Putin forgot Islamic State thinks he is part of the West
While evidence shows that the Islamic State conducted the terrorist attack in Moscow, the Russian leader is likely to stick with the narrative that Kyiv was involved
Three facts stand out as clear amid the lack of hard information about the perpetrators of the appalling terrorist attack on Russia on Friday last week and all three shine a light on dangers inherent in the new multipolar world we now inhabit.
The first is that, before the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed a US warning that it was coming, both in public and to his top security officers. He called the US intelligence that Islamists were planning an assault on a large Russian venue blackmail, aimed at destabilizing his country — a vague goal he did nothing to explain.
There was a time not so long ago when Putin understood that Washington considered Islamist radicalism a shared threat, taken so seriously that it was ringfenced from other disputes. He would have used the warning, even if he could not prevent the attack.
Yet so shredded has trust become between Moscow and Washington since Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, if not since his 2014 annexation of Crimea, that he fell victim to paranoia.
Had he been able to think rationally, Russia’s president would have known this was a game the US would not play, because it could only lose.
Toward the end of the short address to the nation after Friday night’s attack, Putin said he would work with all “genuinely” concerned nations to fight international terrorism — so perhaps he has recognized his mistake. I very much doubt it.
The second piece of clarity is that while Putin has, remarkably, managed to persuade much of the Global South that his invasion of a former imperial possession somehow makes him a fellow victim of Western colonialism, Islamists are having none of it. They do not care a hoot about Ukraine, but they also make no distinction between Russian and Western colonialism.
As far as Islamic State or al-Qaeda is concerned, Putin’s military interventions in Syria and Chechnya are no different from the US’ in Iraq or Libya. Nor is the presence of a large Russian military base in predominantly Sunni Muslim Tajikistan — the ex-Soviet country that the arrested suspects might have been from — any less offensive to Islamist ideas than the presence of US military bases in the Gulf. Russia is for them a part of the Christian West. It does not belong anywhere on the territory of their imagined Islamic caliphate.
Finally, Putin could confidently hint at Ukrainian responsibility, thus absolving his own lapse of vigilance, because no matter what evidence emerges to the contrary, he knows he will be able to sell whatever story he likes at home — such is the totality of his control over the media and eradication of organized opposition.
Putin has demonstrated this ability repeatedly throughout his war in Ukraine and it is deeply worrying. He can now generate domestic popular support for virtually any decision or aggression.
Worse, the creeping spread of what one might call populist “authoritocracies” makes that true for a growing number of leaders.
We cannot yet know for certain that Ukraine did not facilitate the Moscow attack, because it is very difficult to prove a negative.
The only verifiable evidence of Ukrainian involvement that Putin has cited — namely that the killers were arrested while driving in Ukraine’s direction — is weak. It also would imply a near-suicidal stupidity in Kyiv.
There was about a 100 percent chance that Putin would blame Ukraine for the attack and the US, implicated by association, would not forgive being pulled into something that jeopardizes so core a security interest as counterterrorism.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the atrocity at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall concert venue and that is likely true. It has put out footage of the killers that was taken before the attack and it matches with the images Russian television showed of the men afterward.
The four arrested men were identified as Tajiks and the US believes that the Islamic State branch responsible to be Islamic
State-Khorasan, a province of the group’s nonexistent caliphate that would include much of Afghanistan, the northern part of which is ethnic Tajik, as well as Pakistan and Central Asia, including Tajikistan.
The Russian security services said they foiled another Islamic State-Khorasan attack in Moscow just a month ago.
That does not, of course, prove that the Islamic State operation did not get an assist from Ukraine, but so far that has the smell of a conspiracy theory.
The confession by a captive to his Russian guards that an anonymous caller offered him 1 million rubles (US$10,850) to conduct the attack would certainly be inconsistent with an Islamic State-directed operation, but was also offered under the definition of duress: on camera, on his knees and at the mercy of armed security officers.
There is no recording of what came before, so we do not know what he might have been told to say if he wanted to stay alive.
The eradication of trust breeds conspiracy theories and also makes them all but impossible to shoot down. So it is likely that Putin will stick with his Ukraine story no matter what.
That was not always as attractive or as easy to pull off as it is now. Yes, the US-dominated, globalized world that followed the Soviet collapse of 1991 was hardly safe; it was also deeply flawed and unequal. Yet the trade and economic integration that it relied on placed some basic boundaries — and required a minimum of mutual acceptance among governments that made space for the kind of warning the US gave to Moscow to be believed, even when relations in other areas were poor.
That minimal level of confidence also allowed for organizations such as the UN and G20 to function as more than gladiatorial arenas for performative diplomacy.
However, no more.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
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