Vladimir Putin and his intelligence agencies portrayed (you guessed it) the horrific ISIS terror attack on a concert hall near Moscow towards Ukraine, the United States and Britain.
Putin wants to deflect attention from the incredible failure of his security agencies to prevent the attack or their possible complicity in the Crocus City Hall music media massacre.
Sorry for my paranoia, I’m leaning towards the explanation of the moment.
Either way, it is clear that Putin will benefit from the terrorist attack. He will use the baseless accusation of complicity by Ukraine and the West as an excuse for additional military mobilization and increased commercial production for his war against Ukraine, and to justify sacrifice for the Russian people.
And Putin will get help from the inactive and destructive MAGA-led minority in the U. S. House of Representatives, which is still blocking a vote on aid to Ukraine as it goes on a two-week vacation.
This myopia of the MAGA fuels Putin’s apparent confidence that he can exploit ISIS’s attack at home and through propaganda abroad. It is therefore worth taking a look at the background behind the clumsiness – or worse – of Russian security installations during the terrorist attack.
ISIS quickly claimed responsibility for the attack that killed more than 130 people. The intelligence in particular attributed it to an Afghanistan-based associate known as ISIS-K, known for disparaging Putin’s Russia for its crackdown on Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Still, the Kremlin rejected a March 7 U. S. intelligence alert that ISIS-K was planning an attack on Moscow in the coming days and warned that gigantic gatherings and concert halls should be avoided.
Putin called the warning “provocative” to “destabilize Russian society. “
Perhaps this is just further proof of the oft-demonstrated incompetence of Russia’s main intelligence service, the FSB (the successor to the Soviet KGB). “When it comes to genuine paintings against terrorists, they don’t,” Natalia Gevorkyan, one of the first Russian journalists to write about the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union, told me, “They’re incredibly dead when you’re needed to need them. “
In fact, in two of Russia’s most notorious Islamist terror attacks, security not only failed to save them, but was to blame for most of the casualties.
When terrorists from the North Caucasus stormed Moscow’s North-Ost theater in 2002 and took more than 700 spectators, players and staff hostage, Russian special forces injected poisonous fuel into the theater, killing as many as 130 victims of the attack. Many survivors died when the special forces refused to give doctors the formula for the fuel, so no antidote can be administered.
And when Chechen militants took more than 1,000 students, parents and hostages hostage at a school in the city of Beslan in 2004, Russian security forces stormed the school in a failed rescue attempt that killed another 334 people, most of them children.
But the alleged terrorist attack that first comes to mind, after last week’s killings, is a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999. These were attributed through Putin, then minister, to the Chechens as a pretext to liberate the brutal Second Chechen War. , which facilitated his ascension to the presidency in 2000.
I will never again feel the emotion I felt when I visited the site of a bomb in a Moscow apartment building in 1999 with a Russian friend who was paying tribute to the 119 innocent victims who had died there.
Subsequent detailed investigations, carried out by courageous Russian journalists and a former FSB agent, eventually revealed irrefutable evidence that the FSB had staged the attacks, possibly to elect Putin. The Russian leader then pulverized Chechen cities and towns with Russian bomb attacks, just as he is doing lately in Ukraine.
Even if the most recent attack wasn’t a planned false flag operation, it’s hard to understand why Russian intelligence, in the face of U. S. warning, didn’t provide additional security at the concert hall, or why they let the killing continue for more than a year and allowed the terrorists to escape.
Although 4 alleged culprits were arrested, we will probably never know if it was them or if it was just 4 unfortunate Tajik immigrants conveniently arrested and tortured to get them to confess.
What we do know is that on March 22, the same day as the attack on the concert hall, Putin ordered a new mobilization of another 300,000 people to capture Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. It is the first time that Russia has been in a “state of war” in Ukraine, despite the fact that everything abandoned Putin’s false claim of the past two years that it was only a “special operation of the army”.
We also know that on Tuesday, the head of the Russian FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, falsely claimed on Russian television that Ukraine and a Western special had “facilitated” the attack by “radical Islamists. “
The message is clear: while MAGA lawmakers block aid to Ukraine, leaving Ukrainian troops and civilians defenseless, Putin is employing a fatal terrorist attack to justify escalating his terror war against Ukrainian civilians. In a way, ISIS-K, Putin, MAGA teacher Donald Trump, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. , are all wired to facilitate terrorist crimes in Ukraine.
House Speaker Mike Johnson can still break that chain by introducing a transparent bill on aid to Ukraine. He can still save Ukraine, with the backing of Republican lawmakers who continue to cherish former President Ronald Reagan.
But will he and the realists in the Republican Party have the ability to act, and to do so in time?