The leader of the unrecognised republic of Chechnya, the former general, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, escaped a powerful car bomb attack on his presidential motorcade yesterday.
Mr Maskhadov, who commanded Chechen forces in the tiny region's extraordinary victory over the former Red Army two years ago, was slightly injured in the knee by the blast, which killed one, injured six, and destroyed two cars in the convoy as it travelled through the capital, Grozny.
Mr Maskhadov, seen in Moscow and the west as a moderate who offers the best chance of rebuilding Chechnya after the war, made the ritual accusation that the Russian secret service was behind the failed assassination.
More likely is that the attack was part of a burgeoning conflict between different Chechen factions in which the President and a fundamentalist Islamic movement with links to the Middle East, the Wahhabis, are on opposite sides.
The looming crisis inside Chechnya, a bubble of lawlessness on Russia's southern border which the world pretends is still under Moscow's jurisdiction, began last week in the town of Gudermes, the territory's second city.
Six people were killed and 15 injured in a clash between two armed bands, at least one of which fought under the banner of Wahhabism. That evening Mr Maskhadov went on national television to make his first open denunciation of the movement.
"The preachers of this tendency come to Chechnya from Arab countries, they summon the people to war, they declare that kidnapping is justified," he said.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Wahhabi missionaries and ideas have trickled into the Caucasus from Saudi Arabia and from Jordan, which has a large Chechen diaspora.
Over the weekend Mr Mask hadov gave four "foreigners" - three Jordanians and one citizen of Russia proper - 48 hours to quit Chechnya. He accused them of trying to "split Chechen society along religious lines". He followed this up by mobilising 5,000 troops, under command of the feared tactician, Mr Shamil Basayev, to bring down the freelance armed gangs whose checkpoints have proliferated across the territory.
In trying to restore the rule of law, isolate illegal armed formations and separate "extremists" from the rest of the population, Mr Maskhadov is setting himself a similar task to that of Russia's President, Mr Boris Yeltsin, when he launched the catastrophic assault on Chechnya in 1994 - except that the Chechen President is on home turf, is still popular and, as a fighter and a supporter of Sharia law, has much in common with his opponents.
Russia cannot afford to ignore what is happening in Chechnya. Apart from the Caspian-Black Sea oil pipeline running through it, events there have a direct bearing on the tense situation in neighbouring Dagestan, ostensibly a loyal member of the Russian Federation but in reality little more under Moscow's control than Chechnya.