Posted by The bloody terrorist attack on a concert hall near Moscow had barely subsided before Russia launched a disinformation campaign suggesting that Ukraine and the West were somehow behind it, pushing a version of events molded to fit the Kremlin war narrative and downplay a significant security failure.
President Vladimir V. Putin has hinted several times that Kyiv and Washington played a part, and the latest to join the chorus was Aleksandr Bortnikov, the director of the Federal Security Service, the top security agency in Russia. On Tuesday he said, without offering any evidence, that the assault “was prepared by both radical Islamists themselves and, naturally, facilitated by Western special services.”
The United States and other Western governments have said repeatedly that the Islamic State — which itself has issued two claims of responsibility — was behind the assault. U.S. security officials named a specific branch of the organization, the Islamic State in Khorasan. Plus Washington warned Russia both publicly and privately on March 7 about the threat of an attack on an unspecified concert venue.
But on Friday evening, gunmen infiltrated the Crocus City Hall and opened fire, killing 139 people and injuring many others.
“It was classic for Putin to discount the warnings,” said Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council. “The security services don’t have the bandwidth. They never have because they’re so focused on internal repression, and so focused on Kyiv, and they want everything to fit that narrative.”
Accepting publicly that Islamic militants alone were responsible for the worst terrorist attack in Russia in two decades might also dilute the Kremlin’s message that Russians need to unify around the war with Ukraine, Ms. Hill said. “You are having a big existential battle with the West, so you cannot divert attention away from it.”
When it comes to managing crises, disinformation has been a favorite tool of Mr. Putin’s Kremlin, and outside players like the United States are often the villain of choice. Examples stretch all the way back to the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan, Russia in 2004, that left more than 330 people dead, most of them children.
Moscow has arrested eight people in connection with the concert hall assault, most of them from Tajikistan, the Central Asian nation whose citizens hold prominent positions in the Islamic State. The group has maintained its threats against Russian and other European targets, even after the collapse of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq by 2019.
Mr. Putin expressed surprise on Monday that Muslim extremists would attack Russia given that, he said, it “stands for a fair solution to the escalating Middle East conflict.”
Yet Russia has been in the cross hairs of Sunni Muslim extremists, particularly the Islamic State, since 2015, when it deployed its air force in Syria to shore up the brutal rule of President Bashar al-Assad, often striking civilians. Syria was fighting an ISIS insurgency, among other factions, with the backing of its close ally, the Shiite Muslim regime in Iran. Russia continues bombing ISIS targets there to this day.
Mr. Putin “is ignoring the fact that they have bombed places like Aleppo into oblivion,” said Ms. Hill. “Russia is suffering from the same targeting as any other Western country from the point of view of ISIS and Islamic-inspired terrorist organizations.”
Russia has frequently blamed the United States for the rise of ISIS, which emerged after the American-led invasion of Iraq that toppled the government of President Saddam Hussein. Jihadist groups filled the resulting power vacuum and seized significant territory, and were dislodged only after a yearslong war.
The claims on Tuesday from Mr. Bortnikov, the Federal Security Service director, were broadly in line with Mr. Putin’s earlier contentions, and they reflect Moscow’s growing determination to muster its political and media resources against what it depicts as Russia’s main enemies at the moment: Ukraine and its Western backers.
Asked whether Russia saw American, British and Ukrainian roles in the attack, Mr. Bortnikov said, “We believe that’s the case,” the state news agency Tass reported.
“Overall, we believe that they were involved in this,” Mr. Bortnikov told journalists, referring to Ukraine. He said that his accusations were still based on preliminary information.
Other senior officials, including Maria V. Zakharova, the spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, began within hours of the attack to cast suspicion on Ukraine and undercut any other account of what happened at the concert hall. After the United States linked the attack to ISIS, and said there was no indication of Ukrainian involvement, Ms. Zakharova said that American officials had “no right to absolve anyone,” and hinted that Washington somehow had inside information.
So far, the Russian government has not produced any evidence that the men arrested after the attack had any links to Ukraine. The Kremlin has tried to build its case that Kyiv was involved around the fact that the four men described as the main suspects were detained hours after the attack on a highway leading toward Ukraine.
President Alexander Lukashenko of neighboring Belarus, a close ally of Mr. Putin’s, seemed to cast doubt on that scenario. His nation had sealed its borders — the nearest to Moscow — after the attack, at the request of Mr. Putin, he said on Tuesday. Given the heightened security measures, the men “went toward the Ukrainian-Russian section of the border,” Mr. Lukashenko said, according to the state-run news agency Belta.
The Ukrainian government has denied any involvement in the assault. Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian presidential aide, called Mr. Bortnikov’s statements “lies,” and in a post on social media, said, “This is now chronic.”
For almost a day after the attack, Mr. Putin remained silent. Only three days later did he describe it as having been carried out by “radical Islamists” — and even then he insisted that Ukraine may have had a role.
The Kremlin is often at a loss for how to address such crises, analysts noted, and needs time to figure out how they can be used to advance its aims. The message that eventually emerges is often meant more for the domestic audience than the international one, to distract Russians from casting blame on their government.
Independent voices abroad were not buying it this week, but their reach inside Russia is limited. Many critics noted, for example, that the Russian government had been busy labeling gay rights organizations as “extremist,” while failing to find the real extremists right under its nose.
Russia’s security forces can “see rainbow earrings a kilometer away, but not a car with heavily armed terrorists,” wrote Leonid Volkov, a senior figure in the opposition organization of Aleksei A. Navalny, who died in a Russian prison last month.
There is a pattern to the claims, analysts note.
In 2004, during the attack on the Beslan school, the Kremlin first denied that the attackers were Chechens retaliating against Russia for the war in their region, where Moscow had been using scorched-earth tactics against Islamist separatists. Russia instead pointed a finger at neighboring Georgia, accusing it of harboring terrorists.
The same playbook seems to be in use now, and not just in Kremlin statements. Russia’s broader disinformation machine has also cranked into full gear, spreading baseless accusations and conspiracy theories in state-controlled media and online.
The social media accounts of Russian embassies have been “fairly conspiratorial,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who studies information manipulation, “kind of en masse pushing out content that is effectively saying this wasn’t ISIS, or if it was ISIS, it was ISIS under the loose — or in some cases more explicit — direction of Washington and Ukrainian intelligence.”
Most Russian propaganda since the full invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 has sounded a similar theme: that Russia was forced into the war because the West was using Kyiv as a stalking horse to undermine Russia.
“I think we’ve moved to a period where the West and Ukraine are behind all the nefarious actions in Russia,” said Prof. Edward Lemon of Texas A&M University, who specializes in authoritarian governments across Central Asia. “There cannot be a bad action now without the hidden hand of Ukraine and its Western puppet masters.”
Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.