On December 7, 2012 Russia began construction of its South Stream gas pipeline.  Earlier in 2012 the European consortium behind the Nabucco pipeline formally submitted a revised scenario called Nabucco West to Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan and Turkey announced plans to build the Transanatolian pipeline or TANAP from the Shah Deniz gas field to Turk09/29/2010 issue of the CACI Analyst [0]).

Accordingly, it is quite likely that many of the Chechen insurgents still remaining in the republic will follow the established trend of finding temporary shelter in either Dagestan or Ingushetia. In this regard, the ability of the Dagestani or Ingush law enforcement agencies, aided by federal army and police units, to effectively control the border passes in the mountains, as well as the roads from the western part of Chechnya to its center and east appears to be of crucial importance.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of Understanding Ethnopolitical Conflict: Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia Wars Reconsidered (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2013) and An Endless War: The Russian-Chechen Conflict in Perspective (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007).