False Trails and Bizarre Lies After Russian Terror Attack

Blaming Ukraine, blaming America, blaming ... brain implants?

Russian Police high-ranked officers leave the Expanded Board of the Interior Ministry on April 2, 2024 in Moscow, Russia. President Putin proposed to change migration policy in the country and to identify the “ultimate beneficiaries” of the terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall, at the annual meeting at the federal police agency. (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE TERROR ATTACK at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in suburban Moscow, the Kremlin is pushing the universally dismissed claim of a “Ukrainian trail” in the attack more and more aggressively—even as the Afghan branch of ISIS still claims sole responsibility for the act and rumors continue to float about the Kremlin’s own involvement.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has been cagey about assigning blame for the March 22 attack that resulted in 144 confirmed deaths. In his public comments, he has dropped vague hints about the possibility of Ukrainian and Western involvement and promised that Russia would “get to” the unnamed sponsors of the attack. Some of Putin’s top officials have been far less reticent. Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service, asserted in an interview on March 26 that while radical Islamists carried out the attack, Ukrainian intelligence assisted in the planning. On the same day, Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation—and a man widely believed to be one of Putin’s closest associates—was asked by a reporter in an off-the-cuff exchange in a Kremlin hallway whether ISIS or Ukraine was behind the attack. “Of course it was Ukraine,” Patrushev replied with a smirk.

Also on that day, the Russian Investigative Committee formally demanded the extradition of Ukrainian Security Service head Vasyl Maliuk and several other Ukrainian officials it accuses of involvement in “terrorist acts.” The statement did not refer specifically to the Crocus City Hall attack but to Ukrainian strikes on strategic objects under Russian control (such as the bridge linking Crimea to the Russian mainland), as well as hits on individuals inside Russia whom Ukraine regards as war criminals or war propagandists (such as war-hawk blogger Darya Dugina and Donetsk terrorist-turned-military blogger Maxim Fomin, aka Vladlen Tatarsky). But given the timing, ordinary Russians who heard about the extradition order likely inferred that the charges related to the slaughter at Crocus City Hall. One survey of Russians after the attack found that half of the respondents believed Ukraine was responsible while another 6 percent blamed the West.

On the propaganda channels, the speculation flew much wilder. On the Channel One talk show Time Will Tell, criminologist Vladimir Ovchinsky, who headed the Russian bureau of Interpol from 1997 to 1999 and is currently an adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, asserted that the men who carried out the attack “had their consciousness turned off” and were controlled via drugs or maybe brain chips. (As an example, he cited “Elon Musk’s experiments where he makes people out of pigs.”) Such a sophisticated operation, said Ovchinsky—with no pushback from the hosts or the other guests—could have been only carried out by Western intelligence, not by ISIS.

Fantasies aside, Russia has yet to present any evidence at all—even faked evidence—that Ukraine was in any way implicated in the attack, other than the fact that after their getaway the terrorists used the “Ukraine” highway, which runs from Moscow generally southwest toward Ukraine, to make their escape. Of course, if they planned to flee to Ukraine, this hardly proves Ukrainian involvement; but even that scenario seems unlikely, given the heavy Russian military presence on the border. Putin’s claim that they had a “window” on the Ukrainian side elides the question of how the group planned to get through the Russian forces to reach that “window.” And, notably, Belarus’s canny dictator Alexander Lukashenko, whose public alliance with Putin masks a pattern of low-key defiance, has publicly thrown a wrench in the Putin narrative, claiming that the terrorists were actually headed to Belarus but changed course and tried to flee to Ukraine after finding combat-ready Belarusian troops in their path.

Meanwhile, evidence of ISIS coordination mounts. On March 27, for instance, a St. Petersburg court convicted a guest laborer from Tajikistan, Ahmad Faisulohonzoda, of belonging to “a Telegram group where emissaries of ISIS, a terrorist group banned in Russia, recruit individuals to carry out terror attacks in the Russian Federation.” He was fined 5,000 rubles and deported from Russia. The court also noted that the Crocus City Hall killers had been recruited in the same group.

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WHILE THE RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES continue to point blame to the West, evidence that Russia was warned about the attack is mounting. The Washington Post reports that not only did U.S. intelligence tip off Russia in general terms, but the warning specifically mentioned Crocus City Hall as one of the possible targets. And a warning also apparently came from Iran: According to Reuters, “Days before the attack in Russia, Tehran shared information with Moscow about a possible big terrorist attack inside Russia that was acquired during interrogations of those arrested in connection with deadly bombings in Iran.” Given the close ties between Moscow and Tehran, Russian authorities had no conceivable reason to dismiss this warning as a “provocation.”

It turns out that the warnings were not ignored completely: A Crocus City Hall employee confirmed that the staff was advised of a possible terror attack soon after the U.S. warning on March 7 and received instructions on what to do in case of an emergency. Yet the fire sprinklers at the venue didn’t work, and three of the four emergency exits were locked. To some anti-Putin Russian commentators, this strongly suggests that the Kremlin either had a hand in the attack or knew about it and allowed it to happen for its own ulterior motives. Shortly after the attack, expatriate investigative journalist Roman Dobrokhotov said that if the regime tried to blame Ukraine for the attack and use it for propaganda purposes, it would be a clue of the Kremlin’s own guilt. By that logic, the Kremlin stands convicted.

And yet there are also strong reasons to doubt the “Kremlin trail” as much as the “Ukrainian trail.” For one thing, the Kremlin’s reaction to the terror attack was slow and tentative; Putin took nineteen hours to speak about it. There was clearly no attempt to plant evidence implicating Ukraine. Some analysts, such as political scientist Kirill Shamiyev in an interview with the independent news site Meduza, believe that the Ukraine-blaming was an attempt by the authorities to divert attention from their own massive screwup—and to catch up to the war-hawk bloggers, who started pointing at Ukraine right away without any evidence. Between conspiracy and incompetence, incompetence is usually the better explanation—especially in Russia, where abysmal fire safety, for instance, is a longstanding problem.

Ultimately, Occam’s razor still works. The simplest explanation—that four Tajik migrants fell into the clutches of ISIS propagandists and carried out a horrendous attack in Moscow, and that Moscow was multiply warned but at best took inadequate precautions—remains the most likely. What’s not in doubt, however, is that the Kremlin is using this attack to promote hate, whip up war hysteria, and even normalize torture.