Who’s to blame for the Moscow massacre?
Some Russians blame lax security for the horrific attack claimed by ISIL. But a few analysts recall a darker pattern from Russia’s modern history.
Aleksandra Chanysheva is convinced that lax security is what made the Friday night attack on a concert hall just northwest of Moscow possible.
“Guards are the most ridiculed and underpaid people in Russia,” the 51-year-old teacher of Russian language and literature at a public school told Al Jazeera. “And they do their work in the worst way possible.”
The intelligence services received repeated warnings from the West – including a public alert from the United States on March 8.
But days later, on March 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin snubbed that warning about possible attacks in Moscow, and described it as “blackmail”.
A brand new, comprehensive face-recognition system across Moscow that has been widely used to identify opposition protesters also failed to stop Friday’s attack.
And it took authorities an hour and a half to deploy special forces to the site in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk because of heavy traffic jams.
“Where are the helicopters for speedy deployment to critical sites in the metropolitan conditions of Moscow? Where are the armed vehicles? Where are these pumped-up stern guys from [promotional] videos?” Mitrokhin asked.
“We know where they are – burned down with their vehicles on the roads of the Kyiv region, sitting in underground holes near Donetsk or patrolling the Luhansk region … not where the real danger is but there the crazy president decided to wage a war,” he said.
Other independent experts also questioned the suggestions of ISIL’s responsibility for the attacks.
“Very probably, Russian special services knew about [the attack] beforehand,” Alisher Ilkhamov, head of Central Asia Due Diligence, a think tank in London, told Al Jazeera.
“One just has to ask a question – who will benefit? I’m somewhat doubtful that ISIL has any serious interests in Russia,” he said.
Putin, on the other hand, does gain from the attack, Ilkhamov said. “To become a victim of ISIL is to trigger sympathies worldwide. This is some sort of a public relations [trick] to improve [Russia’s] international reputation. So, there’s a whole bunch of benefits for Putin’s regime,” he said.
Putin’s critics have long alleged that he has a history of potential false flag operations used by the Russian president to strengthen his political standing. None of those claims have been established.
A former spy in Germany who briefly headed the FSB, Putin was appointed prime minister in 1999. Months later, explosions at apartment buildings killed dozens of people. The Kremlin blamed Chechen separatists and used the attacks as a pretext to start the Second Chechen War: Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed and paved the way for his first election as president in 2000.
Fugitive ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko claimed that Putin ordered the attacks. Putin repeatedly called him a “traitor,” and in 2003, Litvinenko died an agonising death in the United Kingdom after being poisoned with radioactive polonium. The UK said Putin “may have been” behind the murder.
A Russian opposition group also referred to the late 1990s.
“We remember how Putin’s regime and his special services paved the way to the Second Chechen War,” the Forum for Free Russia, an alliance of exiled opposition activists, said in a statement.
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