The Kremlin Fumbles a Terror Attack ... and Tries to Blame Ukraine

First, a massacre. Then the lies.

Flowers left by the burnt-out Crocus City Hall concert venue in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, on March 25, 2024. At least 137 people were killed when gunmen in camouflage stormed Crocus City Hall, shooting spectators before setting the building on fire in the most fatal attack in Europe to have been claimed by Islamic State jihadists. (Photo by Olga Maltseva / AFP via Getty Images)

AS NEWS OF THE TERROR ATTACK at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in suburban Moscow began to filter in on March 22, Russia’s tightly censored federal news channels were slow to react, presumably in the absence of official directives. Even when it was already known that there were scores of dead and wounded after several men set off explosives and fired automatic rifles at a crowd gathered for a sold-out concert, the TV-1 channel initially aired reports on the attack only in brief news updates between regularly scheduled programs such as a singing talent show. Even the rabid propagandist Anton Krasovsky complained, urging colleagues to “stop the fun and games.” But it took until the next day for the channel to announce a switch to special news programming.

There was no delay, though, in singing the “blame Ukraine” refrain. On the Rossiya-1 TV channel, Russia Today editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan declared that the Western media and intelligence agencies had stupidly tipped their hand by pinning the attack on ISIS even before the suspects were arrested—which could only mean that those agencies knew in advance the culprits would turn out to be Muslims who could pass as ISIS operatives. In fact, Simonyan asserted, there was “no doubt whatsoever” that it wasn’t ISIS but the Ukrainians and their Western “animal trainers.” Fellow propagandist Olga Skabeyeva, host of the Rossiya-1 show 60 Minutes, likewise claimed that Ukrainian intelligence had simply “found people who look like ISIS.” (The grisly and apparently authentic bodycam footage from the massacre released by ISIS-K, the terrorist network’s Central and South Asian branch, was roundly ignored.) NTV, a trashier channel, aired a deepfake video in which Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, appeared to celebrate the attack and acknowledge Ukraine’s responsibility. Even some Kremlin-loyal Russian social media users urged those who shared the clip to remove it as an obvious fake. Needless to say, no retraction or apology has followed—despite the fact that when Vladimir Putin addressed the nation some nineteen hours after the attack, he avoided blaming the Ukrainians directly and claimed only that a “window” had been created for the terrorists to escape to Ukraine.

At a meeting with top officials on Monday, Putin finally named “radical Islamists” as the perpetrators of the terror attack while suggesting that there were still many unanswered questions about who was really behind it, who stood to benefit, and why the terrorists were allegedly headed toward the Ukrainian border. Once again, he limited himself to innuendo and speculation potentially implicating Ukraine and its Western allies: “This atrocity may be merely one link in a long chain of attempts made by those who have waged war on our country since 2014, using the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev [sic] as its tool.”¹ A few hours later, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the TASS news agency that it was “inappropriate” at this juncture to talk about Moscow’s possible reaction to evidence of Kyiv’s complicity, since the investigation was still underway. Perhaps he should talk to Simonyan.

On the other side, some Ukrainian officials and a number of Russian dissident (mostly expatriate) pundits have pointed the finger at the Kremlin itself, even after ISIS-K took responsibility. Foremost among these was former Russian TV journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who asserted that the Kremlin was the sole beneficiary of the attack and almost certainly its principal organizer. Like other supporters of this theory, Nevzorov referenced the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and two other Russian cities, which killed over 300 people, brought Putin popularity and the presidency, and gave him an excuse to start a new war in Chechnya. It has long been widely suspected that those 1999 bombings were a false flag operation. In this case, Nevzorov believes that the motive for the attack was to give the war in Ukraine a belated rationale and whip up the mostly apathetic population into a pro-war frenzy, as well as to divert the world’s attention from Russia’s continuing war crimes in Ukraine and the Putin regime’s blatantly rigged election earlier this month.

Other dissident Russian journalists who now ply their craft as YouTube commentators disagree. The usually reliable analyst Michael Nacke has argued that the motives offered for Putin’s culpability in the concert hall attack make no sense: In contrast to 1999, when Russia still had a flawed but real democracy with a viable opposition and independent media, Russia today is already a “full-fledged military dictatorship,” with “no checks and balances that could stop Vladimir Putin from doing anything”—launching a new round of mobilization, using more ruthless tactics in Ukraine, or declaring martial law in Russia. Yes, Nacke conceded, mobilization will cause discontent, mostly because it makes people feel that they’re being scammed by reports of Russia’s glorious victories in Ukraine and used as cannon fodder, but “a terror attack won’t change that.” What’s more, Nacke points out, the Putin regime has already repeatedly accused Ukraine of terrorism, applying the label to all Ukrainian strikes on Russian soil—such as the recent drone strikes at oil refineries—or on Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. Nacke believes that ISIS is the only credible culprit, especially after its release of the gruesome bodycam video.

Similar points have been made on the exiled liberal channel TV-Rain. Russian political scientist Ekaterina Shulman, who is currently living in Germany and has been labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, noted that even if Putin did need a pretext for harsher measures on the Ukrainian front or at home, the recent cross-border raids by Ukraine-sponsored Russian insurgents on Russia’s Belgorod region—where intense fighting has raged for over two weeks—would have been more than sufficient.

On the YouTube channel Zhivoi Gvozd’ (Live Nail), a hub for refugees from the Ekho Moskvy radio station which was shut down in the early days of the war, former Ekho editor-in-chief Alexei Venediktov pointed out that there had been several reports of ISIS-K activity in Russia just in March: a clash between Russian federal troops and a group of ISIS-K fighters in the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia; a raid on an ISIS-K cell in Kaluga, about a hundred miles southwest of Moscow; and an operation targeting an ISIS-K henchman in the Moscow area. Venediktov reasonably noted that no one was paying attention because of bigger news from Ukraine—which is why the seemingly sudden, out-of-nowhere emergence of ISIS-K in Russia leaves many people nonplussed and prompts speculation about a setup. (While many people have accused Venediktov of being too conciliatory toward the Kremlin, he stressed that he believes there are valid questions about possible FSB involvement in the 1999 apartment bombings but not in the concert hall attack.)

Other analysts are on the fence: Roman Dobrokhotov, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Russian-language news site the Insider, has said that he regards Putin as a “suspect” and that if the regime does try to decisively pin the blame on Kyiv, it will be a clue pointing to the Kremlin’s own guilt.

---

OBVIOUSLY, THE STORY IS STILL UNFOLDING. But so far, at least, the case made by Nacke and Venediktov comes across as fairly strong while Nevzorov’s cui bono explanation is quite shaky. As far as wanting to whip the Russian populace into a “sacred war” frenzy, a number of people have argued that Putin may not actually want genuine pro-war enthusiasm, which could easily lead to anger about the way the war is being conducted: it’s no accident that the leader of the war hawks, Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, is currently serving a four-year sentence for “discrediting the Russian army.”

Motives aside, Russian leadership seems to have been caught flat-footed by the Crocus City Hall attack, as evidenced by Putin’s blatant fumbling for “Ukrainian footprints” and the equally obvious consternation about how to spin the advance warnings of an ISIS strike in Russia from U.S. intelligence. If Putin had been staging a terrorist attack, would he have dismissed the Western warnings in a publicly reported meeting with federal security officials just three days before the attack?

In yet another botched move, Russia’s attempt to argue that the terrorists were fleeing to Ukraine with Ukrainian connivance was undercut by an ally when Belarusian ambassador to Russia Dmitry Krutoi praised his country’s special services for helping “make sure the terrorists did not escape across our common border,” clearly implying that they were headed to Belarus, not Ukraine.

The likelihood that the Putin regime and the FSB were not behind the Crocus City Hall attack does not mean, of course, that the regime and its propaganda machine won’t try to use the attack for its own agenda. A column distributed by the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency claims that writers who defended Ukraine’s right to treat war propagandists like Darya Dugina (and in some cases actual war criminals such as Vladlen Tatarsky) as legitimate targets were responsible for the Crocus slaughter because they had supposedly “said, and said constantly, that a good Russian is a dead Russian.” Of course, not one of them had actually said it, but never mind. So began the shifting of blame from the actual culprits to the regime’s favored enemies.

---

ONE COULD EASILY ARGUE that while the 1999 terror attacks in Russia helped Vladimir Putin consolidate his power by amping up the demand for a “firm hand” at the helm, the 2024 terror attack may hurt him by exposing how much the “firm hand” has slipped after twenty-five years. Small wonder the Kremlin promptly released a two-minute video clip, first made public on the Telegram channel of TV-1 propagandist Pavel Zarubin, that showed a focused and energetic Putin at his desk in the hours after the attacks, briskly talking on the phone to security officials (but, notably, alone in the shot, without any advisers or security officials physically close to him).

The video doesn’t change the fact that the security Putin promised lies in a shambles, in Belgorod and now in Moscow. As Shulman put it on TV-Rain: “Russian special services didn’t organize this terror attack; they dropped the ball on it.” Independent journalists were also scathingly critical of the slow police response that kept firefighters and paramedics from entering the building long after the terrorists had left, almost certainly adding to the death toll.

Videos and photos showing the torture of the captured suspects, posted to Telegram channels allegedly close to Russian security services, added another macabre twist to the story. (Simonyan noted on Telegram that she felt “extremely satisfied” by the four men’s battered and bloodied look as they were brought into the courtroom to face formal charges.) And in yet another twist, it turns out that members of the Russian ultranationalist group Rusich—which was once a unit in the late, unlamented Wagner mercenary company and which incorporates openly neo-Nazi elements, including a self-proclaimed Nazi notorious for a 2009 video in which he beheaded a puppy—were involved in the capture and the torture of the alleged terrorists.

Whether the Crocus City Hall tragedy and its fallout will damage the Putin regime in the eyes of the Russian public, most of which doesn’t follow the independent media, remains to be seen. But independent commentators like Shulman, at least, were quick to see the obvious irony of the Russian “security” state failing to prevent mass carnage by ISIS while hunting such “extremists” as LGBT activists, antiwar poets, and mourners for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny. “No rainbow earrings, no ‘Say No to War’ placards,” journalist Yulia Latynina commented wryly. “If those guys had showed up with a ‘Say No to War’ placard, then cut and dry, they would have been grabbed at once.”

1. It should be noted that Putin’s accusation looks far more direct in the Associated Press translation, which renders the remark as, “This crime can only be a link in a chain of attempts by those who are at war with our country since 2014.” But while Putin’s remark is ambiguous because some words have multiple meanings, the context leaves little doubt that the less definitive version is correct.