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KYIV — The echo of gunfire and grenade blasts had hardly subsided on Friday before Russian and Ukrainian officials started trading accusations, blaming each other for the massacre at a Moscow concert hall that left more than 130 people dead.
In a bid to shape a post-attack narrative, both sides were determined to establish their take as the dominant one.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, never a man these days to shrink from casting aspersions on Ukraine and the West, took to his Telegram channel to warn that there would be hell to pay if Ukraine had a hand in the assault.
“If it is established that these are terrorists of the Kyiv regime, all of them must be found and ruthlessly destroyed as terrorists,” Medvedev wrote. “Official representatives of the state” wouldn’t be immune, he added.
Kyiv fired back against Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence agency accused “Putin’s special services” of mounting Friday’s shooting of concert-goers by gunmen dressed in camouflaged uniforms, saying it was a “deliberate provocation” intended to justify “even tougher attacks on Ukraine.”
“The public execution of people in Moscow should be understood as Putin’s threat of an even greater escalation and expansion of the war,” HUR warned. “Putin has extensive experience in organizing such terrorist attacks to strengthen his own power,” the agency added.
Echos of earlier attacks
That was a thinly disguised reference to a series of explosions in 1999 at four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, which killed more than 300 people and injured a thousand more. The blasts triggered the Second Chechen War, which boosted the popularity of then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, helping him to be chosen by Boris Yeltsin to succeed him as Russia’s president.
For years, serious questions have remained about whether the bombings were so-called false flag operations carried out by Russia’s own security services in order to justify the Chechen war.
But the exchange of post-attack barbs by Moscow and Kyiv was interrupted by the Islamic State terrorist group claiming responsibility for the massacre of rock-music revelers at the Crocus City concert hall in Moscow’s northern Krasnogorsk suburb.
Indeed, the Moscow attack is reminiscent of the Islamic State attack in 2015 at the Bataclan theater in Paris, a killing spree that left 90 dead. Friday’s shooting rampage also bore similarities to the 2002 Nord Ost theater siege, when a group of Chechen gunmen and women occupied a packed theater in eastern Moscow and demanded an end to the Second Chechen War. A bungled rescue by Russian special forces, using a deadly sleeping gas, left more hostages dead than were killed by the Islamist gunmen.
Many members of the Islamist Chechen separatist group behind the theater attack would later move on and enlist with the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS, in Syria. Chechens began arriving in Syria starting in 2011. They made up the second-largest contingent of the Islamic State’s foreign fighters and their numbers were also disproportionately high in al Qaeda’s faction in Syria. Battle-hardened and experienced, several Chechens rose to become Islamic State commanders, including Umar Shishani and Salahuddin Shishani, according to a study by Neil Hauer for the Atlantic Council.
The Russian security services estimated 1,700 to 3,000 Chechens, joined by other militants from the North Caucasus, went to Syria to fight. Syria’s moderate rebels always suspected that Russian intelligence agencies were happy to encourage them to go, making it easy for them to get there by giving them passports, both to get rid of them and to disrupt and divide rebel groups battling Russia’s ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Anti-Assad rebels also accused the Syrian government of collaborating with Islamic State to weaken them and when it served tactical military purposes. Islamic State seemed often in 2015 and 2016 to leverage Russia’s intervention, pressing offensives against moderate rebel factions as they were targeted by Russian airstrikes.
Palmyra speculation
The rebels argued that Damascus and Moscow played a complex double game, using jihadists to act as fifth columnists, planning for them to effectively sabotage the revolution against Assad and color it as extremist. In May 2015, the ease with which the Islamic State was able to seize the ancient city of Palmyra prompted some military observers to speculate that Assad and Russia deliberately abandoned the site — with its unique ruins and irreplaceable ancient artifacts and treasures — to gain Western sympathy.
Moderate rebels said the collaboration was clear at times between Russia and the Assad regime and Islamic State. One leader complained to this correspondent in 2015 that “when ISIS tries to storm our positions, the Assad regime and the Russians back them with airstrikes and shelling.” But that marriage of convenience has not helped Russia subsequently with radical Islamists from Chechnya and the North Caucasus, who still pose a threat to Russia.
Russia’s FSB security services say they have prevented dozens of Islamic State plots in recent years, and earlier this month they claimed to have killed two Kazakh nationals near Moscow. They also said half-a-dozen Islamic State gunmen were killed in a shooting in Ingushetia this month.
Despite the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for Friday’s massacre in Moscow, the Kremlin will likely exploit the concert hall killings for propaganda purposes. Putin’s government will likely continue suggesting Ukraine was somehow involved, even though the attack was “an act of terrorism, full stop,” Sam Greene, an analyst at the Center of European Policy Analysis, argued in a post on X.
“Having failed to prevent it, the Kremlin will likely look for a way to use it, which may well mean blaming Ukraine,” Greene wrote, while cautioning: “The fact that the Kremlin will use the attack for political purposes does not mean it was a false flag.”
No sooner had Greene published his post than the Russian leader himself, Vladimir Putin, claimed in a broadcast that the attackers fled the scene and were “traveling toward Ukraine.” He added in his first public statement on the attack: “All four perpetrators were found and detained. They tried to hide and moved toward Ukraine, where, previously, a window had been prepared for them to cross the border.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called such Russian accusations “planned provocation by the Kremlin to further fuel anti-Ukrainian hysteria in Russian society,” with the aim to “discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the international community,” according to a statement from the ministry.
