It was clear even to the average Ivan that when Russia claimed victory over Chechen fighters who took over several villages in Dagestan last month, the fighting had not yet completely stopped. The Russian media - grievously biased in some of its past coverage, including of Kosovo last spring - has generally kept the public informed about the story in Dagestan.

Russian news sources also reported that the rebels, led by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and freelance Jordanian field commander Khattab, said their withdrawal was strategic and would be followed by a renewed attack.

Few need reminding that official statements from Moscow resemble those that came out of the 1994-1996 Chechen conflict, if not on the same scale of untruth.

But the tendency to lie about the situation and treat it as a minor matter to be taken care of with a handful of soldiers, mortars and helicopter gunships is more than an attempt to cover up military inadequacies. Analysts agree that Russian politicians are ignoring the deep-seated problems of Dagestan and the North Caucasus region as a whole. And their failure to own up to the real situation may ultimately do more damage than in Chechnya because, in this case, Russia may have a lot more to lose.

Grinding poverty, massive unemployment, pervasive corruption and the absence of any real benefit from Moscow's rule are just what's on the surface. Dagestan, along with many other Caucasus and Central Asian states, did not exist before delimitation under the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Such areas were previously ruled by provincial clans and khanates for which territorial delimitation and statehood was largely alien, and served Moscow's political interests.

The co-opting of local elites into the Soviet system served to keep Russia's regions under administrative and political control under the Soviet Union. But after 1991, the artificial nature of borders and ethnic groupings became abundantly apparent.

Even among Soviet-created states, Dagestan was a special case. There is no such thing as a Dagestani ethnic group. The region is a collection of 32 ethnic groups with nothing in particular to tie them together.

That, of course, doesn't mean they cannot get along and live in one state, which is exactly what they are currently doing. Moscow is lucky that the region as a whole is loyal to the federal government and that the incursion onto its territory of Chechen fighters - who are there, they say, to forge an Islamic state in the North Caucasus - has strengthened local opposition to separatist tendencies.

The Russian government should not now screw up what little it already has going for it. By avoiding the real issues for the sake of concentrating on jockeying for power in parliamentary elections this December and presidential ones next summer, politicians are making it worse for themselves in the short- and long-term.

By continuing its badly run military operation, Russia may disillusion the local Dagestani population by bombing their villages and not being able to protect them from the Chechen militants. That can hardly help incumbents in their schemes to stay in office.

But by ignoring the more deep-seated economic and social problems, Russia threatens not only to make the current conflict ongoing, but also deeper.

The government would do well to acknowledge its military inadequacies and address the problems in the North Caucasus instead of treating the issue as a minor headache caused solely by fundamentalist Islamic fanatics. For whereas the invaders may in fact be fanatic in trying to wage war in on Russian territory, their successes so far do much to point to Russia's problems in the region on all levels.