Are the Moscow shootings a false flag? Could be. The Russians just identified one of my Ukrainian acquaintances as a shooter. Mykola has been in Kyiv all week.
MAR 24, 2024
Last week I wrote a piece that got picked up by the Kyiv Post and Washington Examiner talking about Putin’s rise to power on the 1999 deaths of some 300 Russian civilians who were killed in a series of false flag apartment bombings committed by Putin’s FSB friends.
Turns out I was prescient. Yesterday gunmen entered a concert in a Moscow suburb and killed at least 130 Russian civilians. The Moscow shootings seem to be taken from the same playbook as the apartment bombings a quarter century ago, even down to the detail that the villains are Muslim.
What I had no way of knowing is that a Ukrainian friend of mine is one of the shooters now sitting in a Moscow jail. Or that is what the Russians would have us believe.
This popped up on a Russian propaganda account on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Mykola Malukha is not a Muslim terrorist in a Moscow jail. He is a Ukrainian Protestant who works in a Kyiv-based think tank. Mykola helped me at the beginning of our RussiaTorturesChristians.org project.
One of my favorite things about the early Russian propaganda efforts, hearkening back to another white car nearly thirty years to Los Angeles, is that police in Moscow found a suspicious white van with Ukrainian plates near the concert hall. Because it would be easy for Ukrainian terrorists to drive a van from Ukraine across the Russian border, through Russia and park it in Moscow without being detected.
Putin today doubled down on the white van theory, saying that all four suspects were apprehended in southern Russia trying to escape to Ukraine. Meaning the supposed terrorists are a) suicidal but did not want to be suicide bombers or b) smart enough to pull off a coordinated attack in Russia’s capital but stupid enough to want to escape by wading through thousands of Russian troops to try to get back to Ukraine, rather than going through Europe.
The Russians are blaming the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians are blaming the Russian FSB, and the Islamic State is desperately waving its hands and trying to take credit for the attack themselves.
Of course, the super weird thing… why would the Islamic State attack Russia, and why now?
Putin has shown a fondness for the Muslim extremist cause. Hamas and Putin have had a long relationship and Russian weapons. Wagner Group training was a key part of Hamas’s ability to inflict horror on innocent Israelis. Moscow was the first stop for Hamas leaders to meet with Putin and Iranian leaders two weeks after attacking Israel on October 7. Seems like a strange reward for someone trying to help drive Israel into the sea.
However, the intra-party politics among jihadis make House Republicans seem straightforward. Media reports say the branch of Islamic State taking credit for the attack was formed in Afghanistan – ISIL-K. The Soviet Union left there in 1980 and met its demise a decade later. Seems like a long time to hold a grudge against a country that doesn’t exist any more. But that part of the world is highly skilled in multi-generational feuds.
I read a piece in The Conversation from Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation; Scholar -In-Residence Asia Society Australia, Deakin University – a man with a ridiculously long who I had never heard of before today. Barton points out that ISIL-K bombed the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022. In January of this year, ISIL-K attacked Russia’s ally Iran and killed 100 people in a suicide bombing.
Regardless of who actually attacked the Crocus City Hall, Putin is going to try to use it to escalate the war in Ukraine. I write this from my hallway, out of the way of windows and with two walls in between us after an air raid warning and news reports of large numbers of Russian bombers heading this direction.
Typically, I sleep through these “Russian alarm clocks.” But who knows what kind of crazy stuff Putin will do after the real or artificially generated terrorist attack. And Kyiv is running out of Patriot missiles. Please call your member of Congress and let them know.
Thankfully, as dawn breaks and I wrap up this piece, it looks like he is sending fewer missiles today than the 31 he sent on Thursday, when he welcomed leaders from several NATO countries to Kyiv for the Kyiv Security Forum.
Peace be upon you.
…………….
Comment from :
Mark Strand
Liked by Steven Moore
I could believe it was ISIS, and Putin is using the maxim, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” But on the other hand, Putin has shown no reluctance to sacrifice Russian lives for his cause. The high number of Russian deaths in Ukraine is evidence that Putin will encourage Russian deaths in the “meatgrinder” if only he can win the battle of numbers against a smaller Ukrainian army. So, did Putin set this up like he did in Chechnya many years back? Only a fool would ignore that possibility.
Strand is past President of the Congressional Institute and was staff in the House and Senate for 24 years. He teaches at GWU’s Grad School of Political Management, is coauthor of Surviving Inside Congress & a 2017 Harvard Kennedy School IOP Fellow.
The kremlin regime consists of hate-spewing psychopathic nazis who dream of murdering all Ukrainians. That said, these sick freaks have a particular hard-on for Protestants and Mr Moore was one of the first to document putinaZi atrocities committed on innocent Christians from Protestant denominations; of which there are many in Ukraine. Pentecostalists in particular.
Ruskie trolls are angry that many people have no compassion over the attack in muscovy. They are sick enough in their alcohol-soaked brains to expect compassion after the countless horrors they’ve brought to other peoples.
“Meaning the supposed terrorists are a) suicidal but did not want to be suicide bombers or b) smart enough to pull off a coordinated attack in Russia’s capital but stupid enough to want to escape by wading through thousands of Russian troops to try to get back to Ukraine, rather than going through Europe.”
Even going through Europe, via Belarus, would have been an unnecessary risk. Western intelligence services did have informations about the terror plan, after all, and the US had issued an alert before the act. The reasonable escape plan would have been for the attackers to change into civilian clothes (which they did, it was initially reported), break up their group, and every single assasin going on his own escape route, by car, bus or train, towards an islamic country, via the Southwest of the Federation. None of those flight plans should have included wearing combat fatigues or using the very same white Renault with which the group had arrived at the Crocus. You don’t have to be a terroristic mastermind to figure that out. Thus, I can only conclude that Russian security forces probably arrested the first four innocent migrant workers they could find, who only superficially fit the description, and applied toture on them to play along. The real killers may already be in Afghanistan now. 🤨