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Hello, Eamon. Hello, Thomas. Today, we're going to talk about Russia. Can I just mention, like, you know, my first, you know, ever landing in Azerbaijan? Well, you will, but I mean, when it gets there, sure. Because it was a so funny story about how... Not yet. Yeah, okay.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there are only a dozen years left for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. We're seeing the end of capitalism, the end of capitalism as we know it, and I say good riddance. What is at stake is more in one small country than you will do in others.
We have a very complicated episode of Conflicted to Record today. Every episode is complicated, Thomas. This one is going to prove perhaps the most complicated. We're going to talk...
As we have been talking about, the New World Order, America's attempt to create an American-led global, if you like, regime of free market capitalism and perhaps even liberal democracy everywhere following the end of the Cold War. In the last episode, I suggested that America faced three primary challenges in order to achieve that ambition. We discussed how one of the challenges, sorting out the Middle East, has failed.
Another challenge, incorporating China into the world, we're going to discuss in the next episode. In this episode, we're talking about Russia and America's need to get Russia on side to create a new partnership with Russia if its New World Order ambitions were to be satisfied. So let's start with a rough historical sketch of the Soviet Union, its breakup, and Russia's fortunes after the end of the Cold War.
For the 45 years following the Second World War, the Soviet Union, as it then was, was the big baddie of the world as far as the West was concerned. America and the Soviet Union were fighting. By 1991, the Soviet Union has collapsed. Its Eastern European satellite states are independent. Poland, Czechoslovakia, as it then was, Romania, etc. The Warsaw Pact, which was the communist equivalent of NATO, has broken down.
Russia narrowly avoids civil war when Boris Yeltsin, in what was considered at the time an act of heroism, saves the day, becomes the president of newly independent Russia or the Commonwealth of Independent States, as it was called. Now, at this point, what happens? A kind of confused logic at the heart of America's new world order played out as narrowly
NATO expanded into these countries, extended its umbrella across them. That was very provocative to Russia. The EU, in its ever-desperate attempt to expand its own pool of cheap labor, moves into Eastern Europe as well, eventually even flirting with moving into the Ukraine, which was one of the reasons why the Ukrainian civil war would break out in 2014. So,
We did almost immediately see how incorporating Russia into the New World Order, forming a new partnership with it, wasn't necessarily going to work. And it was disastrous for the economy as a whole. In the 90s, the Russian economy was chaotic at best. Yeah.
Remember 1998? The collapse? I mean, it was awful. Overnight, the ruble collapsed. And, you know, any lingering dream that following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian economy might boom and Russia might match, you know, match the prosperity of the West was destroyed. But first of all, to start us off, what does Eamon Dean, former jihadist, have to tell us about Russia?
It seems for some reason, basically, that I always used to pop up in places where Russia, you know, had a beef or two with. I was in Bosnia, I was in Afghanistan, and I was in the Caucasus, basically.
you know, supporting the Chechen jihadists. Chechnya, for the listener, is a tiny Muslim country officially called the Chechen Republic, and it is a part of Russia. It's located in the North Caucasus, that sliver of mountainous land between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. Now, Russia's relationship with Chechnya over the past 30 years is a great illustration of the way Russia responded and adapted to America's New World Order.
And, Eamon, you were involved in the Chechen Jihad, were you? When did it all begin? The first Chechen-Russian war really started in 1994. That was almost two years ago.
conflict when Dzhokhar Dudaev, the president, the first self-declared president of the Chechen Republic, declared independence from Russia. Part of the wider trend following this collapse of the Soviet Union for Russian satellite states, certainly in Eastern Europe, but also within places like the Caucasus, to declare independence, to wrest independence away from the evil Russians who had dominated them for, in some cases, centuries.
Of course. I mean, basically, the Chess and Russian wars, or I would say basically the Northern Caucasus Russian wars, you know, lasted since the days of Catherine the Great. Yeah, they're proverbial. And, you know, the Caucasian peoples of the North Caucasus are famously warlike. Very much so. Few in number in comparison to the numerous Russians. But nonetheless, I mean, they were really formidable foes to the Russians.
And I was there, you know, witnessing the first conflict evolving. So how did you get there? After you left Bosnia in 95, would it have been? Yes. I mean, by late 95, you know, the Bosnian war came to an end.
And so before I went to Afghanistan, there was a detour where I went to Azerbaijan and then later Georgia in order to become what we what I always used to term as an office jihadist. But at that time, you weren't actually a member of Al Qaeda. You were a kind of freelance jihadist who arranged for you to go to Azerbaijan and then to Georgia in order to join the Chechen fight against against Russia. Ah.
Now, in order for this story to make sense, we need to understand the life or at least the name of one single individual. He is known in the jihadist circles as Ibn Khattab. Ibn Khattab. Yes. Now, Ibn Khattab, you know, he was assassinated by the Russians in the year 2002, you know, using a poisoned letter. In Chechnya? In Chechnya. Is this man a Chechen? No. He is...
from nowhere else except my hometown, Khobar, in Saudi Arabia. Oh, what a marvelous city Khobar is. Hey, we gave the world a Ramco. And we gave the world a list of famous terrorists. None more famous than Ayman Deen. So, Ibn Khattab, why did the Russians assassinate him in 2002? And what does he have to do with you? Well...
First of all, Ibn Khattab was my hometown boy. In fact, he went to the same school I went to, except he went many years earlier. And then he went to the Afghan Jihad in 1989. Then he made a detour into Chechnya in 1994 when they declared independence because he wanted to lead the first
Arab jihadist or international jihadist contingent to fight the Russians there in Chechnya. The war really was mainly anti-Russian as in the Russian state itself. So it was about being pro-independence for Chechnya
not only Chechnya, but also the other Muslim republics like the Dagestan, the Kabardino-Bulgar, the Karachay-Sharkas and all these little places in the caucuses. - Exactly. So the whole idea was about an Islamic awakening in the caucuses. It wasn't meant to be anti-Russian. If it was any other nationality there, it would have been anti that nationality, anti that ethnic, anti that state in order to start something
Because why? Chechnya is a mountainous country with warlike, devout Muslim people. But of course, Ibn Khattab, being an international jihadist who spent years in Afghanistan, decided that Chechnya is the next Afghanistan because it's going to spread from there into the rest of the Caucasus. And, you know, it's a mountainous region. It's sandwiched between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.
It's perfect. And Ibn Khattab just called you up. You're in Bosnia. You get a call from Ibn Khattab, said, come on over to Chechnya, fight some Russians. Well, I'm flattered you say that he called me, but no, he didn't. It was his financier from Saudi Arabia who said, well, we need you there. But, you know, I have bad news for you. We are not going to the front straight away. You know, we need you basically to run some logistics in Bosnia.
you know, the office in Azerbaijan and then later in Georgia. So actually, I went there to become someone who basically add up sums, make sure basically that enough supply of mayonnaise and other materials basically made it into Chechnya. An accountant and a grocery supply agent. Exactly. Which actually, you know, was boring.
But nonetheless, that was an eye-opening because I started learning Russian because it's easier, basically, if you are going to cross many different Caucasus states, whether it's Georgia or Setia or, you know, Azerbaijan or Dagestan. I mean, they speak so many different local languages and learning one local language is a waste of time. Just learn Russian. Everyone speaks Russian there. So basically, that was the time when I started learning Russian.
So you never fought the Russians in Chechnya? Well, I didn't fight them with bullets, just with jars of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise? What are you talking about? Well, you know, one of the requests, the frequent request I used to get from Ibn Khattab and his group of jihadists in Chechnya was to keep sending them, you know, jihadists
You know, hundreds of jars of mayonnaise because in the mountains, mayonnaise were the source of protein that maintained them, basically, and maintained their levels of energy. That is so weird. Are we talking about like craft mayonnaise, jars of American-made mayonnaise? Yes. But mayonnaise goes off so easily. It doesn't last long. Not in the cold mountains of Chechnya. So when that first Chechen war against Russia ended in 96, why did it start again three years later?
That's when I can tell you the entire story as to why it all happened.
It all come down to that man I mentioned, Ibn Khattab, and many of his deputies, who many of them came from my city again, Khubar. I'm sorry about that. On behalf of all the good, decent people of Khubar, I apologize to the world. So what happened is that because these, you know, the Cheshions follow a particular brand of Islam, which is Sufism, you
You know, it's mistake, it's ritualistic. But Ibn Khattab and the mainly Saudi and Jordanian jihadists who arrived in Chechnya. All of them Salafists, really. Salafists, Wahhabists, as they are called, basically. And therefore anti-Sufi. In theory, they don't like Sufism at all. Exactly. So Ibn Khattab realized that the Sufis are compromisers.
who compromised on the goals, you know, basically of the Chechen uprising in 1996 when they negotiated with the Russian government in Moscow to achieve some sort of autonomy within, you know, elections and the referendum later on full independence. So in Ibn Khattab's mind,
The Chechen leadership sort of betrayed the jihad by signing a peace agreement with Boris Yeltsin and the Russian government. Exactly. I mean, it was Alexander Libid, you know, a famous Russian general who and then later politician who brokered this deal with the then Chechen president, Zulim Khan Yandervaev. So how did what did Ibn Khattab do next?
as any good jihadi salafists, you know, on the same lines of al-Qaeda would do. Establish a religious academy to graduate local Chechens and Dagestanis and Shirkis, other Caucasus minorities, to become Salafi preachers. He sort of educated them.
Oh, he brought in a quite few preachers from Saudi Arabia, of course, with the disapproval of the Saudi government. Many of them became in a wanted by the Saudi government because the Saudi government and Russia had a good relationship at the time. So they were brought in order to teach a new generation of
of Chechens and Dagestanis and other Caucasus minority people the principles of Salafism, so they spread it and therefore dilute the Sufi character of the Caucasus Muslims. They must have worked very fast if by 1999, only three years later, another war breaks out between Chechnya and Russia. Indeed, and actually I go into quite detailed analysis of this in my book. Ah!
Eamon, so shameless, plugging your book in the middle of our conversation. I know I'm not being, you know, trying to advertise anything here, but I talk about, you know, the reason why the second
Russian-Chechen war started, which is the fact that they did not want to just remain confined within the borders of Chechnya because they had almost full independence by then, although not recognized by the UN or anything, but they were on their way to have a full independence by 2002-2003. But for Ibn Khattab,
The Salafists, and as you know, basically, the Salafi jihadism do not believe in borders. For them, borders, you know, they are just lines, you know, dotted on a map that has no meaning whatsoever. They wanted Dagestan, the bigger, well, the biggest republic within the... Muslim Caucasus. Yes, Muslim Caucasus, to become independent. And so they made more and more incursions, killed so many Russian soldiers, you know, Dagestani police who are cooperating with the Russians, and...
As a result, the Russians were threatening again and again that they will do something. But Yeltsin wanted to maintain the peace. However, something that the jihadists did not take into account, which is while they were planning to launch massive attacks inside Russia, in Moscow itself, against the Russian army residential compounds, you know, which will kill at least 300 Russian soldiers and their families.
and wound another 600 in September and August of 1999, they did not count that Yeltsin, who was changing prime ministers more than he was changing his socks, would appoint the head of the FSB, you know, the successor to the KGB. Absolutely. I mean, the head of the Russian intelligence, Vladimir Putin, as his prime minister. Ah, Vladimir Putin. I wondered when he'd come up because
Because Vladimir Putin is obviously an enormously important figure from recent history, about which much has been written, much is said. He's played the role, something of the classic Russian bogeyman for the West and the world for the last 20 years now. It's been a long time. But who created him?
Who made him into what he is right now? And you're saying that the Chechnyan war has everything to do with his emergence as the new Russian strongman. I can assure you that it's almost the catalyst which propelled him into the leadership. And I tell you why. I met in 2013 with a senior Russian diplomat slash spy, most likely, and he
He's, you know, basically had a personal friendship with Putin. And he said that when he was appointed as prime minister, he saw this as some sort of a destiny, fate calling him. And he basically, you know, as a devout Orthodox Christian,
He saw that being a prime minister is a calling, but he needed a sign from God that this is his destiny to fulfill. Before you tell me what that sign was, I just want to press you on this. Putin, a devout Orthodox Christian. I am, as it happens, an Orthodox Christian because I even lived in an Orthodox monastery for a while. I would question your description of Vladimir Putin as a devout Orthodox Christian. I don't.
admit to you that he definitely pretends to be an Orthodox Christian and invokes Orthodox Christian symbolism in the new Russia that he's building, which, you know, he's trying to kind of, he's trying to bring back the glory days of the old Orthodox Tsarist empire. But a devout Orthodox Christian, really? Yeah.
Well, I have to take the word of the person who told me, who basically is a senior diplomat and someone basically who knew Putin quite well. Okay, so what was the sign from heaven that devout Orthodox Christian Vladimir Putin was looking for?
the bombings of the army barracks in Moscow. Tell us that story. Tell us the story of the Chechen jihadists and your hometown boy, Ibn al-Khattab's attack on the barracks in Moscow. Well, the jihadists for 19 months, and I go into great details of that operation in my book, but the jihadists planned for 19 months to avenge massacres took place in Dagestan and Chechnya by the
the Amun and the Alpha units of the Russian special forces. They located where these special forces live alongside their families in military compounds, and they attacked them in the summer of 1999, just two weeks after Putin was sworn in as the prime minister of Russia. What did Putin do? Putin saw this as this is the Lord's calling.
that's what he you know basically you know interpreted these attacks Russia is challenged and therefore we should not shy away from war until then basically the Russians suffered major losses in the first Chechen war and they were not organized and they didn't have a good leadership Yeltsin was a drunk you know incompetent idiot but Putin decided that he will take charge of this Russian war you know using his you know uh
exceptional skills as a spy in order to execute the war against these people. So this is why I always say that it is ironic that as Russian bombs are falling on jihadists in Syria, I always used to say, you want to blame someone? Blame yourselves. You made this man when you bombed Moscow in 1999.
How was that greeted in the West? Because I imagine at the time, the West must have itself been shocked at such a heinous crime by jihadists in Moscow. Well, actually, the West believed that it was Putin who orchestrated the whole thing.
Why did they think that? Well, first of all, basically, OK, there is this man. He is the head of the FSB, the Soviet intelligence. So now he is the head of the Russian intelligence. Then he became a prime minister. And then suddenly there are these bombings which basically make him so angry that he basically invades Chechnya again and
surprisingly drive away the jihadists way into the mountains and take back Grozny and other Chechen cities. So everyone was saying, oh, how convenient the timing. You become prime minister six weeks later, you know, the pretext for the war that will make you a war hero and Russia's strong man to the point where, you know, Boris Yeltsin appoint you as his successor. I mean, how convenient. But you're saying that's not true? Not true. Because why?
In Christmas of 1999, I just returned back from Afghanistan. I was, you know, loaded with letters from Al-Qaeda to certain operatives here in London. You were already a double agent at this time. Exactly. I was already spying for MI6. And these letters actually were already opened, expertly scanned and put back again as if they were never opened. And then I have to deliver them myself without knowing the content. So...
So basically, I was supposed to deliver some of the letters to Abu Qatada, a famous Al-Qaeda-linked cleric who was based in London. Abu Qatada. Gosh, that takes me back. Exactly. So I called him and he said, come tonight. It was Ramadan, I remember. He said, come tonight after the evening prayers.
You will be hearing from an old friend of yours. So I said, okay, fine, I'm coming. So when I went to his house, we were sitting around, you know, like a corporate managers, five of us, we were sitting around a speakerphone and from Tbilisi in Georgia, we were listening to Abu Saeed Al-Kurdi, who I knew from Afghanistan years earlier. He was the head of the logistics for the Cheshan jihadists. Ah.
including Ibn Khattab, because he planned the whole thing. He told us, when we asked him, you know, was it disadvantageous to you? Because even us thought that Putin did it. You asked him about the attack in Moscow. Exactly. So, you know, it's good, basically, that the whole thing was recorded. So, so basically I asked,
You know, was it disadvantageous that the war, you know, was, you know, the timing of the war was determined by the Russians. And so he asked, what do you mean determined by the Russians? Well, because Putin carried out, you know, these attacks in Moscow as a pretext. A false flag. A false flag. Exactly. False flag. I mean, it has all the hallmark of false flag. And he said, no, we did it. And he went on to explain the whole process, the reasoning, the pretext and why they did it.
It was damning evidence because he talked about details only the bombers would have known. So you have just been told from the horse's mouth, as it were, that what the whole West had believed, that Putin had launched a false flag operation, killing his own soldiers in Moscow, was not true. Jihadists had actually done it. Yes. And it was just amazingly convenient for him. A sign from God, even. A sign from God. Like, you know, later in years, like, you know, almost 15 years later, a Russian diplomat who knew him told me that he viewed this
as a sign from God. I, however, immediately called my MI6 handlers and told them there is something that you need to know and immediately. So we met, told them the information. It was a bombshell and it landed on Tony Blair's desk within days, basically. And as a result, he shared it with other world leaders. And suddenly Putin was no longer treated as a pariah. Putin was treated as a victim of terrorism.
And Tony Blair invited him to a pub a few weeks later where they shared a pint. They were wearing jeans and casual and everything. And suddenly everything seemed going Putin's way. But his reputation did not remain very high in the estimation of the West.
What happened? Why did that? People forget now because Putin is a big bad guy. But in the noughties, he wasn't a big bad guy. He sort of was playing along. He was playing along. But then several things happened along the way. 9-11 happened. Not many people know, but again, jihadists. Putin's party.
path was forged by jihadists. You know, if you want to blame, you know, the rise of Putin on anyone, it's the bloody jihadists. How did 9-11 have an impact on Putin? Okay. So he thought that 9-11 is a good thing in a sense, basically, that the Americans will realize finally that there is a serious war against terrorism. He'd been fighting jihadists in Chechnya and now he says, look, we're all fighting jihadists. Absolutely. And he offered his help against the Taliban, which he did actually. You know, the Russian government
Military and intelligence provided significant help to the U.S. and the U.K. war efforts in Afghanistan. And, of course, they were experts in Afghanistan. They'd fought in Afghanistan for 11 years. Exactly. And they have their own assets there. They have their own allies. So Putin was an ally of the West in the war on terror. Absolutely. What happened to change that? Iraq war. Because Putin was absolutely against it.
Because first he believed that Saddam Hussein, just like Bashar al-Assad and others, they are the pillars of stability. They are, you know, the pillars of Arab nationalism because Arab nationalism protected Arab Christians. Because, you know, look at who was Saddam's foreign minister.
Tariq Aziz. Yes, Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and foreign minister under Saddam Hussein. He was a Christian. And there were many Christian officers in Saddam's army and in Saddam's government and in Saddam's Baath party. Certainly in Syria, the Christian community are very close to the Assad regime. Exactly. I mean, he viewed both Saddam and al-Assad
as the pillars of Arab nationalism and Arab nationalism was an important buffer against Islamic extremism. So,
Putin begins to realize that America's war on terror is not being prosecuted wisely. No, he started to see that the war on terror had a more sinister ulterior motive. He started to doubt whether the neocons of Washington really wanted to fight terrorism or wanted to basically, you know, have an American hegemony in a project in the Middle East.
which would then basically make America far more powerful because they will have access to the world natural resources. They can then flood the market with cheap Iraqi oil, which would then undermine the Russian economy. Russia was a massive net exporter. So if you bring down the price of energy, both oil and gas, then the Russian economy would suffer significantly.
So he saw that, you know, with America being there, America will have its, you know, basically foot, you know, on the hose. Like, you know, they can basically just press and cut, you know, the dollars to the Russian economy by manipulating oil prices. This is very interesting because this is putting us into Putin's head. And often, you know, people aren't encouraged to see the world from Putin's point of view. Now,
By the way, I'm not a Putin apologist. I'm just basically stating facts. I don't like the man. I don't like what the Russians did in Syria whatsoever. I condemn it with the, you know, most, you know, you know, strongest way possible. I condemn it to the strongest way possible. But we have to talk about facts here at Conflicted.
We are dissecting conflicts in order to come up with the right diagnostics. So from Putin's point of view, he's looking out at certain foreign policy decisions that America is making and realizing, I'm not sure I really want to be a part of this new world order, or I'm not sure if this new world order actually has my best interests in mind. Of course, there are other foreign policy decisions that America makes in this time. It expands NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries. Yep.
This is happening in conjunction with the EU, which is trying to expand its influence into former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe, which Russia considers to be something of a threat to its sphere of influence. And this definitely includes the Ukraine, as I mentioned before. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.
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Thomas, remember the Orange Revolution in Kiev? Well, the Orange Revolution in Kiev. I mean, Ukraine would definitely come up in this conversation. Exactly. Because we all know that a civil war has been raging in Ukraine for decades.
Six years now, Russia has covertly, sometimes overtly, intervened on the side of the eastern Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists. And guess whose forces, whose irregular forces, are fighting in Ukraine now alongside the Russians or alongside the pro-Russian separatists in order to keep the Ukrainian forces at bay? Don't tell me the president of Chechnya. Yes, Ramazan Kadyrov.
All right. For the listener, Ramzan Kadyrov became president of Chechnya in 2007.
His father was also president, though he was assassinated in 2004. Now, Ramzan Kadyrov, the thing is, he has this cherubic face. He looks like a little baby with this sort of soft, downy, blonde beard. But he's a really fucking hard guy. He's a real tough warlord. He has a private army of many Caucasus Muslim Sufis who are, you know, brave warriors and
A private army? A private army. You mean it's not the army of Chechnya? No, it is basically a private army, you know, of Ramzan Kadyrov, and they are deployed according to whatever they are needed. So in Syria, they are deployed. There are between four and five thousand of them. They are deployed as the Russian military police.
in order to police newly liberated areas where I know basically the so-called liberated areas from the opposition but because they are Sufi Sunni Muslims they make it easy for the population the Syrian population there to accept them I mean this is blowing my mind a private army separate from the Chechen military this is very much like they are the Chechnya military but they are not a regular Russian military
This is similar to the privatization of espionage you were talking about in the first episode. Are we seeing the privatization of the military completely? Not only that, Ramzan Kadyrov has his own mercenaries fighting alongside, you know, UAE and Saudi Arabia forces in Yemen. They are fighting alongside Haftar, General Haftar in Libya.
You know, it's all for money. And he has actually a military academy in Grozny where he is training. In Chechnya. In Chechnya, where he is training, you know, soldiers from Saudi Arabia, you know, from the UAE, from Nepal, you know, even in Nepalese Gurkhas in order to be deployed to war zones according to the whims of certain leaders of the Middle East. Including East, well,
War zones, including the war zone in eastern Ukraine. And in eastern Ukraine and wherever Putin wants them to. This is amazing. So Putin rises to power in 1999 on the back of Chechnyan separatism. He crushes Chechnyan separatism, installs in Chechnya a president that is basically his lapdog. And now Chechnyan soldiers are everywhere fighting jihadists, fighting terrorists.
Anti-russian forces fighting whoever they're the great mercenaries of the world Yeah, and they are devout Muslims who believed who believe that you know Russia is actually pushing back America's evil influence and therefore they are fighting Putin's jihad
I know it's mind boggling. I'm actually speechless because there's such a conflation of everything we've talked about now for almost a year. You know, Russia, it's not actually that Russia is simply geopolitically America's enemy. Russia has actually allied itself with Islamists who think that America is the Antichrist.
And in a similar vein, before, you brought up Russia's presence in Syria today because it's an amazing thing. It's, in fact, one of the most amazing things about America's failure in the Middle East, that for so many decades, America did whatever it could to prevent Russia from having an untrammeled control of a swathe of the Middle East. And yet now we have Russia, which can do more or less what it wants throughout Syria. Now, they're there for many reasons.
Why is Russia in Syria? Again, that diplomat who I spoke to, he said that there are a multitude of reasons why the Russians felt confident enough that they can intervene in Syria because one, Obama is weak.
and wobbling and wasn't willing to intervene. And that even though Assad crossed the red line, the chemical weapons red line twice, Obama did not do anything. Obama's lack of response emboldened Putin fine, but that's not why he's there. The second reason we have an intervention in Russia, according to the diplomat, is that again, it comes back to Putin's, you know, if it's not belief in the Christian Orthodox Church,
At least it is, you know, acquiescing to the pleas by the Russian Orthodox Church that the Tsarist treaty with the Ottomans, which basically granted the Syriac Orthodox Christians of Syria the protection of the Tsars of Russia. So the idea is that since France is always viewed as the natural protector of the Catholics of the Middle East. Like the Maronites in Lebanon. Exactly. Exactly.
It's the same thing there, that the Russians are tasked, you know, since hundreds of years, basically, with the protection of the Orthodox Christians in Syria. Now, for the listener, from well before the Russian Revolution made the Soviet Union an atheist state, Russia was the biggest Orthodox country. And as such, it considered itself the protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East.
In the 18th century, in fact, the Tsarina, the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, who was in fact not Russian but German, but she took to it like a duck takes to water. She was the first one to explicitly say that she was going to protect the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East. She had this idea, and a lot of Russians did at the time, that eventually...
the Tsar of Moscow, heir to the ancient Roman and Byzantine emperors, would conquer Istanbul, Constantinople, and become the great leaders of the entire Middle East, of the entire formerly Christian world. In fact, Catherine the Great named her grandson Constantine, the founder of Constantinople, with this ambition in mind. Now, in January 2020, Vladimir Putin visited Syria.
We all know the Russians are in Syria. The Russians are allied very closely with Bashar al-Assad. But when he visited Damascus in January, he went along with the Orthodox archbishop of the city, the Patriarch of Antioch,
to the cathedral of the city, the Orthodox cathedral, to worship there alongside Bashar al-Assad. Well, as you know, the czars of Russia has always been tasked with the protection of the Orthodox Christians in the Middle East. That's the first thing. The second thing is that Qasem Soleimani has just been killed. He is the major competitor to Russia's ambitions in Syria because he represents Iran's interest in Syria. He's dead. Perfect. Perfect.
Putin is there to consolidate. Well, it's interesting. I was in Syria. I lived in Damascus in 2007, 2008. Lucky you. And I used to worship at that cathedral. I remember specifically, I'll never forget a Palm Sunday, you know, the Sunday before Easter at the cathedral. You know, Arab Christians are a wonderful community.
people, quite bourgeois, very middle class, but also slightly chaotic. So I remember just at the end of the mass, outside of the cathedral, an enormous ruckus began, a sort of din of brass band music, because all of the young Christians of the old city of Damascus had organized themselves into a brass band, and then they spent the next several hours just wandering around the city playing this sort of
brass marching music. It was very strange, but it was a tremendous sign of the depth of Orthodox Christian penetration in an old Middle Eastern city like Syria, which we often forget about. Exactly. They predate Islam. We forget, basically, that they've been there since before the Muslims actually arrived in Damascus. And Vladimir Putin considers himself their protector.
Clearly, he has cultivated very close relations with Orthodox Christian communities in Syria and elsewhere. Absolutely. But how does that support his wider strategic vision? Because then we come to the third issue. You remember we talked about the Chechen War before and how that lasted years and years. Now, you remember I talked about the friction between the Sufis and the Salafis in the Chechen War. Yeah. You can take it for granted that I remember what you say. Yeah.
Putin decided that he will split the jihadists from each other. The Sufi jihadists he will court and he will court them in order to cultivate their enmity against the Salafists to use it to beat the Salafists. Divide and conquer. Absolutely. So he showered
Ramzan Kadyrov and his father before him, Ahmad Kadyrov. Who are these Kadyrovs? Basically, they are members of a prominent Sufi clan in Chechnya. They were promised the presidency of Chechnya afterwards within the Russian Federation and that they will be having the backing of the Kremlin, the backing of the Russian Armed Forces.
if they just basically turn their back on the Salafists, the Wahhabists, basically, who are trying to ignite a never-ending war in the Caucasus against Russia and against other ethnicities in the region. So Putin gave the Qadirav family the control of Chechnya in exchange for turning against the Salafists. Exactly. So a war...
you know, raged between the Qadirovs and the Salafists, including Sham al-Basayef and other people who were the leaders of that Salafist movement along, you know, and with the successors of Ibn Khattab there. But,
You know, as the war raged and it claimed actually Qadirov's father, Ramzan Qadirov, his father, Ahmed Qadirov, was killed actually by an IED placed under his podium by the jihadists. So what happened is the Arab Spring happened. Syria happened. And suddenly Syria became the magnet of jihadism. And what Qadirov did, he opened the southern border towards Georgia and allowed all of these people to exit. Wow.
Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Go to Syria, wage your jihad there, establish your caliphate there. So they went there. And then what happened is when they were all there, between 5,000 and 6,000 of them, then this is basically when the Russians thought, that's it. We have emptied the Caucasus from them. Let us now pound them there. So Russia has been fighting its own enemies in Syria. Exactly.
Why doesn't anyone know about this? That's fascinating. Well, you need to be quite intimate with the events, as I did when I was in Azerbaijan and Georgia in these days. We should all be more intimate with jihadists. You should create a dating app for jihadists. Get intimate with jihadists. Yeah, except basically, I mean, it will entail some sort of slavery contract. But let's get back to this. Russia and Russia's role
in the formation or perhaps subversion of George H. W. Bush's New World Order. The economic collapse in Russia that happened at the end of the 90s followed
several years where Russia really did dance to the beat of America's drum. The Americans insisted on radical economic surgery, the IMF, which along with the World Bank tries to manage the global economy as it fitfully lurches towards free markets and liberal democracy. And America more or less insist on radical economic and financial surgery to what was a completely sclerotic post-communist
economy and very quickly it caused all sorts of economic problems the ruble collapsed in value in 1998 I think quite famously
state assets were sold to the highest quote-unquote bidder, but actually that meant insiders who had influence within the government there and are extremely rich. And most of them actually seem to live just down the street here in London. That's another story. So initially, Russia did dance to the beat of America's drum. In 1998, the ruble collapses, and from then on, Russia really stops playing along.
That decision to go its own way again is largely the result of Vladimir Putin, who came to power at that time.
There's obviously a lot more we could have talked about in this extremely complex episode of Conflicted. I mean, 20 years of Russian history is not easy to summarize. We could have gone into greater detail about the annexation of the Crimea in 2014. Or we could have talked about the war in Georgia, Russia's war in Georgia in 2008. And, of course, the ongoing Ukrainian civil war, which we did touch on, but...
As we've seen through the story of Russia's relationship with Chechnya, America's strategy towards Russia at the dawn of the New World Order was a bit of a roller coaster.
And it was, once again, jihadists, this time in Chechnya, who played such a huge role in undermining that strategy by creating the conditions for the rise of Vladimir Putin. A man who, you know, love him or hate him, began to look around and realize that America's global ambitions weren't necessarily in the interests of Russia.
In the end, in a sort of twist, Putin partnered with Muslims of Chechnya, the Sufi Muslims, and gave them independence of a sort in exchange for becoming his vassals, which is why we now see Chechen mercenaries in every Middle Eastern hot zone, fighting for Russia, and ironically enabling Russia to regain its age-old role of protector of Orthodox Christians everywhere.
an unexpected dimension of Russia's power struggle with America in the Middle East. So we see that despite efforts on both America's and Russia's parts to forge a new partnership following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
That relationship soured over the course of the noughties, leading us to where we are now: Russia with a strong foothold in the Middle East. Russia becoming an opposing force to America, definitely not their partners. Russia allied with Muslim warriors of the Caucasus, who are in almost every war zone in the region and beyond, supporting and projecting Russian power.
It was certainly not what George H.W. Bush had in mind when he first invoked his New World Order. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Sandra Ferrari and Jake Kotayevich. Edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.
This week, we've got another book to give away to one of our lucky listeners. Our recommended reading for this episode is A Dirty War, A Russian Reporter in Chechnya by Anna, let's see if I can get this right, Politkovskaya. Anna Politkovskaya is a hero among journalists and an early victim of Putin's crackdown on independent journalism.
assassinated in 2006 for exposing the dark side of the new Russia. In this brutally honest book, Politkovskaya courageously documents the Chechnyan war from the ground. To be in with a chance of winning a copy, join our Facebook group before Wednesday, the 18th of March, when we announce the winner.
The link to the group is in the show notes or search Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group on Facebook. You can also find the podcast on social media, Twitter and Facebook at MHConflicted. And if you are a fan of the show, please subscribe to Conflicted in your podcast app and leave us a rating and a review. It will really help us to spread the word. You've been listening to Conflicted with me, Thomas Small, and my good friend, Eamon Dean. See you again in two weeks. ♪