Counterterrorism

According to a 1998 statute, the FSB, the Interior Ministry, the Foreign intelligence SVR, the Federal Protective Service and the Ministry of Defense are all tasked with fighting terrorism. However, the FSB, which has an anti-terrorism department that it inherited from the KGB, had the primary role in counterterrorism until 2003, when the Interior Ministry became more heavily involved, taking over management of the Regional Operations Staff (Regionalny operativny shtab: ROSh) responsible for counterterrorist operations in the North Caucasus.

In August 2003, the Interior Ministry further strengthened its antiterrorism capabilities with the creation of "Centre T", which was integrated into the organized crime division. However, following the Beslan attack, the Interior Ministry’s antiterrorism role was further enhanced when the organized crime unit (GUBOP) was reformed. The situation was further confused, however, when following the Interior Ministry’s takeover of the ROSh for the North Caucasus, it also took control of the Combined Group of Forces (Objedinennaya gruppirovka voysk: OGV) in the North Caucasus. As a result of these reforms, jurisdiction became unclear and overlapping and co-ordination problems have reached a critical level.

By August 2004, the situation in the North Caucasus had become confused, with at least three divisions of the national FSB, as well as regional offices, military intelligence and the Interior Ministry units all operating in the same area. There was little or no co-ordination between them. In November 2004, Dmitry Kozak, the presidential envoy in the North Caucasus, declared: ‘Within two years of functioning as a regional operations staff have been regulated by nothing’i. There were two attempts to fix this situation after Beslan. In November 2004, a new counterterrorist grouping was created that drew together the efforts of those FSB, the Interior Ministry and GRU units carrying out operational searches in the region. However, the new structure is responsible for tactical (army) intelligence, not prosecutorial intelligence, which therefore does little to help defeat the terrorist cause.

A second attempt to solve the problem was the creation of a series of 12 operational management groups (Gruppi operativnogo upravleniya: GrOU), which were launched in August 2004 for the North Caucasus region. Each is headed by a colonel from the Interior Ministry and acts as direct management of military forces for the suppression of subversive and terrorist actions. The GrOU includes conventional and special operations troops from the Interior Ministry and the ministries of defence and emergency. The GrOU head has the rank of deputy head of the regional anti-terrorist forces, thereby making them the second highest ranking official in the region after the governor in terms of combating terrorism. In the event of hostages being taken or insurgents making intrusions into Russian-held territory, the GrOU commander will automatically assume control and has the right to make decisions, independent of control from Moscow. As result, for the first time in the history of the Russian hostage crises, the responsibility for addressing the crisis rested with the regional rather than central authorities.

However, the GrOUs still suffer from the fact that they can only react to terrorist attacks, rather than actually preventing them. This was evident when insurgents attacked Nalchik in October 2005, leaving the GrOU of Kabardino-Balkaria desperately trying to respond to the situation.

Similarly, the concept of a local GrOU commander taking operational control did not always work in practice. While a GrOU was already in place in Northern Ossetia during the Beslan crisis, Valery Andreev, the local FSB chief, supervised the operations staff – overruling his GrOU counterpart. During the attack on Nalchik, the GrOU commander was responsible for the situation for only four hours before being superseded by commander of North Caucasian region internal troops.

In February 2006 the legal situation radically changed, when the Federal law "About the opposition to terrorism" was accepted. This created the National Antiterrorist Committee (NAK). First, the National antiterrorist committee was created within the structure of FSB, not the Interior Ministry, and was headed by Nikolai Patrushev, director of FSB. The staff of NAK consists of 300 agents of the FSB central apparatus and 7 FSO agents. Within the framework of this committee, federal and regional operational staffs were created which were to take control in the case of terrorist attack or seizing of hostages.

According to presidential edict, operational staffs in the regions are headed by chiefs of territorial divisions of FSB. GrOUs, created as a result of reforms of 2004, became part of regional operational staffs. Thus, the creation of the National Anti-terrorist Committee actually indicates that the system that had been developing since 2004 has now been rejected. One exception was made. In August the President signed an additional edict, asserting the composition and management of operational staffs in the territory of the North Caucasus. In all cases management of staffs was allotted to the FSB, but not in the Chechen republic – there, the deputy minister of internal affairs remained the Chief of Staff. This was changed in October 2009 when the position of the Chief of Staff in Chechnya was handed over to the chief of the local FSB department in Chechnya.