Giving North Caucasus Veterans Land in Homelands Could Trigger Conflict

Giving North Caucasus Veterans Land in Homelands Could Trigger Conflict

Executive Summary:

• Programs giving land to North Caucasian veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine in the North Caucasus are exacerbating ethnic tensions in those land-short republics, especially in cases where those who are not given land are a different nationality than those receiving it. 
• These programs are especially fraught because many returning veterans have weapons and military training, a reason why Moscow stopped the draft in the North Caucasus after 1991 and later, for many years, took a smaller percentage of men from there than elsewhere.
• Moscow will certainly end these programs if they cause violence in the North Caucasus. The Kremlin would dispatch more forces there in response to increased conflict, which could become political, another way that the end of Putin’s war against Ukraine could lead to less stability in the Russian Federation.

Officials in Moscow and Russia’s federal subjects have been struggling to reintegrate veterans of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. Reintegration efforts intensified in recent months after a Kremlin official made a report, which Moscow has since denied, that 250,000 veterans have not found work (Radio Svoboda, January 26). Unemployed veterans are more likely to turn to crime to survive, a major fear of many Russians (see EDM, April 14, 2022, January 19, 2024, September 24, 2024, May 29, June 26, July 10, September 11, 2025; Window on Eurasia, October 16, 2025). Some of these veterans may choose to channel their anger politically. Because of those risks, regional officials are seeking to put in place new means of re-integrating such veterans. One approach, adopted by Ingushetia and some other republics in the North Caucasus, involves giving veterans land (Fortanga.org; Kavkaz.Realii, May 15, 2025). This approach has so far attracted little attention. If this program expands, as seems to be happening, however, it is likely to spark violence, reigniting some of the conflicts that roiled that region during the first two decades after 1991. Renewed armed conflict in the North Caucasus would force Moscow to intervene more forcefully than in recent years, with consequences for the region and the Russian Federation as a whole.

Almost a year ago, Mahmud-Ali Kalimatov, the head of the Ingush Republic, announced that his government plans to give land to veterans to reintegrate them into peaceful life (Fortanga.org; Kavkaz.Realii, May 15, 2025). Local observers immediately expressed concern that this program would exacerbate ethnic and sub-ethnic divides and could trigger violence because Ingushetia is one of the poorest republics in the Russian Federation, has serious ethnic problems with its neighbors, and suffers from land shortages given a burgeoning population (Telegram/@fortangaorg, April 11, 2023; Telegram/@sunzha_rayon, April 14, 2025). Despite that, Kalimatov has now announced that he has given land plots to more than 800 veterans, a number he expects to increase as more veterans return home from Ukraine (Fortanga.org, January 12).

Ingushetia is not the only republic to have adopted such a policy. Last year, Dagestan, the largest and most ethnically mixed republic in the North Caucasus, launched a program to hand out land parcels to returning veterans. This program threatened to explode when officials gave land to returning veterans of one nationality, the Avars, but not to those of a different nationality, the Chechens (Kavkaz.Realii, November 15, 2024). Not only were the local Chechens outraged, but Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov threatened to intervene on their behalf. Moscow dissuaded him, and because the Avars and the Chechens of Dagestan have been in conflict for so long, this development was widely interpreted as simply the latest stage of that conflict. Less attention was given to how the handing out of land to returning veterans was the trigger (Kavkazskii Uzel, February 26, 2025). As of January, the Dagestani authorities have given out almost 1,700 free parcels of land to returning veterans (RIA Novosti, January 29).

These problems are threatening to explode because Moscow and St. Petersburg are the only two federal subjects that have sent more of their men to fight in Ukraine than the republics of the North Caucasus relative to population (The Moscow Times, January 5). That means they will have a disproportionate number of veterans to reintegrate, all of whom have military training and many of whom will have weapons. That may strike many as surprising, given that for many years after 1991, Moscow did not draft men from the non-Russian nationalities of the region and later took them at a rate lower than elsewhere. This policy was a reaction to conflicts in the North Caucasus, and because of Russian commanders’ opposition to having North Caucasians in their ranks. Moscow feared soldiers would acquire weapons and skills to later resist Russian power in their republics (see North Caucasus Weekly, July 10, 2012; see EDM, November 20, 2014). 

A decade ago, Moscow began drafting non-Russians from the North Caucasus at higher rates. This was relatively easy because many men wanted to get their “military ticket” so that they could get jobs with the police after returning to civilian life and were even prepared to bribe their way into the military (Window on Eurasia, October 28, 2018, January 4, 2020). When Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin leader took in still more men from the North Caucasus because there was less resistance to the draft there and far higher numbers of men in the prime draft age cohort. Birthrates in the North Caucasus remain much higher than among Russians or other non-Russian minorities. Putin has to increase North Caucasian troops despite continuing opposition of the overwhelmingly ethnic Russian officer corps (see EDM, March 1, 2022). 

Experts in Moscow and the North Caucasus have long recognized that land disputes, triggered by the arrival of outsiders or returnees, can cause conflict. They often report on them case by case but rarely generalize about the problem. An important exception was Akhmed Yarlykanov, a senior specialist at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, who pointed out more than a decade ago that “the ethnic factor really plays an important role in the development of land conflicts” in the region, with longtime residents angered by the demands of arrivals (Vestnik Kavkaza, December 20, 2011). That is especially the case when the arrivals use land for purposes different from those of the older residents, when the claims of the former lack a legal foundation, or when the new arrivals occupy so much land that existing settlements cannot expand because they have been surrounded. In Dagestan in particular, the ethnographer observed, “a danger exists” that these conflicts will take on an “ethno-political” character. He noted “calls to solve the problem” by separating the Dagestani lowlands from the highlands by setting up “territorial formations for the residents of the valleys and so on.”

For decades, analysts in Russia and the West have focused on the problems posed by the multinational composition of Moscow’s army for the Kremlin. Now, given what is happening as ever more veterans return home, they are going to have to pay more attention to what the non-Russians among them are doing. Some certainly are turning to crime, but others may engage in violence directed toward political ends, including opposition to Moscow’s increasingly Russian nationalist approach and supporting their national independence (Window on Eurasia, April 24, 2025; Kavkaz.Realii, July 9, 2025). If the number of North Caucasian veterans willing to engage in political violence increases—and there is every reason to think they will, since many of these veterans have guns, and because of the behavior of officials in their republics—then the Kremlin will face a more serious challenge in the North Caucasus than it has since the 1990s. This prospect is another way that the end of Putin’s war against Ukraine may not lead to stability in the Russian Federation, but to even greater instability and more threats to Putin.