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Ilya Rogachev, who heads the Foreign Ministry's department for modern challenges and threats, told Ekho Moskvy radio Friday that those who have joined the group include people from the Russian province of Chechnya and some other regions in the volatile North Caucasus.

He said precise numbers of Russians among ISIS fighters are hard to measure, as they include some Chechen refugees who had moved to Europe, as well as some ethnic Chechens from Russia's ex-Soviet neighbor, Georgia.

News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies.

Russia under Putin’s grim tutelage has grown notorious for cronyism and corruption on a vast scale, repression of domestic opponents and free speech, and military aggression and disruption abroad.

Yet it appears Putin does not want to emulate out-and-out dictators in other countries by making himself president-for-life – the path chosen by China’s Xi Jinping. He values a veneer of democratic legitimacy.

Putin’s chief ideologue and grey cardinal, Vladislav Surkov, the ‘Kremlin demiurge’. Known also as the ‘puppetmaster who privatised the Russian political system’, Surkov is the real genius of the Putin era. Understand him and you understand not only contemporary Russia but a new type of power politics, a breed of authoritarianism far subtler than the 20th-century strains.

He trained as a theatre director then became a PR man; now his official role is ‘vice-head of the presidential administration’, but his influence over Russian politics is unsurpassed. He is the man behind the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, in which democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms, the man who has turned television into a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine and launched pro-Kremlin youth groups happy to compare themselves to the Hitler Youth, to beat up foreigners and opposition journalists, and burn ‘unpatriotic’ books on Red Square. But this is only half the story.

Newly translated postmodernist texts give philosophical weight to the Surkovian power model. François Lyotard, the French theoretician of postmodernism, began to be translated in Russia only towards the end of the 1990s, at exactly the time Surkov joined the government. The author of Almost Zero loves to invoke such Lyotardian concepts as the breakdown of grand cultural narratives and the fragmentation of truth: ideas that still sound quite fresh in Russia. One blogger has noted that ‘the number of references to Derrida in political discourse is growing beyond all reasonable bounds. At a recent conference the Duma deputy Ivanov quoted Derrida three times and Lacan twice.’ In an echo of socialism’s fate in the early 20th century, Russia has adopted a fashionable, supposedly liberational Western intellectual movement and transformed it into an instrument of oppression.

In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”

An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.

Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers

Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed, annotated and fact-checked

It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Putin here is implicitly defending Russia's right to use its veto to block the United Nations from any action on Syria, including simple press releases condemning the use of chemical weapons.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will consider whether to reinstate the death penalty for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.The 2013 bombing, which Tsarnaev carried out with his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, killed three people and injured 264 others. The Chechen immigrant was convicted of all 30 charges brought against him in 2015, and a court imposed six death sentences and 11 concurrent life sentences.

But last year, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston threw out the death penalty sentences after finding that the trial judge had failed to ensure proper questioning of prospective jurors, including whether their opinions had been influenced by the wall-to-wall press coverage of the bombing.The Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, seeking to revive the capital sentences. And on Monday the justices, in a one-sentence order, agreed to consider reinstating Tsarnaev's death sentences. They will not hear arguments in the case until the next term.

Tsarnaev's defense team has not denied that he participated in the attack, in which two pressure cooker bombs were detonated as runners crossed the race's finish line. But they argued that he was under the strong influence of his older brother, who was killed during the massive manhunt that locked down most of the Boston metropolitan area in the days after the attack.Tsarnaev, 27, is being held at the high-security supermax federal prison near Florence, Colo.

MARSEILLE, France — Once again, terrorism strikes France — and once again, terrorism is exposing the country’s dangerous contradictions.

First there was the murder of Samuel Paty, a history teacher who was decapitated near Paris on Oct. 16 by a young Chechen man after Mr. Paty showed students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class about freedom of expression.

In addition to security and counterterrorism measures, the French government responded to Mr. Paty’s killing by vigorously reaffirming the right of free speech — including the right to satirize and blaspheme — as well as the central role of France’s version of secularism, known as laïcité, in all state institutions, especially public schools.

Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union to a family of Jewish dissidents, spent nearly a decade in Moscow working largely on reality TV shows for a Russian entertainment channel. It turned out to be the perfect lens through which to see Putin’s Russia, where the Kremlin’s spinmeisters work hard to promote an image of a virile and infallible president vanquishing devious foes. It’s a place where people don’t say (and may not even know) what they really think and where sophistication means being in on the truth that most everything is potentially a lie.

“It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next,” Pomerantsev wrote. “So you’re always split into little bits and can never quite commit to changing things. And a result is the somewhat aggressive apathy you can encounter here so often. That’s the underlying mind-set that supported the U.S.S.R. and supports the new Russia now.”

something went wrong in Putin’s approach, and it wasn’t just the incompetence of his military, the bravery of Ukrainians or the intercession by the West. In a nutshell, the problem is this: A monopoly on truth can be sustained only through a monopoly on violence. Big Brother can tell the Big Lie only if he has the Big — and only — Gun. Otherwise, the lie inevitably falls apart.

YASNOHORODKA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Standing amid the charred remains of a roadside hotel on a major highway near Kyiv, Isa Akayev explained what drove him to build his Muslim volunteer unit and fight for Ukraine.

Many Tatars opposed Moscow's annexation of Crimea, which had followed the overthrow of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president amid mass street protests.Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimea's Tatars - Akayev’s grandparents among them - in 1944, accusing them of collaboration with Nazi Germany.They were only allowed to return with their descendants in the 1980s - as Akayev did from Uzbekistan in 1989 - and many welcomed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation.

become a fully-fledged unit of Ukraine's army.Dozens of other volunteer battalions sprang up in 2014 and began helping Ukraine's unprepared regular army to fight in the Donbas. They included two Chechen units, a Georgian one, and several with a right-wing nationalist ethos. Some have since disarmed while others have joined the regular army.Russia has been scathing about such units. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on the eve of the war that providing shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to former volunteer battalions was evidence of a "militaristic psychosis".A Ukrainian presidential envoy said in March that such volunteer battalions now numbered more than 100. Ukraine's government celebrates them as heroes, celebrating their exploits on an annual volunteers' day.

Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.

A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.

The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.