Moscow Attack Most Likely Embarrassing Putin Failure, Not A False Flag
Information changes over time
American intelligence-sharing about imminent Islamic State attacks led to a foiled IS plot in 2017, and then a second attempt two years later. Vladimir Putin dismissed a third warning, delivered in writing, during March as “outright propaganda,” an act of “blackmail” to “intimidate and destabilize our society.” Three days later, Islamic State killers attacked the Crocus City Hall in Moscow. IS channels later posted first-person camera videos recorded by the attackers.
The United States was not alone in warning the Kremlin about the impending attack. Iran, which has experienced deadly terror attacks by the same IS branch in Khorasan Province, also tried to warn Putin. Everybody seems to have known about the plot; even the Ukrainians knew that Russians security services had been duly warned of an impending terror attack by IS.
IS-K, the Khorasan branch, claimed the attack and praised the attackers. Their motive was likely the embarrassment of their Taliban rivals. On March 28, six days after the Crocus attack, IS spokesman Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari gave a speech extolling the massacre by the IS subsidiary “for striking ‘Crusader Russia’ in ‘its very heart, in its capital,’” for taking
a great step towards “avenging the Muslims and disciplining the unbelievers”, as well as exposing “the hypocrites” (al-munafiqun)—namely, those Muslims who condemned the atrocity—who are invited to “die in their rage”. Abu Hudhayfa says the Islamic State has “no need to muster a justification to legitimate targeting a State that has fought Muslims in the past and in the present: we are still killing and capturing its soldiers in Syria and the Sahel, and before that we brought down its plane in the Sinai”.
Despite all this evidence of IS-K responsibility, Russian propaganda has relied on prejudice against Central Asians, supposedly incapable of planning ahead, and towards a more convenient enemy. “The FSB investigators of terrorist attacks, traditionally the most competent part of the organization, will have no choice but to follow Putin’s lead,” Russia journalists Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov wrote on 26 March. “They will now have to chase, or pretend to chase, a phantom enemy even as they seek to protect the public.” How right they were.
Indeed, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesunit Maria Zakharova found it “extremely hard to believe” that the IS had committed the atrocity even after the killers had been arrested. Then more people were arrested, and then more relatives of the killers, who came from Tajikistan, were arrested. Another Tajik was arrested three days ago. No matter, though, because this is Russia.
As if to celebrate April Fool’s Day, head of the SBU Vasil Malyuk demanded the extradition of Ukraine’s intelligence chief in connection with the attack. Tortured confessions to Ukrainian involvement are worthless as findings of fact but useful as propaganda when people are terrified. As I wrote two days after the Crocus attack, there are curious echoes of the American experience after 9/11 in all of this.
In that earlier post, I wrote that if the Crocus attack was a false flag, the outcome will not look any different from strategic surprise. The propaganda will also look the same if it was a case of strategic surprise. Putin will not suffer any public humiliation, nor will rumors of provocation matter to him. His useful idiots in the West will remain useful. His war on Ukraine was already bound to intensify, and happily for him, Russians were suddenly lining up to place flowers at the scene of the massacre rather than on Alexei Navalny memorials.
Yet, as former Danish Navy Captain Anders Puck Nielsen pointed out later, there is in fact one aspect of that propaganda that might change over time, potentially indicating a case of strategic surprise. If the volume of propaganda about the attack declines — if the talking heads on Russian television and the Telegram warbloggers stop discussing the Crocus Hall attack at all — then it indicates the regime is embarrassed, and trying to help the Russian public forget the attack even happened.
On 25 March, Nielsen thought “it’s likely that we’re going to see [the Kremlin] try to make the situation go away, so that in a couple of weeks, nobody’s talking about it anymore. Because it is embarrassing. It does not show Putin in a positive light when the system is unable to prevent these kids of things.” Contrarily, conspiracy theories about false flags do him no harm, for they still make Putin out to be the “mastermind,” an object of fear.
If my interpretation is right, that this is inconvenient and it’s an embarrassing story that they would rather be without, then I think we should probably from now on mostly see it as an information operation. I think we’re going to see the Kremlin utilizing all different kinds of misinformation tactics to make it go away. And the most common method to achieve such a thing is to create a lot of confusion by flooding the information space with contradicting narratives, because then people will get into all sorts of arguments about which version is the right one.
One month later, we have some fake news items intended to implicate Ukraine, including AI deepfakes, sometimes with contradicting narratives. We have “multiple Russian officials saying so many conflicting things regarding the terrorist attack,” defense analyst Hunter Stoll writes at the RAND Corporation website. He sees it as “a signature example from the Russian disinformation playbook.” Attempts to implicate Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company at the heart of conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, clearly aim to fan the dying embers of that discredited impeachment scandal in Washington. This is deflection, and moreover the overall volume of news and noise related to the Crocus Hall attack seems to have declined, just as Nielsen suggested might happen.
I normally avoid hot takes on hot wars because of problems like this. The ‘first draft of history’ often starts with one consensus explanation, trending towards another consensus explanation as information changes over time. Nielsen recalls the spectacular 3 May 2023 drone attack on the Kremlin. Many observers with professional credentials called it a false flag at first, but those same analysts changed their mind once Ukrainian long-range drone strikes began in earnest. With new information, the previous attack made more sense as a demonstration strike than a false flag.
When dishonesty is built into every part of the social and political operating system, as it is in Russia, discerning truth can be difficult, and it is always a subjective process. I keep saying that Kremlinology is back. I hate being right.