The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Kremlin ramps up disinformation push
The bloody terrorist attack on a concert hall near Moscow had barely subsided before Russia launched a disinformation campaign suggesting that Ukraine and the West were somehow behind it, pushing a version of events molded to fit the Kremlin war narrative and downplay a significant security failure.
President Vladimir Putin has hinted several times that Kyiv and Washington played a part, and the latest to join the chorus was Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service, the top security agency in Russia. On Tuesday he said, without offering any evidence, that the assault “was prepared by both radical Islamists themselves and, naturally, facilitated by Western special services.”
The United States and other Western governments have said repeatedly that the Islamic State group — which itself has issued two claims of responsibility — was behind the assault. U.S. security officials named a specific branch of the organization, the Islamic State in Khorasan. Plus Washington warned Russia both publicly and privately on March 7 about the threat of an attack on an unspecified concert venue.
But on Friday evening, gunmen infiltrated the Crocus City Hall and opened fire, killing 139 people and injuring many others.
“It was classic for Putin to discount the warnings,” said Fiona Hill, former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council. “The security services don’t have the bandwidth. They never have because they’re so focused on internal
repression, and so focused on Kyiv, and they want everything to fit that narrative.”
Accepting publicly that Islamic militants alone were responsible for the worst terrorist attack in Russia in two decades might also dilute the Kremlin’s message that Russians need to unify around the war with Ukraine, Hill said. “You are having a big existential battle with the West, so you cannot divert attention away from it.”
When it comes to managing crises, disinformation has been a favorite tool of Putin’s Kremlin, and outside players such as the United States are often the villain of choice.
Moscow has arrested eight people in connection with the concert hall assault, most of them from Tajikistan, the Central Asian nation whose citizens hold prominent positions in the Islamic State group. The group has maintained its threats against Russian and other European targets, even after the collapse of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq by 2019.
In another development, two men accused in the
terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall spent time in Istanbul just weeks before the assault, a senior Turkish security official said Tuesday, adding that the shortness of the men’s visits suggested that they had not been radicalized in Turkey.
The information came on the same day that the Turkish Interior minister, Ali Yerlikaya, wrote on the platform X, formerly Twitter, that the Turkish security services had caught 147 people alleged to have connections to the Islamic State group since June.
Yerlikaya did not say how many of those suspects had been apprehended since the concert hall attack in Moscow last week or whether any of those previously arrested were believed to have links to that attack. The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the assault.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the senior security official said that one of the attack suspects who traveled to Turkey, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, arrived in Istanbul on Jan. 5 and spent 16 days in a hotel in the city’s Fatih District. He left March 2.