Russia’s Tragedy, Putin’s Humiliation

Terrorists struck deep inside Russia on Friday, and the conspiracy theories are already spinning.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Three Realities

If you are trying to figure out who attacked a Russian rock concert and why they slaughtered and wounded dozens of people, your confusion is understandable. In an era when social media spews chaff and deception during every crisis, some fairly straightforward issues get obscured in all the drama.

As we untangle the ghastly attack just outside of Moscow, bear in mind three realities about politics in Russia.

First, some terrorist groups have a long-standing hatred of the Russians, and mass-casualty attacks in Russia’s cities are not new. Americans, scarred by 9/11, often think that they are the prime target of Islamist extremists, but over the past two decades, Russia has endured more mass-casualty terror attacks from Islamist extremists than the United States, including barbaric assaults on a school and a downtown Moscow theater. The most recent massacre is only one of a series of such attacks in Russia over the past 30 years.

Second, reliable information will be scarce for some time. The immediate Russian response in such circumstances is to clamp down on the media while government officials mostly dummy up, in part because people who may have been asleep at the switch will already be engaging in desperate ass-covering. And third, always remember that Russia and its useful idiots in the West will try to shift blame and obfuscate as much as possible as they try to blow the stench of failure away from Moscow.

Let’s start with what we know—or what we think we know—at this point.

On Friday, gunmen opened fire at a crowd gathered for a concert at the Crocus City Hall, a music venue that is part of a shopping mall in the Moscow suburbs. So far, Russian authorities say at least 139 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. The Islamic State (ISIS) has claimed responsibility, but American officials, according to The New York Times, are connecting the attack to ISIS-K. As an NPR report noted yesterday, ISIS-K is a regional group (the K stands for the Khorasan area of Central Asia) that has declared its loyalty to the larger ISIS in the Middle East, and it “is fighting or has declared hostilities against Al Qaeda, China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, the Taliban and the United States,” but it has a particular animosity for Russia: Moscow’s troops have fought ISIS there in support of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

So far, the Russian government hasn’t publicly accepted the ISIS claim, but before the attack, American intelligence sources were so concerned about the possibility of an ISIS-K assault in Moscow that the State Department warned U.S. citizens to stay away from big gatherings; the Americans reached out and warned the Kremlin as well. Whether the Russian government took these warnings seriously is still unclear.

The Russians have now arrested people, and four of them—all from neighboring Tajikistan—showed up in court looking like they’d been severely beaten. No surprise there, but the next development to watch for is whether they make detailed confessions. (Two of them, according to the Russians, have admitted guilt.)

Putin, in a predictable authoritarian move, is trying to pin this attack on the Ukrainians, whose government has denied any involvement. He was just “reelected” (with the Kremlin’s laughable claim that he netted 87 percent of the vote), and his crusade against putative Ukrainian Nazis looks like lethal incompetence if Islamist terrorists can walk into Russia from next door while Russia’s security agencies are focused elsewhere. He must assert that Ukrainians were involved; otherwise, he has a lot of explaining to do about why he’s butchering Orthodox Slavs in Ukraine while Russians are being butchered by Islamist terrorists in Moscow.

Authoritarian governments, of course, aren’t big on explaining anything to anyone, and Putin, as is his habit during a crisis, initially hunkered down and stayed silent. (This is why, by the way, I don’t think this was a “false flag” or inside job. Not that I would put it past the spooks and ghouls in the Russian intelligence services—they’ve done it before—but this situation is too embarrassing for Putin. If the attack were an inside job, the Kremlin would have set it up better than this incredible mess.)

Earlier today, Putin finally acknowledged that “radical Islamists” were behind the attack, but he was still trying to somehow tie them to Ukraine. The suspects will probably be required to support Putin’s line—as soon as Putin settles on one—but the Russian president’s attempt to pin all this on Ukraine will probably become more difficult as we learn more, including whatever the United States chooses to release about the warnings it offered to Russia.

Fortunately for the Kremlin, however, Russia has apologists in the West who are already more than happy to carry forward the charge of Ukrainian involvement. The entrepreneur David Sacks—a man who almost daily illustrates the problem of plutocrats who think that their wealth qualifies them to speak about any subject—posted on X that if “the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it, else we become complicit.”

Sacks then preemptively griped about the inevitable “bogus community note” that he knew was coming. (On X, these “community notes” allow other people to correct what they believe is bad information in a post.) “I’m aware that Ukraine has denied responsibility for the attack. I’m also aware that such denials don’t mean much; in fact they are part of a pattern.” Not as much of a pattern as Islamist extremist attacks in Russia, but for many of the Westerners siding with Russia, history began only a few years ago, when Russia tried to complete its takeover of Ukraine.

Sacks isn’t clever enough to create really detailed nonsense. For that, we must go to the former Fox News regular and retired colonel Douglas Macgregor (whose 2020 nomination by Donald Trump to be ambassador to Germany was stopped in the Senate). Macgregor, also posting on X, claimed that the “perpetrators of the terrorist attack in Russia escaped from Russia into Ukraine near Belgorod and are directly tied to Muslim elements fighting on behalf of” Ukraine. He added that they were “allegedly paid about 500,000 rubles of which 250K was paid upfront. An unknown third party provided weapons.”

Macgregor also posted that he has “little doubt” that “MI-6/CIA were involved.” Of course, Macgregor has no way of knowing any of this, but it all sounds like a cool spy movie. It’s only a matter of time before this narrative gathers steam in the right-wing ecosystem, because the charge that the terrorists escaped through Ukraine is basically Putin’s line—although Putin has claimed only that this was the plan, not that any of them had made it out. (It’s a long way from Moscow to Belgorod.)

The immediate question for Ukraine, and for the United States, is how far Putin will go to shift the blame for this horrific tragedy away from himself and onto his various enemies. For now, the Ukrainians will bear the brunt of Putin’s anger. Gangsters don’t take humiliation well, and Putin will want someone to pay, even if it’s just those who have the misfortune to be within his immediate reach. As always, the price will fall on ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, and potentially millions of other people who are cursed with living under—or too near—Putin’s neofascist regime.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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