By ELLEN BARRY
And yet he talked about Doku Umarov, who claimed responsibility for last month’s double bombing in Moscow’s subway, as if the rebel leader were standing in the room.
“His time will come,” said Mr. Yevkurov, 46, who is scarred from an assassination attempt last June that Mr. Umarov claimed to have organized.
“Whether it’s tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, whether he dies of natural causes in the woods or in a cave, whether he is blown up or shot up, or if he is caught and locked away in a death cell,” Mr. Yevkurov said. “If he is still alive and walking around, that does not simply mean he has managed to survive. The Almighty is giving him the chance to find the strength to acknowledge the evil he has brought to people.”
“But he is not using this chance,” he said. “Retribution will reach him sooner or later.”
Moscow suddenly focused on Mr. Umarov last month, after he announced that he had ordered the bombings that killed 40 people in the subway. Russian leaders scrambled to sever his links to the public by pressing Google to remove his video messages, and they circulated a bill in Parliament that would ban the media from quoting him.
But Mr. Yevkurov was addressing an old enemy. He and Mr. Umarov, 46, were born within months of each other, in closely related ethnic groups that share an archaic wariness toward Moscow. Both were in their 20s when the Soviet Union fell, forcing young men in the Caucasus to choose sides in a separatist war. There they diverged, and two decades later the loyal Russian soldier and the battered rebel are still fighting.
Now the prize is something more slippery than territory: the loyalty of a generation that grew up in the chaos of those wars.
“In the Caucasus, a leader’s personality really matters,” said Ramzan R. Ugurchiev, 29, the chairman of Ingushetia’s youth committee. “There is a saying: If the leader is a wolf, we will be a pack of wolves. If the leader is a jackal, we will be a pack of jackals.”
Mr. Ugurchiev, like any young man here, could reel off a list of acquaintances who had “gone to the forest,” or joined the rebels. He guessed that 15 percent of his classmates had done so, vanishing with so little warning that their parents could never accept that they left voluntarily.
In some cases, he said, a voice simply reached them at the right time. Rebel recruiters like Said Buryatsky, killed in a special forces operation last month, tapped into the sense of injustice seething beneath the surface here, where the official unemployment figure is around 50 percent and young men chafe at heavy-handed treatment by federal counterterrorism troops.
“The harder you press down, the more we will press up against you,” Mr. Ugurchiev said. “It’s the Caucasus. It was always this way.”
Mr. Yevkurov — one of 12 children born to a peasant family — seemed to address this resentment head-on. He refused a lavish inauguration, saying he preferred to greet the public at evening prayers, and combines the suit and tie of a Moscow-backed bureaucrat with a traditional skullcap. Though counterinsurgency operations continued, he won over much of the opposition with open-handed gestures like giving out his cellphone number and responding to complaints personally.
That was part of his strategy. A career military intelligence officer, he said he had long believed that counterterrorism was mainly a matter of soft power.
“The most severe punishment, that should make up 1 percent,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent should be persuasion, persuasion, persuasion.”
His project was interrupted by a roar of flames last June, when a suicide bomber swerved into his motorcade, killing two in his party and badly wounding his brother. Mr. Yevkurov was still in a coma when the rebel Web site Kavkaz Center published a letter saying the bombing was ordered by Mr. Umarov, a former separatist leader who has embraced global jihad as his new ideology.
The letter professed special hatred for Mr. Yevkurov because he fought for Moscow in the second Chechen war, calling him “the faithful dog of Russia.”
“From the moment Yevkurov came to power,” the letter read, “we wanted to kill him.”
The attack gave Mr. Yevkurov a reason to hate Mr. Umarov — but he had reasons already. The Ingush people share a religion and a language with Chechens but have traditionally been more loyal to the federal center; they bristle when Chechens try to take control of their territory, as Mr. Umarov has. He also attended school in Beslan, where in 2004 separatists took more than 1,000 children and teachers hostage.
Mr. Umarov, meanwhile, has good reason to fear Mr. Yevkurov and his experiment in persuasion, said Sergei M. Markedonov, a Caucasus expert at the Institute for Political and Military Analysis, in Moscow. To survive, the insurgents need the support of 15 or 20 percent of the public, combined with a mood of “passive neutrality,” he said. Mr. Yevkurov is bidding for this percentage — and, critically, for the allegiance of people in their teens and 20s.
“That is the main force, of course,” Mr. Markedonov said. “Whoever wins over the young generation will win.”
That competition goes on, invisibly, in the pauses between explosions. When a counterterrorism operation in February killed four civilians who were in the forest gathering wild garlic, Mr. Yevkurov expressed regret over the deaths. He said that 180 garlic pickers had been evacuated in a sincere attempt to avoid killing civilians and that 18 militants had been killed in the attack.
But he was not the only one who recognized a public-relations moment. Moscow was still reeling when Mr. Umarov announced that the bombings there were revenge for the garlic pickers, “mercilessly destroyed, killed by those bandit groups under the name of the F.S.B.,” Russia’s security service.
Mr. Yevkurov responded with disdain, saying Mr. Umarov “portrays himself as a kind of Robin Hood, who defends people.”
“An opponent is an opponent,” he said.
“Had he been some enemy who came from outside I might have valued him, respected him,” he continued. “But this is an enemy who kills his own people and covers it up with ideas. I have no respect for him, despite all his abilities to hide.”
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