Islamic State claimed the Moscow attack. Why is Putin accusing Ukraine and the West?

Ukraine

Laura King March 27, 2024

Did Russian President Vladimir Putin overplay his hand?

Only five days after Putin breezed to another six-year term in power following a heavily stage-managed election, Russia suffered its deadliest terror attack in decades. At least 140 people died when attackers stormed Crocus City Hall, a shopping and entertainment complex on Moscows northwest edge, first raking concertgoers with gunfire and then setting the venue ablaze.

Putins near-immediate response to Friday’s attack was to blame Ukraine, the neighboring sovereign country he has spent the last two years trying to subdue militarily. The government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vehemently denied any involvement in the attack.

On the face of it, analysts say, Putins accusation against Ukraine makes no sense.

The Islamist group ISIS-K, an offshoot of Islamic State, quickly claimed responsibility, and even proffered self-shot video footage of the attack as proof. U.S. intelligence

officials

had publicly and privately warned that such an attack inside Russia by Islamist militants was in the works, though its assessment of imminent danger was made a few weeks before the actual strike. Putin publicly dismissed the warnings as attempts to intimidate Russia.

Putins apparatus has pivoted in recent days to grudging acknowledgment that the likely culprits had an agenda unrelated to Ukraine: revenge for years of carnage carried out by Russian security forces in Syria, Chechnya and other Muslim states.

After the attack, Russias main security service, the FSB, reported the arrests of 11 people. The four suspected gunmen, who have been identified as Tajik nationals, were brought into court over the weekend on terrorism charges, appearing battered and brutalized. One appeared to be drifting in and out of consciousness.

But the Russian leader and his senior lieutenants have continued to insist that Ukraine played some role in the attack and have widened the scope of the accusation to include Ukraines Western backers.

The FSB head, Alexander Bortnikov, said Tuesday that investigators believed that while radical Islamists carried out the actual attack, Western special services assisted, and Ukrainian special services played a direct role. Bortnikov cited no evidence to support the assertion.

William Courtney, a former U.S. ambassador to the ex-Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Georgia, said the whole scenario amounted to a major blunder on the part of the 71-year-old Russian leader.

I think this is a huge propaganda misstep, to somehow lay it off on Ukraine, said Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow with the

RandRAND

Corp., a nonpartisan think tank.

Putin, he said, may have calculated that the embarrassment of not having prevented the attack is lessened because it is cast as a big Western effort, not just from tiny Tajikistan.

But he and others also noted a hallmark of Stalinist-style strongmen: to turn a particularly audacious falsehood the so-called Big Lie into a blunt-force assertion of power, daring anyone to question what their own eyes and ears tell them.

A key element of Putins political brand over nearly a quarter-century in power has been his perceived ability to keep Russia safe, and the concert hall

attack

undercuts that notion.

The florid accusations against Ukraine and the West combined with authorities’ public flaunting of acts such as cutting off part of one suspects ear are likely calculated to divert attention from intelligence lapses that led to the attack, longtime Russia watchers said.

On the whole, Russias response to terrorism in the Putin years has been almost performatively brutal, analyst and journalist Edward Lucas wrote in an online article for the Center for European Policy Analysis. But he added that the seeming ease with which the attackers struck served to dent the FSBs credibility at all levels.

The Crocus attack pointed up another uneasy truth: Enormous security resources in Russia are devoted to shutting down all forms of domestic dissent. A muted but determined public outpouring following the death in an Arctic prison last month of Alexei Navalny, Putins fiercest and most vocal critic, was a reminder of continuing opposition to the Russian leaders rule.

With independent media voices silenced and civil society groups disbanded or driven into exile, any breath of criticism against Putins government on virtually any subject advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, for example is branded as terrorist activity.

The ugly aftermath of the concert hall attack is also entwined with the even uglier dynamics of the Ukraine war.

Russia, which has lately regained battlefield momentum after a string of early failures, has been battering the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and other cities with the most punishing drone and missile attacks in months. The renewed ferocity of attacks against civilian areas would likely have occurred anyway, analysts say, but Putin can use the concert hall strike as a pretext for stepped-up bombardment.

Zelensky has sought to draw attention to lagging support from allies, particularly the United States, where congressional Republicans have blocked assistance and weaponry. Delays are deadly, the Ukrainian leader said.

Ukraine needs more air defense, said Zelensky. This is security for our cities, and saves human lives.

As the

Ukraine

war drags on, Putin will need to mobilize more and more troops something he has managed to do so far, but the conflicts ripple effects are being felt more widely across Russian society.

In one small but telling example, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov last week acknowledged for the first time that Russias actions in Ukraine constituted a war.

That might have been obvious for some time to the rest of the world, but in the wake of the full-scale invasion of Feb. 22, 2022, Putins government confined itself to the term special military operation.

That term still applies, Peskov told reporters, but he denounced the involvement of the collective West as a continuing escalation and provocation.

De facto, it has become a war for us, he said.