Fixing borders in Caucasus marks new challenges for Kremlin

The clarification of regions' borders is a routine task for the "Rosreestr" (Russian Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography), but the Ingush-Chechen territorial dispute has forced the Kremlin to intensify the work. The federal centre is seeking to prevent new territorial conflicts, the political analysts interviewed by the "Caucasian Knot" believe.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the "Rosreestr" demanded to clarify 25 borders between the regions of the North-Caucasian Federal District (NCFD) and enter the data into the Unified State Register of Real Estate by 2021.

The instruction of the "Rosreestr" to clarify the borders may be caused by the officials' desire to prevent possible border conflicts, Akhmet Yarlykapov, a Senior Researcher at the Caucasus Studies Centre at the MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations), suggests.

"It's not by occasion that everything started after Kadyrov's statements; and most often we hear about borders and delimitation from the head of Chechnya. Probably, in [Moscow] an idea arose to prevent disputes and conflicts by a detailed land inventory to be conducted by the subjects themselves," Mr Yarlykapov has explained.

"Territorial disputes lead to stronger national movements, as was the case during the Ingush protest against fixing the border with Chechnya. In Dagestan, too, [tensions appeared] amid talks about delimitation with Chechnya; people get mobilized," Akhmet Yarlykapov has concluded.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on January 30, 2019 at 00:28 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.