Putin, ‘False Flags’, and a Massacre in Moscow
Mehdi’s Monday Memo on Russia, Israel, and the response to terrorism
On Friday evening, the Russian rock group Piknik was getting ready to perform in front of a sold-out audience at the Crocus City Hall, a massive complex home to a concert venue, shopping mall, and conference center on the outskirts of Moscow. Before the group could take to the stage, four gunmen dressed in camouflage gear and armed with automatic weapons entered the concert hall and began spraying bullets into the crowd.
They murdered at least 137 people, including three children. People were shot and killed in cold blood as “they huddled against the windows.” There were more than two dozen bodies found in one of the venue’s bathrooms, “which included ‘many mothers’ clasping their children, while 14 others were discovered in an emergency exit stairwell.”
Coming just days after a landslide victory for President Vladimir Putin, in what was a decidedly unfree and unfair election, this was the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia for 20 years.
How on earth did it happen? How were the attackers, as one report notes, able to saunter through “unguarded metal detectors towards the auditorium” and why do the videos from eyewitnesses show “no sign of Russian police or special forces anywhere in the building”? Or as Russian dissident, Putin critic, and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov asked on Twitter, how in “Moscow, one of the most surveilled places in the world, with so much security you cannot say ‘no war’ without being arrested in 30 seconds, this went on for so long and they escaped?”
The gunmen, according to Russian authorities, have since been detained and charged, but there are still plenty of unanswered questions. They include the biggest one of all: who did it?
The ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan, ISIS-K, has claimed responsibility for the massacre in Moscow. A U.S. official told the Washington Post that the United States had “no reason to doubt” the claim from ISIS. According to counterterrorism expert Colin Clarke of the Soufan Group “ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years” because they believe the Kremlin has “Muslim blood in its hands, referencing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.”
Yet there is also much talk of “false flags,” of this particular terror attack being committed by one party but blamed on another.
The Russians, despite fighting extremists in places like Chechnya and Syria for decades, don’t seem too keen to hold ISIS responsible for this particular act of carnage. They’re pointing the finger in - surprise! - Kyiv’s direction. A prominent Russian oligarch called for a nuclear strike on Ukraine while the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, and the country’s former president, Dmitry Medvedev, said that if Ukrainian involvement was proved, all those involved “must be tracked down and killed without mercy, including officials of the state that committed such outrage.”
On Saturday, Putin issued a recorded address in which he made no mention of ISIS but claimed the four suspected gunmen “tried to hide and were moving toward Ukraine, where, according to preliminary information, the Ukrainian side had prepared a window for them to cross the border.”
Neither Putin nor Medvedev have provided any actual evidence of Ukrainian involvement.
The Ukrainians, meanwhile, have returned the favor, accusing the Russian security services of orchestrating the attack on its own citizens “at the behest of Putin” in order “to justify even tougher strikes on Ukraine and total mobilization on Russia.”
But they, too, have provided no actual evidence of Russian government involvement.
So who to believe? Well, lest we forget, this isn’t the first time that a government led by Vladimir Putin has been accused of carrying out a “false flag” attack on civilians inside of Russia to gin up support for controversial military action. Remember the run-up to the Second Chechen War? As the Associated Press reminded us over the weekend:
Over a two-week period in September 1999, four apartment buildings were bombed in Moscow and two other cities, killing a total of 307 people. Officials blamed militants from the separatist region of Chechnya.
But serious doubts about the claim of Chechen involvement arose when officials reported sacks of explosives attached to a detonator in an apartment building in Ryazan. Three men with cards identifying them as members of the Federal Security Service, which Putin had headed until becoming prime minister a month prior, were detained on suspicion of planting the material.
The security service later claimed it had been conducting a drill and the sacks contained harmless material. But by then, Putin had used the incident to justify launching an air assault on the Chechen capital, beginning the second full-scale war in the region.
Within four months of the apartment bombings, Prime Minister Putin had also replaced Boris Yeltsin and ascended to the Russian presidency. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Look, anyone who has followed my journalistic output over the past two decades knows that I am no fan of conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, when it comes to Putin and “false flags,” this isn’t some mad online fantasy from tin-foil-hat-wearing loons. Former Russian spy Alexander Litvinkenko wrote an entire book accusing the Russian secret service, the FSB, of staging the apartment bombings. Liberal Russian politician Sergei Yushenkov, who was vice chairman of an official commission formed to investigate the apartment bombings, also viewed the FSB as responsible. Another prominent Russian skeptic of the official Kremlin account, that blamed Chechen terrorists for the attacks, was investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
All three of them were murdered.
So, on Friday night in Moscow, was it ISIS, the Ukrainians, or the Russians themselves? We don’t know - though, so far, only ISIS is trying to claim responsibility and only ISIS is putting out pre-attack pictures of the gunmen, as well as post-attack gory videos.
What we do know for sure is that, on March 7, the U.S. Embassy in Russia tweeted that it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts.” How did Putin respond? By dismissing that warning from the U.S. as “outright blackmail” with the “intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”
Could this be the Russian president’s very own “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” moment? A massive failure of domestic security and political leadership? And, if it was a terrorist attack by extremists that caught the Kremlin by surprise, is Putin now planning on cynically exploiting it to justify an escalation in Ukraine, the same way that George W. Bush used 9/11 to justify an invasion of (an unconnected) Iraq? Still, “the fact that the Kremlin will use the attack for political purposes does not mean it was a false flag,” argued Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College, London, on Twitter.
To be clear: whether the Russian government was behind this attack, complicit in this attack, or just utterly unprepared for this heinous attack, whether it was cock-up or conspiracy, a newly re-elected Vladimir Putin has many, many questions to answer.
Does Russia Get a Pass Too?
On a side note: now that Russia has been hit by a brutal terrorist attack, do Western governments support Vladimir Putin’s right to flatten entire towns and cities, as well as refugee camps, schools, and hospitals, in the name of self-defense? Will they be endorsing the Russian leader’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in order to defeat the terrorists? Does Moscow get to block foreign reporters and undermine UN investigators with the full blessing of Washington and London?
Or do we in the West only give that pass to Benjamin Netanyahu?
#justasking
What I Am Reading
The stock market is up, unemployment is down, and yet Americans still tell pollsters in survey after survey that they’re dissatisfied and disgruntled with both their personal lives and the direction of the country. So what’s up? Two psychiatrists writing in The Atlantic claim to have discovered the underlying, non-economic, non-material cause:
Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors can’t fully account for America’s national malaise. We believe that’s because they’re overlooking a crucial factor.
Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
What I Am Watching
Al Jazeera obtained this video below from an Israeli drone in Gaza, operating above Khan Younis in February, showing four apparently unarmed Palestinians searching for their bombed-out homes and being vaporized in multiple air strikes. There has been little to no coverage in the U.S. or UK media of this shocking footage. (Warning: graphic imagery)
The Israeli military now claims to be investigating these four deaths.
What I Am Quoting
“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” - Finley Peter Dunne
Where I Have Been Interviewed
I was live on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC last week, debating the media’s coverage of Gaza with Brian as well as taking calls from his listeners.
I also taped a long podcast interview with NewsNation host Chris Cuomo, in which we debated the threat to democracy and civil liberties from a Trump second term. I am told it will drop tomorrow.
***Reminders***
Thank you again for all your support for this new media endeavor. Zeteo, though, is still in soft-launch mode. Our shows, and full content and list of contributors, won’t be released until mid-to-late April.
In the meantime, have you watched our recent sitdown interview with South African Foreign Minister Dr. Naledi Pandor? Or my Zoom townhall with our founding members on Islamophobia and the media? Have you shared our trailer video with your friends and family members?
Love this update on what you have been up to, where we can see and hear you and your take on hot stories.
Putin has been accused multiple times of attacking his own people and infrastructure. That, in the face of multiple western authorities openly claiming that their aim is to weaken Russia. To me, it is more likely that the West (MI5, CIA, etc.) is responsible for the attacks on Russia (their stated enemy) than that Russia is attacking itself.