It’s been more than 20 years since al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden boasted of his success in bringing down New York’s twin towers, and there are still millions of people who prefer to believe that the CIA or Jews were responsible. So it’s no surprise that conspiracy theories are multiplying just five days after terrorists murdered at least 139 people at a Moscow concert hall.
What’s different this time is the role of the state in spreading this nonsense, because the reality is so much more banal and — from the point of view of Russia’s security forces — so much harder to explain: A spectacular level of incompetence married, as I’ve written previously, to a destructive paranoia at the pinnacle of the Russian state.
On Tuesday, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, accused not just Ukraine but also the US and UK intelligence services of facilitating Friday’s attack. There’s by now too much evidence suggesting Islamic State’s responsibility — they’ve claimed it and provided video footage
filmed by the perpetrators — for even Vladimir Putin to deny it. But the real issue, Russia’s president said on Monday, is “who benefits?” — the starter question of conspiracy theorists across the ages.
Benefit, of course, isn’t evidence, but potential motive, and as anyone who has watched a detective series will know, there can be a lot of people with motive for a murder who didn’t commit it. If you accept “who benefits” as evidence of guilt, then Putin should agree with those who’ve accused Russia of orchestrating the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. There are no facts to demonstrate Russian involvement, but Moscow has nevertheless benefited from the distraction of attention and resources from the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the one piece of circumstantial evidence Russia has offered of a Ukrainian connection — that the suspects were arrested near Bryansk on the road to the Ukrainian border — has been undermined by a statement from Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, who said they first tried to cross the typically open border into his country but turned back toward Ukraine after seeing roadblocks he’d set up.
What we do know is that the assailants parked their white Renault sedan outside the concert venue in Moscow’s northern suburbs at about 7:55 p.m., emerging to escape 20 minutes later having embarked on an horrific shooting spree and set the hall on fire. According to various witness accounts, it took up to an hour for police to arrive. TASS, the state-run news agency, reported at 8:33 p.m. that SWAT teams were on their way.
Russia’s interior ministry has rejected this picture of delay, saying that local police arrived at the scene within five minutes of finding out about the attack. The statement on Monday didn’t give a time of arrival or say when the police became aware. Whatever the case may be, officers arrived on the scene only after the attackers had fled.
Russia has one of the largest surveillance and security forces in the world including, according to a 2022 Kremlin decree, 934,000 regular police officers and an estimated 75,000 personnel working for the FSB (excluding border guards). That isn’t the world’s highest per capita concentration, but it’s a lot: the US, with a population well over twice the size of Russia’s, has a similar number of police at 957,000, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in turn has half the staff of its FSB equivalent, at 35,000. China, no security slouch, has twice as many police as Russia for a population 10 times bigger.
The FSB, however, is the successor organization to the Soviet KGB. Its senior officers and organizational DNA — including Putin’s — come from the Soviet era and are more focused on controlling society than protecting it. As with his top military officers, Putin values the loyalty of his security chiefs over their competence or even results. According to Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, analysts and critics of the FSB, the organization has in recent years been retrenching to the more brutal practices and mindsets of the Stalin-era NKVD. As for Russia’s police, they’re better known more for their low salaries and corruption than for law enforcement prowess.
Yet the core problem here isn’t necessarily police failure. Questions as to why security services fail to stop terrorist attacks are asked whenever they succeed. The 9/11 tragedy, which might have been prevented but for territorial jealousies that prevented the passing of information from one agency to the other, caused a major shakeup in the US, including the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security within weeks of the event. When Islamists carried out rapid fire attacks on a football stadium, open air cafes and the Bataclan concert hall in Paris on Nov. 13 2015, killing 130, a similar shakeup followed across French security agencies.
But for disaster to result in improvement requires honesty about what went wrong. The Kremlin hopes that blaming Kyiv and the West for the attack will turn a difficult domestic political situation to its advantage. Not only can Putin and his chiefs deflect public anger, but potentially also ease a path for the further mobilizations they will need to fight the war on Ukraine. Even the gruesome, publicized torture of the four alleged gunmen, including the severing of one terrorist’s ear and the genital electrocution of another, is calculated to further that distraction.
None of these potential Kremlin wins will, however, change the nature or competence of the FSB. Nor will they make further successful terrorist attacks less likely. For ordinary Russians that’s a loss, because while the threat posed to their security by independent Ukraine was always imaginary until Putin invaded, the threat from Islamist terrorism was and remains quite real.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.
Credit: Bloomberg
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