Leadership Quote by Aslan Maskhadov

A tired warning disguised as a throwaway line, Maskhadov's phrasing lands because it treats geopolitics like a reckless parlor game. "Keep playing with, and around" suggests not strategy but improvisation: Western capitals poking at Russia, sidestepping Russia, bargaining over Russia's periphery, acting as if the country is an object to be managed rather than an actor that will eventually lash out. The verb "playing" is doing the moral work here. It implies frivolity, short-termism, a belief that consequences can be paused when the meeting ends.

Maskhadov wasn't speaking from a think-tank remove. As Chechnya's elected president during the brutal post-Soviet collapse, he watched Moscow reassert control with overwhelming force while Western governments oscillated between muted condemnation and pragmatic engagement with the Kremlin. That lived proximity to Russian power gives the line its bite: he is not romanticizing Russia, he's insisting that treating it as a puzzle box rather than a volatile, wounded empire creates blowback for everyone caught nearby.

The subtext is also an indictment of Western selective attention. "Around" hints at the borderlands - the Caucasus, Ukraine, the Baltics, Central Asia - places often framed as chess squares for "stability" or "energy security" rather than societies with agency. Maskhadov's complaint isn't only that the West misreads Russia; it's that the West's casualness invites Russia to prove, violently, that it cannot be handled casually.