The Moscow terror attack blame game has started

Who was behind Friday night’s terror attack in Moscow? A branch of the Islamic State terror group, ISIS-K, has claimed responsibility and US officials (who had warned two weeks ago that this was coming) said this sounded credible. But not to the Kremlin, which has not accepted the ISIS claim and says it’s looking at all options — even that of Ukrainian responsibility. 

Western intelligence warned the Kremlin of a likely terrorist attack on Russian soil weeks ago. The West is, by now, adept at keeping an eye on ISIS and its globetrotting jihadists which is why the US, Latvia, Canada, Sweden and Germany all issued public warnings to their citizens in Russia that such an attack might be likely. Only on Tuesday, Putin dismissed these warnings as “outright blackmail” whose aim was not to protect Russian civilians but “to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

We can now expect the Kremlin to deflect; Ukraine has already been dragged into the fallout

For a leader to fail to act on an intelligence tip is bad, but to angrily reject what turns out to be an accurate tip would be career-ending in a democracy. Russia is anything but, but the freshly “re-elected” Putin is still stuck for who to criticize. 

The Russian intelligence service has at least acknowledged that their American counterparts passed along warnings of an attack, the information was “of a general nature, without specifics,” according to the Russia state media agency TASS. The US has said that an attack was likely, and singled out music concerts as a likely target. There was no date or location but Putin’s critics (most now exist digitally or in exile) can ask why security was not increased. And, given that the Kremlin has decreed that these Western tip offs were nonsense, whether security were likely to be increased. 

For his part, the newly-elected Member of Parliament for Rochdale George Galloway has been considering the idea that the US, not ISIS, was behind the attack. He’s not alone. Pro-Kremlin talking heads have already started to disparage the US version of events, with one, the journalist and former Putin advisor Sergei Markov fueling the conspiracy theory that “the CIA lies all the time.” Margarita Simonyan, the sulfurous editor-in-chief of the state-controlled broadcaster RT, went a step further, saying on Telegram: “This was not ISIS. This was the Ukrainians. And the fact that, even before any arrests, before faces or names were known, the western intelligence services took it upon themselves to convince everyone that it was ISIS just exposes their guilty consciences.”

We can now expect the Kremlin to deflect; Ukraine has already been dragged into the fallout. Overnight, the Russian authorities detained two suspects in a car a few miles from the border with Belarus and Ukraine. The FSB, Russia’s security service and successor to the KGB, is claiming that the suspects “had relevant contacts on the Ukrainian side.”

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has angrily rejected US assurances that Kyiv had no hand in the attack. Unless Washington had proof they were willing to share with Russia, they didn’t have the right to “indulge” Kyiv in that way. 

The branch of ISIS that has claimed responsibility is based in Afghanistan and has reportedly been fixated on Russia for several years. Counterterrorism analysts have asserted that the branch has repeatedly accused the Kremlin of “having Muslim blood in its hands.” In their tirades they have referenced Moscow’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, the two wars waged against Chechnya between 1994 and 2009 aimed at squashing any idea of separatism in the Muslim republic, and helping Bashar al-Assad repress the Islamist uprising in Syria since 2015. ISIS has claimed responsibility for other attacks in Russia such as the 2017 bombing on the St. Petersburg metro which claimed the lives of fourteen victims, as well as several other smaller incidents in 2019, in which just one victim lost their life.

Some 115 people are now feared dead in the attack with many more still in hospital receiving treatment. One of the members of the rock band Picnic, who were due to perform at Crocus City Hall Friday night, is reportedly amongst the missing. The enormous blaze that engulfed the music venue took the whole night to extinguish and has reduced the building to a burnt-out shell. Russian social media is full of eyewitness accounts circulating on Telegram, groups of bodies have been found in some of the venue’s toilets and emergency stairwells. Lines of Muscovites rushing to donate blood formed outside donation centers across the capital Saturday.

Over twenty hours on from the attack, Putin finally addressed the tragedy. He offer condolences to the victims and their families and vowed that those responsible would be punished accordingly. Crucially, when talking about the perpetrators, he failed to mention ISIS even once, instead linking Ukraine to the attack. “They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine,” Putin said, “where, according to preliminary information, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border.”

It’s possible that Putin kept quiet for as long as he did in hope that an alternative explanation would emerge, and that he would not stand exposed for having rejected an American warning about a stadium terrorist attack. It took him three days to speak after the Kursk submarine sinking in 2000 and a day to speak after the Prigozhin rebellion last summer. The harder the explanation, the longer the pause. His address to the Russian nation, making no mention of ISIS, suggests he plans to plow on with this strategy.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.