System for monitoring ethnic conflicts to appear in Russia by end of 2015

The system of monitoring, analyzing and predicting inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions will be launched in Russia by the end of the year, Federal Agency on Nationality Issues head Igor Barinov said on Thursday.

In an interview with the Kommersant daily, Barinov said: “We plan that the system will start working by the end of the year” adding that it is the agency’s priority task at the moment.

The system will rely on data from Rosstat federal statistics service, Federal Security Service, Federal Protective Service, Interior Ministry and Federal Financial Monitoring Service, Barinov noted. “The main difficulty is to connect software, sociology and expert estimates. In this connection is the key to obtaining effective monitoring data that will allow us to understand why the situation is complicated in this or that region. It could be uncontrolled migration or prevailing of one nationality in a certain economic sphere,” he added.

“National problems always accompany crisis, social injustice, corruption. Domestic, economic and criminal factors lead to conflicts. Existing systems mostly state this or that event post factum. And we need to create a system that would show where and why these problems are accumulating, predict developments, analyze for federal and local authorities,” Barinov concluded.