DISINFO: Western, Ukrainian intelligence responsible for Crocus City Hall attack
SUMMARY
One of the perfectly plausible versions of a terrorist attack in Moscow is precisely that Western or Ukrainian intelligence services hired thugs with Tajik passports to provoke turmoil and riots in Russia. To fracture the country from within. Two years ago, on a training ground in Belgorod, anti-Russian forces, not necessarily Muslim radicals, possibly Western or Ukrainian intelligence services, already utilized religious fanatics or unstable individuals.
RESPONSE
This disinformation story is part of a wider campaign by Russian officials and media -including by Vladimir Putin himself- to baselessly blame Ukraine and other actors for the attack.
This also fits several pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about the US as an evil force always conspiring to destabilise other countries, about encircling Russia (and China), and about US and other Western intelligence services supporting and using jihadist groups to advance geopolitical goals. In this case, it appears that the allegations were specifically crafted to tarnish the image of the US and EU, portraying them as sinister.
There is no evidence backing this allegation. The US has been acting as the leader of the global coalition to defeat Daesh/ISIS, and has invested massive resources and efforts for years to fight Al Qaeda. Israel is also a declared target of jihadist organisations, and has worked to thwart ISIS terror attacks worldwide and inside Israel itself.
The US was legally obliged to warn Moscow earlier this month of a possible attack in Russia aimed at large gatherings before issuing a public advisory to citizens in the country. As explained by ABC news.
"The United States shared those advance intelligence indications under a tenet of the U.S. intelligence community called the “duty to warn," which obliges U.S. intelligence officials to lean toward sharing knowledge of a dire threat if conditions allow. That holds whether the targets are allies, adversaries or somewhere in between".
The alert was dismissed as "provocative", "blackmail" and an "attempt to intimidate, destabilise our country" by Putin. He said: “I’ll remind you of recent, let’s say directly, provocative statements of certain official Western structures about potential terror attacks in Russia. All of this looks like obvious blackmail and an attempt to intimidate, destabilise our country”.
In a recent development, news have appeared that Iran had warned Moscow a few days before of an imminent attack by ISIS based on information obtained from arrested ISIS terrorists in Iran.
Even Putin himself acknowledged late on 25 March that Islamists were committing the attack.
See similar disinformation cases claiming that Anti-Russian actors using neo-Nazis in Kyiv may be involved in Crocus attack, that Ukrainian official admitted Ukraine’s involvement in the terrorist attack in Crocus City, that ISIS claiming responsibility for Moscow attack looks like a fake, that Ukraine is resorting to terrorism by attacking nuclear sites in Russia, that Foreigners from terrorist organisations are fighting for Ukraine, that Kyiv uses the same methods as ISIS to recruit children and that The Kyiv regime is a global terrorist threat.