Hundreds of police reinforcements were sent to Russia's north-western town of Kondopoga on Monday as ethnic tensions spiralled after a wave of anti-Chechen violence, bringing warnings of possible intervention from the Chechen prime minister.
About 30 young people were arrested and 13 charged in an overnight attempt to burn down a Chechen-owned restaurant in Kondopoga, in the Karelia region near Russia's border with Finland, a regional police spokesman told AFP.
The arrests brought the total number of people detained in two days of racist violence to 150, the spokesman said. About 90 of them have been fined and released and about 35 are still being held, he added.
The restaurant was the site of a barfight on Tuesday between ethnic Russians and ethnic Chechens that left two of the Russians dead, provoking riots that targeted Chechen-owned businesses over the weekend. Regional police have sent 400 officers to Kondopoga to help maintain order, the police spokesman said.
Officials including Karelia regional head Sergei Katanandov have sought to play down the ethnic nature of the attacks, blaming "hooligans" and calling for calm.
Chechen officials and Muslim religious leaders have had far sharper reactions.
"The feebleness of the local authorities testifies to their helplessness," said Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, a former warlord handpicked by the Kremlin to help run his war-shattered homeland, in a statement Monday.
"If the Karelian authorities cannot find forms and methods to resolve the situation, then we will be able to find legal methods to return the situation to a lawful course," Kadyrov said.
Kadyrov also sent a Chechen parliamentary delegation to the region, which brought quick condemnation from Kamil Kalandarov, a member of the Russian presidential human rights commission, as well as Karelia's regional administration.
"We are very worried that the Chechen parliament and (Kadyrov) are interfering in the conflict," Kalandarov said in an interview on radio station Ekho Moskvy. "One Russian region should not interfere in the affairs of another."
Karelia administration spokesman Alexander Smirnov concurred, telling Ekho Moskvy: "Ramzan Kadyrov is rattling his saber ... He thinks that Chechens have been victimised here, when in fact the reverse is true."
Six suspects in the barfight killings - natives of Chechnya and neighbouring Ingushetia - have been arrested and turned over to prosecutors, the police spokesman said. Kondopoga has already become a rallying point for Russian nationalists, including the xenophobic Movement Against Illegal Immigration, which sent activists to Karelia over the weekend and warned ethnic Caucasians in a statement on its website to flee the region.