Crocus City Belies Putin’s Image of Strength: Patten

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” Mark Antony warns in Act of Three of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But what if the dogs have already been loosed?

In addressing the Russian public this weekend about a cowardly attack on concertgoers in Moscow on Friday, President Vladimir Putin pointed a crooked finger at Ukraine, the country he formally invaded just over two years ago, for “opening a window” through which the terrorists could escape.

What Putin failed to note in his remarks is that the Islamic State had already claimed responsibility for the terrorist act in the Crocus City concert venue that has killed at least 133 civilians and wounded many more.

For Russians, this latest attack might bring back dark memories of the late 1990s and early ’00s when terrorists allegedly connected to Chechen separatists blew up apartment blocks and subway cars and held a theater in central Moscow hostage, leading to a deadly stand off in which hundreds of innocents were killed.

In my book, I describe what this was like based on my memories of living in Moscow with a young family in those years. It was terrifying, and for the purposes of comparison, I say this as someone who was stuck in Moscow on 9/11. Then, it stung me to feel pitied by Russians – now I am stung by my pity for Muscovites because so much has changed.

How can I can I call Russian citizens “innocents” when a majority of them support their country’s war on Ukraine? In the same way I call every man, woman and child who perished on 9/11 innocent despite the warped sense of collective responsibility their killers projected on us for the West’s interventions in the Middle East. The same holds true for concertgoers in Southern Israel on October 6^th last year, or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who harbor no love for Hamas.

One way or another, we’re all in the crosshairs. How politicians cast blame in the wake of terrorist violence matters a lot.

There is no demonstrated evidence linking Ukraine to the attack in Moscow, and Ukraine’s leaders have adamantly said as much. US intelligence confirms the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility. So what is Putin doing? The same thing politicians caught with their pants down always do – pointing the focus elsewhere.

The earlier terror attacks on Moscow stopped when Putin managed to curb the Chechen resistance by 2004-5 and make the region’s current strongman Ramzan Kadyrov his personal pit-bull (shortly after the assassination of Ramzan’s dad right about then). Since then, Chechens have mainly been used to kill Russian opposition figures. So this recent resurgence of Islamic extremism – provided it is real – should legitimately terrify Putin. It means his hat trick may have run its course.

The Russian state’s relationship with Islamic extremism has been strange and unpredictable. Sources suggest that border guards in the Southern Russian region of Daghestan actually held Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s #2, who succeeded him as head of al Qaeda until the United States managed to dispatch him in Afghanistan in 2022, in a local prison for nine months in the 1990s having no clue who he was. When they got tired of feeding him, they cut him loose and he returned to Egypt. Then, Zawahiri was on a mission to build a bridge with the Chechens, but after his extended Daghestani hospitality, he gave up on the notion.

Now, Putin’s top commander in Ukraine, General Sergey Surovikin, enjoys the nom de guerre Armageddon because of his no holds barred tactics in Syria, where he committed war crimes by killing civilians en masse. Perhaps he pissed some folks off in those pre-Ukrainian adventures.

The terror suspects Moscow has detained hail from Tajikistan, where the Northern Alliance fighters who cut their teeth killing Soviets in the late 1980s fell back to train and equip in those days and where, today, new terror cells have free rein in the wild hillsides. Who knows who kitted them out and sent them to Moscow, but US intelligence had been warning of a major attack in the offing there for at least two weeks now. For the trillions we abandoned in Afghanistan several years ago, perhaps a few antennae are still functioning.

The bottom line is Putin has more enemies than the Ukrainian people he attacked without provocation. And despite the mythology that he installs US presidents and lords over a country with nifty shopping carts, he is weaker than he’d like others to believe. Innocent Russians should not have to bear the cost of his weakness forever.