Filenews 26 March 2024 - by Marc Champion
Three facts stand out as clear following the arrest by Russian authorities of the alleged perpetrators of Friday's terrorist attack in Moscow – and all of them shed light on the dangers inherent in the new multipolar world in which we now live.
Reject warnings
The first is that, prior to the attack, Vladimir Putin rejected a U.S. warning that such an attack was imminent, both publicly and to his top security officials. He called U.S. intelligence reports that Islamists were planning an attack on a major Russian gathering site as aimed at destabilizing his country — a vague goal he did little more to explain.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Putin understood that Washington considered Islamist radicalism a common threat, taken so seriously that it was fenced off by other disagreements. He would have used the warning, even if he had failed to prevent the attack.
However, trust between Moscow and Washington has been so fractured since Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, if not since his annexation of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, that he fell victim to paranoia. If he were able to think rationally, Russia's president would know that this was a game that the U.S. would not play, because it would only have to lose. Toward the end of his brief address to the Russian nation after Friday night's attack, Putin said he would work with all "really" interested countries to fight international terrorism — so he may have acknowledged his mistake. I very much doubt that.
The jihadists' perspective
The second piece of clarity is that while Putin, remarkably, has managed to convince much of the Global South that his invasion of a former imperial possession of Russia (Ukraine) somehow makes him a victim of Western colonialism, Islamists do not buy such a view at all. They don't care about Ukraine at all, but they also make no distinction between Russian and Western colonialism.
From the perspective of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, Putin's military interventions in Syria and Chechnya are no different from America's in Iraq or Libya. Nor is the presence of a large Russian military base in predominantly Sunni Muslim Tajikistan — the former Soviet country from which the arrested suspects may have come — any less offensive to Islamist ideas than the presence of U.S. military bases in the Gulf. Russia is for them a part of the Christian West. It belongs nowhere in the territory of their imaginary Islamic caliphate.
Narrative
Finally, Putin was "certainly" able to hint at Ukraine's responsibility, thus absolving himself of responsibility for his own lack of vigilance, because regardless of evidence to the contrary, he knows that he should be able to sell whatever narrative suits him at home – and this is linked to his complete control over the media and the elimination of organized opposition. Putin has demonstrated this ability repeatedly throughout his war in Ukraine, and the fact is deeply troubling. It can now generate domestic popular support for almost any decision or aggressive move. Worse still, the creeping spread of what one might call populist "authoritarian regimes" creates a similar reality for a growing number of leaders.
We cannot yet know for sure that Ukraine did not facilitate the attack on Moscow, because it is very difficult to prove. The only verifiable evidence of Ukrainian involvement cited by Putin — namely that the killers were captured while driving in the direction of Ukraine — is weak. That would also mean near-suicidal stupidity in Kiev. There was about a 100 percent chance that Putin would blame Ukraine for the attack, and the U.S., directly implicated in such a case by its political and military connection to Kiev, would not forgive being drawn into something that jeopardizes such a basic security interest as counterterrorism combat.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the atrocity at Moscow's Crocus City Hall concert venue — and that's probably true. Islamic State released footage of the killers taken before the attack — and matched images shown on Russian television later. The four men arrested near the Russian city of Bryansk over the weekend and presented in court on Monday have been identified as Tajiks, and the United States believes the Islamic State affiliate responsible for the events is Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K), a province of Islamic State's non-existent caliphate that would "include" parts of Afghanistan. the northern part of which is ethnically Tajik, as well as Pakistan and Central Asia, including Tajikistan. Russian security services said they foiled another IS-K attack on Moscow just over a month ago.
Conspiracy theories
Two of the men pleaded guilty to carrying out the attack, which killed at least 137 people. This, of course, does not prove that the IS operation did not receive aid from Ukraine, but it gives this version the "smell" of a conspiracy theory. A prisoner's confession to his Russian prison guards that an unidentified person offered him 1 million rubles ($10,850) over the phone to carry out the attack would certainly be incompatible with an IS-directed operation, but it was also given under the definition of coercion: in front of a camera, on his knees and at the mercy of armed security officers. There's no record of what preceded it – so we don't know what he might have been told to say if he wanted to stay alive.
Eroding trust breeds conspiracy theories and also makes it impossible to completely debunk them. It is therefore possible that Putin will stick to his narrative of Ukrainian responsibility. This has not always been as attractive or as easy to achieve as it is today. Yes, the U.S.-dominated, globalized world that followed the Soviet collapse of 1991 wasn't exactly safe. It was also deeply flawed and unequal. However, the trade and economic integration on which it was based set some basic limits – and required a modicum of mutual acceptance between governments that left room for the warning given by the US to Moscow to be believed, even when relations in other areas were rather bad. This minimum level of trust also allowed organizations such as the United Nations and the G-20 to function as more than duelling fields for diplomatic shows. This is all over.
Performance – Editing – Text Selection (2019-2024): G.D. Pavlopoulos
