No sooner had Russian security forces killed Buryatskiy than his boss, Doku Umarov, cropped up on the internet, claiming responsibility for the Moscow bombings and vowing that ordinary Russians will be made to "feel" Chechnya's strife through further spectacular attacks in Central Russia. Umarov knows about strife since most of his family seems to have been abducted and killed. 

Chechenising the counter-insurgency has also had its drawbacks. Chechnya is run by Ramzan Kadyrov, possibly the only world leader to be happy in the company of  the boxer Mike Tyson, whom he invited to organise a martial arts event horribly reminiscent of those in Bruce Lee films. Kadyrov is the former chief bodyguard to his late father, an imam who became Chechen president and was blown up in 2004 after switching to Putin's camp when he fell out with such Wahhabist "devils" as the Saudi Ibn al-Khatab, aka the "Lion of the Caucasus", whom the Russians eventually poisoned. 

Kadyrov is all Armani tracksuits, blacked-out Lexuses, pet lions and panthers, lavish palaces, disappearances and torture chambers. He is also an enthusiastic proponent of polygamy and sharia. He probably funds his reconstruction efforts from Chechnya's black market in oil and gas. 

In other words, he caters to an authoritarian version of Chechen separatism, which incorporates corruption, Islam and rhetorical resistance to big Russian oil and gas. That style of rule propels his opponents into the virtual world of jihad, where the people they recruit are potentially malleable. At that point, this tale of gun-mad lunatics in the mountains of the Caucasus ceases to be solely a problem for Medvedev or Putin, since you can bet your bottom rouble that the immigration and security services in London or Washington won't, in sorry retrospect, have regarded a young visiting female Russian teacher as a major priority.