Giorgio Malfatti di Montetretto
In the context of the gradual rapprochement between Russia and Iran, Dagestan is emerging as a crossroads of growing strategic importance. A republic of the Russian Federation on the shores of the Caspian Sea, with a Sunni Muslim majority but also a politically and religiously significant Shiite minority (around 5%), the region combines internal fragility with geopolitical value. For Moscow, it represents both a periphery to be kept under control and, at the same time, a platform linking Russia to Iran, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Against the backdrop of Western sanctions and the war in Ukraine, its importance now extends well beyond the local level.
This dual nature — unstable frontier and strategic corridor — explains why the Dagestan question cannot be reduced to a purely security matter. The region is the product of a long stratification of ethnic, religious and political affiliations, made more visible and harder to govern by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Since the end of the USSR, Dagestan has been shaken by political, social and religious tensions, tied both to Caucasian separatism and to the spread of radical Islamist currents. Its history is often compared to that of neighbouring Chechnya, but it has distinct features of its own: a fragmented social structure, a complex ethnic mosaic, and an ambivalent relationship with the Russian federal centre.
The decisive turning point came in the summer of 1999, when jihadist groups from Chechnya, led by Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab, moved into Dagestan to support the project of an Islamic republic promoted by the preacher Bagauddin Kebedov. The operation collapsed within a few weeks. Much of the local population rejected the imposition of a radical project seen as foreign to its own religious and social traditions, while anti-Wahhabi militias and Russian army units resisted the fighters’ advance. The jihadists’ defeat opened the way to a new militarisation of the Caucasus and helped shape the political climate that preceded the Second Chechen War.
In the years that followed, Dagestan remained exposed to jihadist violence. First the Caucasus Emirate, then groups linked to the Islamic State, fuelled attacks, clandestine networks and radicalisation processes. More recent episodes — from the October 2023 assault on the capital’s airport by a crowd chanting pro-Hamas slogans as a flight from Tel Aviv landed (the republic is also home to a Jewish community), to attacks on places of worship and security-linked targets — show that the threat has not gone away, despite repeated declarations by Russian authorities that the local insurgency has ended. Alongside the persistence of organised groups, autonomous cells, clan-linked criminal networks and self-radicalised individuals make the security landscape more fragmented and harder to control.
Dagestan’s instability is also rooted in economic and political factors. The republic shows high levels of poverty, unemployment, corruption and crime compared with other regions of the Russian Federation, and depends heavily on federal transfers: roughly 80% of the local budget comes from subsidies from Moscow. That support, designed in part to prevent a slide comparable to Chechnya’s, has nonetheless fostered clientelist practices and embezzlement among local elites. Added to this is a highly multi-ethnic, multilingual society, in which dozens of communities compete for resources, political representation and control over economic activity. Within this context, the divide between traditional Islam — rooted in Sufi brotherhoods and backed by the local Muftiate — and the more recently emerged Salafist currents also carries a social dimension. For some marginalised young people, radicalism offers an alternative identity to a system perceived as corrupt and closed off. This pull does not always translate into taking up arms, but it helps sustain a persistent undercurrent of political and cultural vulnerability.
Dagestan thus plays a strategic role arising from the layering of its history, geography and security challenges. Its ties to the Persian world and its position on the Caspian Sea make it, for Moscow, a potential diplomatic and commercial corridor toward Iran. For Tehran, meanwhile, the region offers a space of indirect influence, built on cultural, religious and economic ties — a limited but meaningful form of soft power that fits into the broader process of rapprochement between the two countries.
The port of the capital, Makhachkala — the only Russian deep-water port on the Caspian Sea that remains operational through the winter — carries particular weight in this context. It enables links with Iran and Central Asian markets at precisely the moment when Western sanctions make alternative routes all the more valuable. Its central role in freight transport, energy infrastructure and Russian military projection in the Caspian makes it a first-rank strategic asset.
The war in Ukraine has sharpened this importance further, turning infrastructure once considered peripheral into sensitive targets on the military front as well. Ukrainian drone strikes on facilities tied to Russia’s presence in the Caspian Sea show that the conflict’s effects now extend well beyond the Ukrainian theatre, reaching areas that appear marginal but are in fact essential to Moscow’s logistics and strategic reach.
In conclusion, the “Dagestan question” is not simply a matter of Russian domestic security. It touches on the balance between centre and periphery within the Federation, the management of radicalism in the Caucasus, the Caspian’s role in the new Eurasian trade routes, and the consolidation of the Moscow-Tehran axis. It is precisely because it is at once peripheral, fragile and strategic that Dagestan stands as one of the most valuable vantage points for understanding the geopolitical shifts now under way across the post-Soviet space.
