“Crocus City Hall” attack in Moscow suburb and other important Russian news
Bad news travels fast and major international broadcasters are always on the lookout to talking heads for ‘added value’ commentary.
Thus, I was not surprised to receive a phone call from a key Indian television network at 10 pm last night requesting some sage words about the breaking news events in a suburb of Moscow, where a large concert hall had just been attacked by several men in camouflage outfits wielding automatic weapons. At that moment 40 people inside the hall were reported to have been killed on the spot; this morning the number has risen to 60 and it may yet go higher.
Not much more about the tragedy was known then and I declined to comment. Not much more is known now, given that official Russian news releases are very sparing and cautious. We have heard that a ‘criminal investigation’ was opened into the case, but such investigations are opened daily into hundreds of cases relating to the war with Ukraine, mostly in the border territories. Those investigations are purely pro forma and yield no results worthy of discussion.
We are also told that the various Russian law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working on the case. Full stop. So far there is no official Russian speculation on who may have been behind this attack, who perpetrated it. Meanwhile, United States news portals say that American authorities warned the Russians that a terrorist attack was coming in March. No more than that bald assertion is known.
However, one does not have to be a Sherlock Holmes to understand that in one way or another Kiev is behind this latest terrorist attack. And, in one way or another, U.S. intelligence operatives are giving instructions to their Ukrainian counterparts on what is allowable in terrorist operations and what is not. The Financial Times said as much yesterday in an article entitled “US has urged Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries.” Yesterday’s New York Times carried the same information.
That attacks on Russian oil refineries are a no-no has nothing to do with America’s views of sabotage and terrorism directed against Russia more generally. It is motivated solely by self-interest of the Biden administration, which fears that reduction in Russian oil production and exports will negatively affect global markets, raise prices of gas at the pump in the United States, and impact negatively on the Democrats’ electoral chances in November. There is no interest whatsoever in what terrorist acts may or may not mean for taking the lives of Russian civilians.
*****
Let us be perfectly clear: the more desperate the Ukrainian military position on the battlefield becomes, and by all reports, Western and Russian, the situation is dire and Ukrainians are being pushed back to the West daily, the more vicious and spectacular are the Ukrainian directed or inspired acts of terror against Russian civilians in the ‘occupied territories’ of the Donbas and Crimea, and more recently in the Russian heartland. In terms of range, the latest Ukrainian drones have a 1,000 km operating zone and so are reaching well beyond Moscow and St Petersburg. As we see from the events last night, detachments of Ukrainian directed executioners can wreak havoc in the very neighborhood of the Russian capital.
The question of a shift from conventional warfare in which Ukrainian forces are being decimated, with or without Western military and financial help, to terrorist operations was already discussed in Western as well as Russian media a month ago when General Zaluzhny was about to be replaced as head of the Ukrainian military forces. There was speculation that his successor might well become Kirill Budanov, head of the Ukrainian military intelligence services and director of the campaign of sabotage and terror against Russia, which was even then yielding very impressive results while the regular army was floundering. Instead, Zelensky selected General Oleksandr Syrsky to replace Zaluzhny. Syrsky, as we know, was the general who threw away the lives of his soldiers in hopeless efforts to retain strategically unimportant towns and he has continued this military folly in the latest Ukrainian counter-attacks around Avdeevka. Meanwhile, Budanov’s star has continued to rise. Yesterday’s carnage at the Crocus City Hall is only the latest and most publicized proof.
*****
The Putin administration is clearly wary of pointing a finger at Kiev for this outrage. But the Russian public is surely going to put enormous pressure on the Kremlin to face up to the facts and to do something more than just another ‘revenge attack’ on Ukrainian military infrastructure such as was carried out several days ago in response to the latest Ukrainian incursions and missile attacks in the Russian border province of Belgorod, near Ukraine’s second city of Kharkov.
There surely will be those Russian patriots who will call for a decapitating strike on Kiev to get rid of Zelensky and the neo-Nazis who de facto control his government at one blow. This has been achievable at any moment over the course of the past two years but was not done by the Kremlin for reasons that have nothing to do with its Christian faith guided humanitarian values.
No, the reason was to prevent what has been until recently a conventional war contained within certain rules of conduct degenerating into a partisan war without rules such as you commonly see in fratricidal military conflict.
The fact today is that with the upsurge of spectacular terrorist attacks on and inside Russia Ukraine is de facto already engaged in all-out ‘partisan’ style warfare. The fact is that with the threat of a French directed invasion force entering Ukraine set out in the past week, with the delivery of F-16s to Kiev approaching, and with the delivery of nuclear enabled German Taurus cruise missiles still under discussion, the time for end-game division of what remains of Ukraine among the interested parties is here and now.
The logic of the U.S. encouragement to Kiev to perpetrate exactly this kind of atrocity is obvious to anyone with eyes to see. It was precisely attacks like this, as for example during the Chechen wars and the Beslan school siege-massacre that Putin was enraged and responded violently. The decapitation of Kiev now will be very convenient also for Washington.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024