everyone can paint the picture they want to see. If you are inclined towards predictions of doom, you can make the case that violence persists across the region and the security services continue to ‘find’ terrorists. Both genuine discoveries and efforts to boost statistics have the potential to destabilise. If you are of a sunnier disposition (or pursuing a different agenda), you can find evidence to argue that the security services have a grip on the situation and there are still no sustained challenges to Russia's control over the region.
Thus, we find ourselves at the limits of what statistical data can reliably tell us. Every incident contributes to the panorama of violence and the perpetual association of the region with instability. It would be a brave person who predicted that the region is sure to be stable into 2026 and beyond. After all, only one major incident is required for the overall picture to acquire a much more negative complexion.
In reality, political violence could go in either direction, but the most likely scenario for the short term is that we will continue to see much the same for the remainder of 2025. That said, it’s worth noting that there was little by way of advance warning of the June 2024 attacks.
That these conclusions are virtually identical to those I offered in Q2 pretty much sums it up!
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