Three days after witnessing the most devastating terrorist attack suffered by their country in years, the Russian people are in mourning. And the West is waiting for the Kremlin’s next step.
While a branch of the Islamic State (ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K) emphatically claimed responsibility for massacring 137 people in Moscow on Friday night, Vladimir Putin has insisted that Ukraine was responsible.
On Saturday, in his first public speech after the massacre, the Russian president did not mention ISIS entirely, instead declaring that “the Ukrainian side” had “prepared a window” for terrorists to flee to that country after the attack.
US intelligence insists, however, that it has “no reason to doubt” that IS was responsible and, in fact, warned a few weeks ago that such an attack was likely.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also denied involvement, saying: “The miserable Putin, instead of reassuring his own citizens, remained silent for a day thinking about how to link this to Ukraine.”
A suspect in Friday’s shooting at Crocus City Hall is escorted into the Russian Investigative Committee headquarters in Moscow.
ISIS released a sickening 90-second video showing in graphic detail how its four terrorists massacred 140 people.
Vladimir Putin lights a candle during his visit to a church in the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence on March 24 as the country observes a national day of mourning after the massacre.
Regardless, Putin clearly hopes to shift the blame to kyiv to shore up domestic support for his ongoing invasion and justify escalating the conflict.
Yesterday morning alone, Russia launched 57 cruise missiles at the Ukrainian capital and the western city of Lviv.
With Ukraine short of anti-missile weapons – and US aid stalled by Washington’s policy and the diversion of weapons to Israel – Russia aims to crush the defenders in a ruthless war of attrition.
Yet despite growing confidence in the Kremlin that victory in Ukraine can be secured, this attack – gruesome enough on its own, with a death toll likely to rise – has left Putin looking weak and helpless. .
Yes, four suspects accused of carrying out the shooting have been arrested and videos are circulating showing the men, with their arms tied behind their backs, being tortured by sadistic Russian captors. One was photographed with electrodes apparently attached to his genitals; another was allegedly forced to eat his own severed ear.
But arresting, humiliating and tormenting alleged perpetrators is too little, too late.
Ordinary Russians will now wonder if Putin could have stopped the attack before it happened. Had the old KGB man and his security services been distracted by concentrating on his intractable Ukrainian question?
Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, suspected of involvement in the concert hall attack, sits in the accused’s cage with a severed ear that is believed to have been fed to him.
After all, this is far from the first Islamist terrorist attack on Russian soil. In 2002 there was the Moscow theater siege, in which 132 hostages died, most of them, in fact, due to the sleeping gas released by the inept Russian special forces. Two years later, 334 people – including 186 children – were killed in the Beslan school shooting.
Putin used both occasions to justify intensifying attacks against Chechen Muslim separatists and to suppress internal opposition. His decisive intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, supporting President Assad against a range of enemies, including IS, further galvanized Muslim extremists against him.
In 2017, the St. Petersburg subway was bombed, killing 15 people and injuring 45.
And in recent years, Russia has fought IS factions – largely through proxy forces such as its now-disbanded Wagner Group – in countries on the edge of the Sahara, such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, in a bid to control the natural resources of Africa.
Together, all of this has helped motivate totalitarian Islamist sects against them. So, for all of Putin’s warmongering in Ukraine, his most dangerous domestic enemy is almost certainly Islamist terrorism. And that presents you with an additional problem.
Russia has a huge Muslim population: at least 14 million citizens and millions more migrant workers.
Russian media have claimed that the four suspects in Friday’s attack are from Tajikistan, a poor, Muslim-majority country in the former Soviet Union that supplies a large migrant population to Russia.
Putin desperately needs to avoid creating tensions in these communities to prevent more terrorist attacks or, worse, separatist wars breaking out in Russian regions with large Muslim populations.
He may have won another sham election and murdered his most powerful critic, Alexei Navalny, in an Arctic gulag.
But tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed in a “special operation” that was supposed to last just a few weeks when it was launched more than two years ago. The war has reached a stalemate, even if long-term conditions favor the Kremlin.
Now, a domestic terrorist attack has horrified his country, damaged his image as an invincible strongman and emboldened other Islamist extremists in volatile frontier regions of his expanding empire.
By blaming Ukraine for this rather than the real perpetrators, he may achieve a temporary propaganda victory. But increasing its attacks on Ukraine will only multiply the risk of that conflict escalating further and attracting other actors, including NATO.
Saving his own skin at enormous human cost is now Putin’s strategy. Will the Russians fall for their cruel ploy?
MARK ALMOND is director of the Crisis Research Institute at Oxford