OPINION / EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — On the night of March 22, four masked individuals armed with automatic weapons entered the Crocus City Hall in the Russian capital of Moscow and opened fire a crowd of individuals, killing over a 133, wounding many more and sending hundreds of people fleeing from the scene of this terrorist attack.
After the incident, the terrorists reportedly fled the scene in a white Renault sedan and were suspected of fleeing into a wooded area on the outskirts of Moscow. By March 23, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that Russian authorities had detained 15 individuals suspected of being involved in the attack, including the four gunmen. Not surprisingly, the FSB also claimed that the suspects were apprehended as they were attempting to flee Russia in the direction of Ukraine, where they expected to be met by facilitators – a subtle way of implying that the Ukrainian Government was linked to the attack.
Being less subtle, Russian President Vladimir Putin directly accused Kyiv of being responsible for the attack, and former Russian Prime Minister and President Dmitriy Medvedev warned that “if” Moscow determined that the Ukrainians were involved, it would target Ukrainian leaders in retaliation, which was an odd statement given that the Kremlin has been targeting Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky and his cabinet since February 2022, if not earlier.
In the West, pundits immediately took to social media to opine that the attack was staged by the Kremlin as part of a false flag operation. While some commentators claimed the operation was designed to give Putin an excuse to clamp down even further on Russia’s civil society, others argued that the false flag would be used to justify a nation-wide military mobilization. The Ukrainian authorities, understanding the Kremlin’s mentality and tactics well, were quick to deny they had any hand in the attack.
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The U.S. Government supported Kyiv’s denial, which in the sad reality of today’s world, will only make the Russians more suspicious about Kyiv’s alleged involvement. But Washington also reminded the world that the U.S. had passed the Russians intelligence about a plan by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – Khorosan (ISIS-K) to launch attacks in Russia in connection with the Russian Presidential elections. And on March 23, ISIS-K took credit for the Crocus City concert hall attack but that doesn’t fit Putin’s needed narrative.
While there are a good deal of conflicting allegations and claims in the information space, what is clear is that ISIS-K has targeted the Russians in the past and likely had strong reasons to continue to target them. For example, it was ISIS that claimed responsibility for the October 2015 aviation attack against a Metrojet charter aircraft in Egypt that resulted in the death of 224 innocent passengers who were en route to Pulkovo Airport in St Petersburg.
Russian citizens may also remember that in December 2017, their President announced that the FSB had disrupted a mass casualty attack that ISIS-K had been planning in St Petersburg. More importantly, they should remember that at the time, Putin also thanked his American counterpart for the assistance provided to the FSB by its American counterparts, who had passed critical intelligence to the FSB that allowed the FSB to disrupt the attack before more innocent Russians were killed.
Unfortunately for the victims of last week’s ISIS-K attack, while Putin and the FSB were willing to cooperate with the Americans in 2017, they are apparently not willing to take warnings provided by Washington now.
The Russian people should understand that even despite tense relations between Washington and Moscow in 2017, the American Intelligence Community (IC) leaned forward to share Counterterrorism (CT) information with their Russian counterparts and demonstrated a willingness to assist the Russians in dealing with threats from ISIS-K on other terrorist groups.
Russians may remember Putin’s public expression of appreciation to then-President Donald Trump and should know that afterwards, senior Russian Intelligence and Security officials publicly and privately praised the growing level of cooperation between their Services and the CIA.
For example, at a January 2018 Holiday Reception hosted by the FSB for its Foreign partners, during his opening remarks to attendees, FSB Director General Aleksandr Bortnikov personally thanked the CIA for sharing intelligence that led to the disruption of the ISIS-K attack in St Petersburg.
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergey Naryshkin made similar positive statements about assistance provided by the CIA and in private discussions with other foreign partners, Russian Security officials broke with past tradition of criticizing the CIA by claiming that they were pleased with the growing level of cooperation.
Further, in late January 2018, Naryshkin and Bortnikov were invited to Washington to meet with U.S. Intelligence Community officials to discuss CT cooperation and other areas of potential future cooperation that would benefit both the American and Russian people.
It should be stressed that U.S. IC leaders at the time demonstrated a willingness to find ways of improving cooperation, despite knowing that enemies of the Trump administration would look for ways to exploit Washington’s overtures as “evidence” of Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin. (Of course, Trump’s enemies in Congress were much less willing to attack the previous Administration for seeking to forge a CT dialogue with the Russians during President Obama’s time in office.)
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Despite pushback from some in the U.S. against the Trump Administration’s efforts to engage Russia on CT issues, the main reason behind the collapse of that dialogue was the attempted assassination of former Russian Main Directorate of Intelligence (GRU) intelligence officer Sergey Skripal in the Salisbury, United Kingdom (UK).
This failed lethal operation that resulted in the death of innocent civilians and was quickly traced back to the Kremlin, resulted in a significant downturn in an already struggling relationship between Moscow and Washington. Less than two months after Bortnikov and Naryshkin had been hosted in Washington for official visits, Putin’s poor decision making and lack of strategic vision resulted in the expulsion of 60 Russian officials from the U.S. and the inevitable Russian response, a new round of sanctions.
It is important to note that among those Americans caught up in the reciprocal diplomatic expulsions were U.S. officials who played a key role in supporting the CT dialogue between Washington and Moscow before March 2018 and were directly responsible for helping to stop the ISIS-K mass attack in St Petersburg in 2017.
By late March 2018, the political environment related to the U.S. – Russian dialogue was so toxic that all progress made in the previous years was lost. In short, Putin’s short-sighted decision to try to exact revenge on Skripal destroyed progress that had been made in the CT dialogue between the U.S. and Russia.
Unfortunately, in recent years the Russian Intelligence and Security Services have repeatedly attempted to weaponize the issue of ISIS and its affiliates to undermine both the U.S. and Ukraine.
For example, in Afghanistan, the Kremlin repeatedly made false claims that the U.S. was sponsoring and supporting ISIS-K fighters as part of an effort to undermine U.S. relations with other countries and stoke fear in the hearts of Central Asian governments to justify Moscow’s attempts to maintain or deploy Russian forces to their territory to “protect them” from threats being created by Washington.
The Russians also cynically attempted to exploit European fears about the spread of Islamic Extremist threats into Europe by falsely claiming that the Government of Ukraine (GoU) was sponsoring the movement of ISIS operatives between Ukraine and the European Union (EU) and providing haven to a range of extremists.
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While it might be difficult for some to imagine how the Russians would seek to ‘weaponize’ the issue of CT cooperation, those familiar with Russia’s aggressive Active Measures efforts since Putin took over the Kremlin in 2000, recall that after 9/11, the Russian Intelligence and Security Services engaged in efforts to discredit the U.S. in Central Asia and other parts of the former Soviet Union by lying about alleged links between the U.S. and extremist groups and “warning” other governments that the U.S. was using extremist groups to try to overthrow regional leaders and incite “colored revolutions”.
Understanding this sad reality makes it easy to see through Moscow’s current attempts to link the ISIS-K attack in Moscow to its enemies in Kyiv and the West. But what Russian citizens need to know is that each time their regime politicizes the issue of CT to advance Putin’s own political interests, it further undermines Russia’s credibility and makes it much harder for those in the West who want to pursue some level of cooperation with Russia to sustain any effective discussions on this critical issue.
While the world mourns the death of more innocent people at the hands of ISIS-K, Russians need to ask whether Vladimir Putin’s policies are helping or hurting their country. If Putin had opted to treat efforts by the U.S. and other countries to engage in a CT dialogue more seriously in the past, would ISIS-K have been able to carry out their attack in Moscow? If he had not decided to throw away all the progress made in the U.S. – Russian CT dialogue between 2017 and 2018 by trying to kill Sergey Skripal – would continued cooperation between the U.S. and its Russian counterparts have resulted in a repeat of the successful 2017 disruption of a major threat in St Petersburg?
Why were Russians asked to invest so much of their limited resources and finances in hosting international events like the 2014 Winter Olympics and 2018 World Cup if their President planned on squandering the potential benefits of such investment by making bad decisions that undermined their country’s image and resulted in isolation vice international acceptance? Is Putin delivering on his promise to bring stability and security to Russia, or are his failed polices resulting in more instability, crime, and terrorism? Is his war in Ukraine improving the lives of Russians – or resulting in the death or mutilation of hundreds of thousands of Russians, seeding Russian society with returning war veterans facing serious phycological problems because of their exposure to the brutality of the war in Ukraine? Is the war improving crime on the streets in Russia, or is it resulting in an increase in the number of convicted criminals who have served in the war and were then turned loose on the streets?
Finally, Russians should ask if their government failed to protect their fellow citizens on March 22 because precious resources that should have been dedicated to fighting real terrorist groups like ISIS-K, where instead being wasted trying to fight a war against a country that presented no real threat to the majority of Russians before 2014, and only presented a threat to their own president’s ego and his desire to sustain his autocratic rule for eternity.
Russian citizens should understand that, at the end of the day, there are two parties responsible for the murder of the victims of the Crocus City Hall attack – ISIS-K and their own President.
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