The Ingush Constitutional Court has ruled that a law codifying the October 4, 2018 border agreement with Chechnya is unconstitutional.
The court decided that the law violates three articles of the Ingush Constitution, which requires any border changes to take into account public opinion, and obligates the state to preserve the republic's territorial integrity.
The Ingush Constitutional Court said the law formalizing the new border deal with Chechnya was adopted without a referendum, and therefore “has no legal consequences for law enforcement, organizations, or Ingush citizens."
The leaders of Chechnya and Ingushetia publicly agreed to exchange some borderlands on September 26. The Ingush parliament confirmed the deal on October 4, 2018.
The senior research fellow of the Caucasus Problems and Regional Security Center at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Nikolai Silaev, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza earlier, noted that there was practically no chance that the residents of Ingushetia would accept the border agreement as a compromise. “I don’t think that this decision will make the Ingush authorities more popular. The territory in Nadterechny district is not useless for Ingushetia, because they do not have much land suitable for agricultural production and just plain land. But it seems to me that it will be assessed in terms of symbolic politics - our mountains, our ancestral homeland were given to someone else," he noted.
Nikolay Silaev also stressed that the problem of disputed territories on the Chechen-Ingush border still does not have a good solution. "Would any federal officials stand in the way of lobbying by Ramzan Kadyrov in order to keep the mining area? But this is an image project for the Chechen leadership, although it is clear that no permanent population of any significant number will be restored there," the senior research fellow of the Caucasus Problems and Regional Security Center at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations said.
