Chechens now comprise the largest group seeking asylum in the European Union, Dan McLaughlin found in the Polish capital, Warsaw.
Sipping tea in a Warsaw café, "Comdt Ruslan" does not exude any obvious menace. But, if Russia is to be believed, this garrulous man with a clutch of gold teeth is at the vanguard of an al-Qaeda-backed terror threat to the European Union.
He and his Chechen compatriots now make up the largest single group seeking asylum in the West, leaving victims of more prominent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine trailing far behind.
Most acquire a fake passport in their Caucasus homeland, bribe their way north through military checkpoints, cross Russia's unguarded border with Belarus and turn up at the Polish frontier - which since May 1st marks the eastern edge of the EU.
Almost 7,000 people claimed asylum in Poland last year. Of them, 5,345 were Chechens and some, like Comdt Ruslan, were militants, who the Kremlin says are fuelled by the extremist ideology and financial muscle of Osama bin Laden and his acolytes.
"It's pure propaganda - we have no need for those Wahhabis," insists Comdt Ruslan, using the common term in the Caucasus for all Muslim fundamentalists.
"They have cash but no real support in Chechnya. There is 80 per cent unemployment there, and of course people need to eat. But they are simply deceiving the young people with their money."
Comdt Ruslan, who requested use of his nom de guerre to protect relatives still in Chechnya, pours scorn on President Vladimir Putin's relentless efforts to portray the conflict there as a crucial front in the US-led "war on terror".
He says he commanded a rebel battalion in the 1994-96 war that ended with defeat for the Russians and de-facto independence for Chechnya, and then served as a deputy security minister under Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, working with Moscow's officials on a commission to exchange captured soldiers and rebels.
The Kremlin sent its troops back into Chechnya five years ago, and Ruslan was eventually driven into hiding after the security services repeatedly came looking for him in his home village in the Shalinsky region.
He maintains links with the separatist guerrillas at home and abroad, as part of a network that is spreading throughout Europe as thousands of Chechens flee the war-shattered republic each year.
This network, Moscow insists, presents an imminent terror threat to European nations that have been sceptical about the ties between Chechnya and radical Islam.
"Many Chechen fighters are leaving for European countries on the basis of false documents, above all for Poland, and hiding there, pretending to be refugees," Maj-Gen Ilya Shabalkin said in the wake of last month's horrific school siege in Beslan.
"Such refugees are capable of anything and there is a real chance that major terrorist attacks like that which took place in Spain this year could be repeated in Europe," Maj-Gen Shabalkin said.
Ruslan, who now works with the Chechen Information Centre in Warsaw, admits that a few Arab extremists with possible links to al-Qaeda may have found an ally in Shamil Basayev, the warlord who took responsibility for planning the attack on Beslan.
But he insists that Mr Maskhadov is free of such ties, despite Moscow's concerted efforts to paint him as Mr Basayev's political master.
"There is absolutely no al-Qaeda link with Maskhadov," says Comdt Ruslan (57), who smuggled his wife and two sons out of Chechnya before escaping hidden in a lorry.
He now travels frequently across the Continent on his Polish passport, as does the head of the Chechen Information Centre, Mr Khamzat Aslambekov, much to Moscow's chagrin: a man of the same name was the reported leader of a guerrilla group operating south of the Chechen capital, Grozny, in the mid-1990s.
People who can prove they were fighters make up most of the 5-10 per cent of Chechen applicants who actually gain full refugee status from the Polish authorities, entitling them to a passport, benefits and help finding work and accommodation.
The rest are deemed "tolerated residents" and forced to leave their refugee shelter two weeks after receiving a final status decision. Without any assistance learning the language or finding a job or place to live, many try to move west.
However, new EU laws prevent people reapplying for asylum in a member-state once their case has been heard somewhere else in the Union.
"They used to hire buses to go to Austria or the Czech Republic, but there's no point now," says Ms Magda Kmak, a lawyer with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
She added: "They can't move on and can't go home, so they are stuck here, but have no help making a life in Poland. Some of them have been tortured so they can't work, and unemployment is so high that there are very few jobs around anyway."
With human rights groups reporting continued kidnapping, torture and murder by Russian troops and their local allies in Chechnya - and with fears of reprisals strong after Beslan - the flow of refugees from the Caucasus looks unlikely to wane.
"They come without documents and in masks, so you've no idea who they are," says Mr Rashid Magdiev, of the men who twice seized him at his home about 10 miles from Grozny.
"My family bought my freedom both times," he says.
"There is no real law in Chechnya, only that of the gun. You can just disappear and no one will even know where to look for you." Mr Magdiev (38) says he fought with the rebels in the 1994-96 war and helped supply them with food and medicines in the current conflict.
Now he, his wife and their four children get free food and lodging and the Polish equivalent of $20 each a month for their other needs.
His case is the kind that prompts the Kremlin to scream about international terrorists moving West, and has caused Brussels to consider the creation of camps outside the EU's borders to process asylum applications and repatriate anyone who is rejected.
"I'd like to get to Britain but I've heard it's very tough," says Mr Magdiev.
"I'd just like my children to have a chance. In Chechnya they have seen only war, learned only war, and won't be able to do anything else with their lives."