As of: March 27, 2024, 3:57 p.m
By: Michael Kister
Comments
Press
Split
After the terrorist attack in Moscow, accusations abounded.
Some observers suspect this to be a false flag operation.
Moscow – After the devastating attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, the “blame game” is in full swing.
Everyone is wondering who ordered the attack - including Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova, who, according to the Russian state news agency
Tass,
said: "It is very important for the entire global community to work together today to find the perpetrators and them to be held fully accountable.”
It just seems as if Vladimir Putin has already found those responsible.
After almost a day of silence on the attack, he claimed that Ukraine had prepared a "window" through which the terrorists could cross the border undetected.
But this was prevented by being caught on the way there in the Bryansk region of Russia.
A total of eleven suspects are now in custody, including four Tajiks, of whom at least two are said to have confessed - presumably under severe torture - to being the attackers.
Some believe Russian President Vladimir Putin had a hand in the Crocus City Hall attack.
© IMAGO/Vladimir Smirnov
Putin's narrative: Ukraine is behind the terrorist attack
So Putin set the narrative that Russian commentators agreed with: Ukraine was responsible for the terrorist attack in Moscow.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova
recently told the
Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper
an alleged involvement of the USA into the narrative.
While Western observers largely agree to reject this view, some put forward a bold hypothesis.
Quite early on, the Military Intelligence Service of Ukraine (HUR) voiced the accusation of a false flag operation on its official Telegram channel: “However, the unhindered movement of a group of gunmen with assault rifles in the center of Moscow, as well as many other indisputable evidence, indicate that the shooting in the Crocus City Hall was organized by Russian secret services.”
Was the Crocus City Hall attack a false flag operation?
The Ukrainian journalist and editor-in-chief of the news portal
Censor.net
Yuri Butusov called the massacre in Moscow “Putin’s bloody coronation.”
The Kremlin ruler wanted to push the “crimes and mass murders that Putin commits every day” into the background in international perception and replace them with expressions of pity towards Russia.
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“And all of this,” Butusov continues in a post on to leave the necessary direction.
Similar accusations do not only come from the Ukrainian side
However, such accusations do not only come from the Ukrainian side.
U.S. security journalist Mark Toth and retired U.S. military intelligence colonel Jonathan Sweet compared the Crocus Hall attack in the
New York Post
to the bombings that killed 293 people in Russia in September 1999.
Putin, who was still prime minister at the time, blamed Islamist terrorists, thereby legitimizing the Second Chechen War, which consolidated his power.
Since then, there have been allegations that the FSB and Putin himself were behind the explosions.
Toth and Sweet are now speculating that this was the case this time too.
They even raise the question of whether the FSB may have intentionally laid a false lead on IS, which then led the USA to issue a terror warning to the Russians.
This prompted Putin to justify a tougher crackdown in Ukraine and a further wave of mobilization.
Carlo Masala: Putin “immediately tries to blame the Ukrainians”
Whether the ruler of the Kremlin needs this, however, seems questionable.
The initiative at the front in the Ukraine war lies with its troops and substantial resistance within Russia to a new mobilization is unlikely.
That is why the majority of Western observers also share the opinion that security expert Carlo Masala expressed at the Leipzig Book Fair in an interview with
ARD
,
ZDF
and
3sat
: “Putin was the one who declared a few years ago that the problem of the Islamic State was over , the Islamic State has been defeated as a result of Russian intervention in Syria.
Now this international terrorism is coming back, he cannot admit that in the end his entire security apparatus has completely neglected this threat and is immediately trying to blame it on the Ukrainians.”
It is possible, Masala continued, that the Russian security organs do not have the forces at their disposal to adequately deal with the terrorist threat because they have been tied up with a view to Ukraine for two years.
This view of things is also supported by the evidence: a corresponding terror warning from the USA in advance as well as a letter of responsibility and body camera video footage of the attack, both published by IS, point to the Islamic State as the perpetrator of the bloodbath in Crocus City Hall.
(mk)