Atrocity raises questions about why FSB security service failed to stop it

MUSCOVITES are sadly no strangers to terror attacks. In the 2000s and 2010s, a string of suicide bombings struck the city’s metro system and airports, mostly carried out by Chechens and other Islamist separatists from the North Caucasus.

But last night’s attack at Crocus Hall will recall, above all, the 2002 Nord

Ost theatre siege when a group of armed Chechens took an entire theatre hostage in eastern Moscow to demand an end to the second Chechen war.

The botched response saw more hostages die from the sleeping gas used by special forces than were killed by the terrorists. Some 172 people died.

In recent years, such atrocities seemed to fade away – partly as a result of years of sustained and often brutal counterinsurgency campaigns, and partly because of the war in Syria, which attracted many Russian jihadists who the authorities were only too glad to see leaving.

So yesterday’s atrocity, for which Islamic State claimed responsibility last night, will come as a horrific shock. Its claim has not been confirmed.

Thousands of Russians and Russianspeaking jihadists flocked to Syria and Iraq in the mid-2000s. Many ended up in open-air prison camps in northern Syria alongside other foreigners including the UK’s Shamima Begum. Some were allowed to return home.

This attack is a reminder that the terror group remains a potent threat – and also that Russia’s security services, preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, may have neglected it.

The target – a sprawling exhibition complex on the north-western edge of the MKAD, Moscow’s equivalent of the M25 – is well known but nowhere near as high profile as the ultra-high security environment of the city centre that is home to the Kremlin.

None the less, questions will be asked about the FSB’s failure to prevent the attack.

Two weeks ago, the US embassy in Moscow warned its citizens to stay away from large public gatherings over a possible terror threat.

Despite current tensions, Western intelligence agencies usually share actionable intelligence on terror threats with their Russian counterparts.

So Moscow probably had some idea of an attack – but perhaps not enough to forestall it.

Vladimir Putin has a history of tightening his own grip on power in the aftermath of terrorist atrocities.

After a mysterious series of bombings of apartment blocks in 1999, he launched the second Chechen war, which in turn secured his first term as president.

Following the 2004 Beslan school siege, in which more than 300 people including 186 children were killed, he cancelled elections for regional governors on the grounds that central oversight was needed. To this day, governors are appointed by the president. In retrospect, that was a key moment in Putin’s project of recentralising power in the Kremlin.

It is too early to predict how Putin will react to this latest horror. But many Russia-watchers expected him to make some kind of big move after last week’s election – possibly in the form of an even harsher crackdown on internal dissent, or possibly imposing an unpopular mobilisation to draft soldiers for the war in Ukraine.

If he was looking for an excuse for a big security policy shift, he now has it.