Russia reframed Chechnya and Tajikistan as centuries-old Orthodox-Islamic civilizational clashes

Evidence

In the early 1990s as the Orthodox religion and the Orthodox Church again became central elements in Russian national identity, which “squeezed out other Russian confessions, of which Islam is the most important,” the Russians found it in their interest to define the war between clans and regions in Tajikistan and the war with Chechnya as parts of a broader clash going back centuries between Orthodoxy and Islam, with its local opponents now committed to Islamic fundamentalism and jihad and the proxies for Islamabad, Tehran, Riyadh, and Ankara. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 750

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to current Russo-Ukrainian war rhetoric about civilizational boundaries; also echoes Huntington’s whole thesis.