Chechnya: West backs militancy in Caucasus

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has blamed a surge of violence in Russia's North Caucasus on the West, calling for a military scheme to fend off western influence.

The 33-year-old former rebel leader, who defected to the Russian authorities in 1999 along with his father Ahmad Kadyrov, said Thursday that the federal government needed to counter the West's increasing sway in the region or witness further disorder.

"The West is financing them. I officially declare this: those who destroyed the Soviet Union, those who want to destroy the Russian Federation, they stand behind them," said Kadyrov whose father was assassinated as Chechnya's president in May 2004.

"If they get control of the Caucasus, you could say they'll get control of virtually all of Russia, because the Caucasus is our backbone," the young leader said in an interview with the state television.

"The Russian government needs to work out a strategy, it needs to attack," he added.

Kadyrov referred to the campaign against Chechen militants as a war of necessity and not one of choice, saying, "I don't want to kill, I fought terrorists. Who did I protect? I protected the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow or St Petersburg ... could live in peace. ... They accuse me of killing women and children. It's not true."

"Today there are very few (rebels) left," he went on to say.

"This year we destroyed a great many terrorists in (the neighboring Russian republics of) Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya," British newspaper The Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.

He also raised the alarm against the increasing western influence in former soviet satellites such as Georgia and the Ukraine.

Kadyrov took over the presidency from his father in 2007 and created an army meant to quell Chechen separatists who have recently stepped up their campaign against the republic's government.