On Friday, March 22, an attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue near Moscow killed or wounded hundreds of people. The assault was the deadliest act of terrorism in the Russian capital in more than a decade. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and US officials have attributed it to the ISIS-K branch. Russian authorities have arrested four men suspected of carrying out the attack but continue to blame Ukraine for the tragedy. For a closer look at the emerging narratives and response to the attack, we offer you an FPRI expert commentary below:

Nikolas K. Gvosdev

We need to pay careful attention to the narrative emerging in Russia. Even before the horrific attack at the Crocus City Hall, Russian officials were already ramping up their rhetoric. Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, described Russia as now being in a “state of war” with Ukraine, no longer carrying out a more limited “special military operation” and specifically assigned blame to “when the collective West became a participant.” Russian commentators now routinely proclaim that active duty personnel of NATO countries are now deployed in combat roles in Ukraine, and recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian targets are attributed to NATO action. 

Because the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the massacre at the concert venue, the initial Russian efforts to describe the attack as a Ukrainian action have been modified: either ISIS carried this attack out at the behest of Ukraine and its Western partners or was manipulated by Kyiv and its associates to strike the Russian capital. What would be the motive to do so? Russian social media channels ascribe two primary objectives: to create further unrest inside of Russia and to provoke the Kremlin into taking retaliatory action against ISIS–both of which would be designed to lessen the pressure Ukraine has been under in the last several weeks as the Russian military makes advances and as Ukraine runs out of Western supplies. 

By tying together all these threads–an anti-Russia coalition of ISIS, Ukraine, and NATO–which poses an existential threat to Russia, the Kremlin seems to be preparing the population for a long struggle. One which can now only end with regime change in Kyiv and a definitive pushback to Euro-Atlantic influence in Eurasia.

Robert E. Hamilton

The horrific attack on Crocus City Hall was a vivid and tragic example of two pathologies of Putin’s Kremlin: the fixation with the alleged threat the West poses to Russia and the fact that Russia’s security services are far better at repression of Russian society than they are at dealing with actual threats. Together, these pathologies allowed ISIS-K to pull off a brazen attack that killed or wounded hundreds of Russians. 

The Kremlin’s dismissal of US warnings of the attack and Putin’s characterization of them as provocations designed to blackmail Russia illustrate the first pathology. Putin and his inner circle simply could not believe that the US was sincerely interested in preventing an attack of this sort in Russia, and so not only dismissed the warnings but attacked the US for passing them along.

The Kremlin’s ham-fisted attempts to implicate Ukraine–and, by extension, the West–in the attack are another grotesque manifestation of its pathological thinking, thinking which allows the Kremlin to twist a tragedy into a justification for increasing the intensity of its brutal and illegal war against a neighbor. Implicating Ukraine and the West in the attack also deflects attention from the Kremlin’s failure to prevent it.

Russia faces real threats to its security, and terrorism is a big one. The 2002 Nord-Ost theater hostage crisis, the 2004 Beslan school siege, the 2010 Moscow metro bombing, the 2011 Moscow airport bombing, and the 2015 Metrojet airplane bombing are just a few of the many attacks that Russia has suffered this century. Unfortunately, as long as their security services see people laying flowers to commemorate Alexey Navalny as a threat equal to that posed by international terrorists, Russians will continue to suffer these types of attacks and die needlessly.

Philip Wasielewski

Once again, the scourge of international terrorism has hit Russia, leaving at least 133 innocent people dead and even more wounded. The attack on a concert at the Crocus City Hall theater near Moscow is a two-fold tragedy, tragic in the evil that perpetuated it and tragic in how Putin’s regime responded to it. As with the Beslan school, Nord East theater, and other terrorist attacks in Russia, the horrors of terrorism are sometimes compounded by the Kremlin’s response. The March 22 attack is no different.

The United States tried to warn the Russian government 15 days ahead of this attack that extremists had imminent plans to strike large gatherings in Moscow, including concerts. It did so privately through official channels and publicly. The warning was not only ignored but met with derision. On March 19, President Vladimir Putin himself called the warning “blackmail” and an attempt to destabilize Russian society. After the attack, the Russian government immediately made baseless accusations of Ukrainian and US involvement with the attackers, who most likely belonged to the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan. Despite the current poor bilateral relations, the United States followed its duty to warn policy to share intelligence with Russia only to see in Kremlin minds that this action was “proof” of US involvement. Furthermore, there are already indications that the Kremlin will use this attack to stoke further its propaganda war against the United States and its conventional war against Ukraine, where civilian casualties on the scale of the Crocus City Hall attack happen monthly. It is a strange psychology that permeates Russia’s national security elites to be unwilling to cooperate and accept help or warnings against common threats to all civilized nations, such as international terrorism. Unfortunately, the Kremlin can only see the world through one type of lens– that of anti-Western hysteria and loathing. Pity the man or the country that will never grasp an outstretched hand, even when drowning.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

Image credit: A Russian law enforcement officer walks at a parking area near the burning Crocus City Hall concert venue following a shooting incident, outside Moscow, Russia, March 22, 2024. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov