Are conflicts on interethnic grounds possible in Russia – expert opinion

Alexander Malkevich, General Director of the Saint Petersburg TV Channel, First Deputy Chairman of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation Commission on Mass Media, touched upon a hot topic in Russian society – possible conflicts in Russia on interethnic grounds.

Alexander Malkevich recalled the resonant incident that happened on November 4 – an attack on a man with a child in Novye Vatutinki. Four young men, aged 17 to 21, have already been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. All of them are natives of one of the Transcaucasian countries, three of them received Russian citizenship about ten years ago.

After this outrageous incident, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the editor-in-chief of the RT channel, Margarita Simonyan, entered into a public dispute over whether the media should focus on the ethnicity of the suspects. However, then Kadyrov and Simonyan publicly extinguished the conflict.

In his opinion, foreign agents are rolling out BLM (Black Lives Matter) technology across the Caucasus, thus making attempts to sow ethnic strife in our society. Therefore, he urges to be prepared for the fact that these attempts will continue. You also need to be ready to resist it.

Malkevich believes that this topic will begin to be worked out and developed along the lines of the deported and small peoples, and then they will deal with a more global topic – the entire Caucasus.

“I have said for a long time that in our country the inhabitants of the North Caucasus will be “appointed” to the role of local“ African Americans”, “oppressed” when BLM technology is being promoted. And now, after the elections, we see how this forecast begins to come true before our eyes. I predict that all this will only intensify until the presidential elections in 2024. We will all be very seriously “pumped”, using rather sophisticated technologies, which we are not always ready to resist”, he said.

A possible scenario would look like this: the media will focus on the nationality of those who are suspected of any crimes, while provoking prominent representatives of the North Caucasus to make emotional statements. And these statements, in turn, will be actively circulated through the media and social networks, deliberately created with the wrong color.

Now this is partly already working out: if you managed to provoke a conflict between such outstanding personalities, real statesmen like Ramzan Kadyrov and Margarita Simonyan, this says a lot. It is good that they had the wisdom not only to make peace, but also to do it publicly.

“In the next two years, Russia will face a difficult period, when both the Caucasus itself and the entire country will be actively trying to shake it up, provoking conflicts on interethnic grounds. In each region they will look for “enslaved”, “disadvantaged” and work with them. And this work will be done not only through social networks, but also through private chats in instant messengers. How to track this situation, work it out, is not yet completely clear. But in any case, this is a very serious challenge for all of us and for all special services”, concluded Alexander Malkevich.