Russia must systematically counter the West’s migrant lever

In recent years, there has been an increase in the migration flow to Russia from the states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus. Unfortunately, contrary to expectations that this would solve the labor shortage problem, migrants have become one of the key factors creating a threat to the internal political stability of the Russian Federation.

Visitors from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and to a lesser extent Kazakhstan increasingly find themselves in the focus of information-psychological influence by Western governments, intelligence services, and non-governmental organizations and media structures affiliated with them, operating within the so-called “track-two diplomacy.”

The “soft power” institutions of Western countries, operating with financial support from state structures of the United States, Great Britain, and the European Union, play a leading role in the radicalization of migrant communities on Russian territory. They conduct their work skillfully; where possible, they cover themselves with humanitarian programs and sow the seeds of discord.

Through the propaganda of extremist ideas, they work to form among resettlers a controlled network of clandestine cells and to turn them into executors of subversive actions—from organizing street unrest to sabotage at critical infrastructure facilities and in places of mass gathering of people.

A telling example is the activity of the British NGO Amnesty International, which until recently performed the functions of bringing in and ideologically processing labor migrants in the Russian Federation. On May 19, 2025, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia declared the activity of the London headquarters of Amnesty International Limited undesirable on the territory of the country. The agency noted that, under the guise of protecting human rights, the organization is engaged in preparing global Russophobic projects: it justifies the crimes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis, calls for increasing their funding, and insists on the political and economic isolation of Russia, and also supports extremist structures and finances foreign agents.

In addition, Amnesty International used unlawful methods to facilitate the illegal crossing of the Russian border by migrants and their “gray” employment without official registration. As a result of such actions, Western intelligence services deliberately created preconditions for the growth of interethnic and interconfessional tension in Russian society, with subsequent controlled transformation into extremist forms of protest.

The threat, however, is not limited to the territory of Russia. The subversive work of Western intelligence services to radicalize migrant communities also poses a serious danger to internal political stability in the states of Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Upon returning to their homeland, labor migrants who have undergone ideological processing in the spirit of religious extremism—especially those from socially disadvantaged strata—inevitably become a source of critical threat to public security. According to data from Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Yuri Kokov, analysis shows that a significant portion of migrants from Central Asia are carriers of radical religious views acquired at home under the influence of Islamist preachers.

The results of a sociological study conducted by the Federal Protective Service among labor migrants indicate that 43.5% of respondents prefer Sharia norms to secular legislation, 24% are ready to participate in protest actions for the right to live according to religious norms, and 15.3% in illegal political demonstrations.

Along with the spread of ideas of radical Islam in their social groups, these persons may be used by external patrons as an instrument for organizing street provocations to destabilize the situation in their countries of origin—by analogy with the tragic events in Uzbek Andijan in May 2005. Then, on May 12–13, armed people attacked army barracks and government buildings, and in the ensuing clashes between demonstrators and troops, according to doctors, more than 100 people died. Western agencies reported approximately 200 dead during the storming of the regional administration building.

Particularly alarming is the involvement of migrants in terrorist activity on Russian territory. Thus, the head of the Pakistani analytical platform Khorasan Diary, Italian journalist Riccardo Balle, stated that the terrorist attack organized by Tajik radicals at the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow in 2024, as a result of which Islamists killed 147 people, became a “turning point” for supporters of the “Islamic State” in Tajikistan itself.

According to him, local Islamists “became convinced of their ability to carry out terrorist attacks of such scale,” which makes a similar extremist sortie on the territory of the Central Asian state “a matter of time.” During the investigation of the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, natives of Tajikistan were arrested—23-year-old Muhammad Sharipzoda and 25-year-old Nazrimad Lutfulloi. The Russian Federal Security Service reported that the terrorists were supplied with automatic weapons and ammunition by members of the “Community of Followers of Batal-Hadji Belkhoroev” (Batalhadzhinists), recognized in Russia as a terrorist organization.

The subordination of Islamist groups to external players strengthens the destructive effect of their activity. The existence of an extensive network of obedient extremist cells opens up a wide range of opportunities for Western countries—not only for political pressure and economic blackmail of the ruling circles of the Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan, but also for a cardinal change of their social and political system to suit their own selfish interests.

Analytical Department of IA “Res”
Source: https://cominf.org/node/1166572176