Happy Friday!

In January, I published an in-depth report on patterns in terrorism and state responses in the North Caucasus in 2024. That report drew on a unique, multi-source dataset of incidents that I compiled. If you’ve not read it already, you can dowload it here.

It’s now the start of April, so it’s a good time to look at what has happened in the first quarter of the year and whether the trends are positive or negative. So that’s what I’m going to do in today’s newsletter!

What I’ll cover this week:

• The overall downward trend in violence
• How the security services continue to shape the picture
• Continuity and change in the data

Drops in number of incidents, casualties

The biggest takeaway from Q1 is that there has been a decline in the volume and seriousness of incidents compared to both the same period last year and the last quarter of 2024. Thus, there were 21 terrorism-related incidents in Q1 2025, compared to 26 in Q1 2024 and 34 in Q4 2024. The biggest drop-off in violence was seen in Ingushetia, with eight incidents compared to 13 and 14 respectively. Chechnya also saw a decline, with no incidents compared to three and nine.

A look at the casualty figures reveals the same broad patterns: If we take the lowest reported figures, then only eight people were killed or wounded in terrorism-related incidents in Q1 2025 compared to 12 in the same period last year and 20 in the last quarter of 2024. The biggest drop was in North Ossetia, where in December 2024 one person was killed and 10 injured when a drone was shot down over a shopping centre.

Decline in security service activity behind fall

The main contributor to the drop in violence was not reduced activity by ‘terrorist’, insurgent, or other anti-state forces: The number of attacks in the first quarter of 2025 was higher than the same period in 2024 — three compared to one — and the same as the last quarter in 2024.

Instead, a decline in security service activity explains why levels of violence are down. There was only one special operation in the first quarter of 2025 — in Dagestan at the beginning of March — compared to three in the first quarter of 2024 (but none in the last quarter). However, it was the fall in the number of incidents where people were detained for terrorism-related offences that was most significant: 11 in the first quarter of 2025 compared to 16 in the same period of 2024 and 18 in the last quarter of 2024.

Continuity and change in political violence

The picture painted by the quarterly data is generally a positive one: There has been a drop in both the volume and intensity of violence.

This positive appraisal, however, comes with three significant caveats. First, terrorism-related violence remains a persistent feature of the political landscape of the North Caucasus. Violence may be down, but it has not disappeared. Second, this only looks at things from a short-term perspective, and the trends would need to persist quarter-on-quarter for a more sustained period to be truly noteworthy. Finally, declining security service activity can be interpreted as indicators of a reduction in different things: of the threat of terrorism itself, of intelligence on terrorist activity, and of the short-term need of security agencies to demonstrate their effectiveness. Only the first of these is actually a positive.

These caveats notwithstanding, we can identify both continuity and change in the data. The two main continuities, compared to the 2024 trends report, is that Dagestan and Ingushetia remain the main areas of concern, and that the security services continue to be the main drivers of violence. The main difference is that drone activity has declined as quickly as it emerged: Having been a major new development in the last quarter of 2024, there was only one drone-related incident in the first quarter of 2025.

I’ll publish another update next quarter — but if there are things you’d like to know from the data, hit reply and let me know!