WaPo (“Death toll from Moscow concert attack rises to 115 as more bodies found“):
At least 115 people were killed after gunmen armed with automatic weapons opened fire at a popular concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow and set the concert hall alight, Russia’s Investigative Committee reported Saturday, following U.S. government warnings this month about a “planned terrorist attack” in the Russian capital.
The committee said more bodies were found in the concert hall early on Saturday, adding that the death toll was expected to rise, with 16 of the 107 hospitalized victims in a grave condition and 44 in a serious condition.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) reported to President Vladimir Putin that all four of the gunmen who attacked the Crocus City Hall concert venue had been arrested early on Saturday, and another seven arrests had been made, according to the Kremlin press service.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Friday night attack, already one of the most deadly in modern Russian history, which left about 140,000 square feet of the venue in Krasnogorsk in flames according to Russia’s emergency services. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, told The Washington Post that the United States had “no reason to doubt” the claim from the Islamic State.
CNN (“US had warned Russia ISIS was determined to attack“):
The US warned Moscow that ISIS militants were determined to target Russia in the days before assailants stormed the Crocus City Hall in an attack that killed scores of people, but President Vladimir Putin rejected the advice as “provocative.”
[…]
Experts said the scale of the carnage – some of which was captured in video footage obtained by CNN showing crowds of people cowering behind cushioned seats as gunshots echoed in the vast hall – would be deeply embarrassing for the Russian leader, who had championed a message of national security just a week earlier when winning the country’s stage-managed election.
Not only had Russian intelligence services failed to prevent the attack, they said, but Putin had failed to heed warnings from the United States that extremists were plotting to target Moscow.
Earlier this month, the US embassy in Russia had said it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow,” including concerts, and it warned US citizens to avoid such places.
US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the US government had “shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy.”
But in a speech Tuesday, Putin had blasted the American warnings as “provocative,” saying “these actions resemble outright blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society.”
That stance came despite Russian authorities having reported several ISIS-related incidents within the past month.
The state-run RIA Novosti reported on March 3 that six ISIS members were killed in a counter-terrorist operation in the Ingush Karabulak; on March 7, it said security services had uncovered and “neutralized” a cell of the banned organization Vilayat Khorasan in the Kaluga region, whose members were planning an attack on a synagogue in Moscow; and on March 20, it said the commander of an ISIS combat group had been detained.
Two sources familiar with the American information said that since November there had been a steady stream of intelligence that ISIS-K – an affiliate of ISIS that is active in Afghanistan and the surrounding region – was determined to attack Russia.
Moscow has intervened tellingly in Syria’s civil war, to the support of President Bashar al-Assad and against ISIS.
ISIS-K “sees Russia as being complicit in activities that regularly oppress Muslims,” Michael Kugelman of the Washington-based Wilson Center said, as quoted by Reuters.
NYT (“Russia has been hit by several major attacks in recent decades.”):
For many Russians, the massacre at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow on Friday night brought to mind shootings and bombings across the country in recent decades, events that the authorities often described as terrorism.
The authorities linked many of those attacks to Russia’s wars against Chechen separatists in the 1990s and 2000s. Those conflicts helped enable the rise of Vladimir V. Putin, who over his two decades in power has sought to project an image of being tough on terrorism.
In the early 2000s, Chechen militants staged several major terrorist attacks, as Russia waged a second war to defeat a separatist movement in Chechnya. In October 2002, dozens of Chechen gunmen seized a crowded Moscow theater, taking more than 750 people hostage.
The siege lasted for days, until Russian special forces filled the theater with a debilitating gas to incapacitate the gunmen. More than a hundred hostages died as a result of the raid, with most of the deaths attributed to the gas. The Russian government later acknowledged that it had pumped in an aerosol version of fentanyl in its attempt to end the standoff.
In September 2004, Chechen militants swept into a school in Beslan, a city in the North Caucasus, taking more than 1,000 people hostage, including 770 children, and rigging the building with explosives.
Three days after the siege began, Russian security forces armed with tanks, rockets, grenade launchers and other weapons stormed the school, which caught fire as they engaged in gun battles with the Chechen fighters.
More than 330 hostages — including 186 children — died in the battle, leading the European Court of Human Rights to decide over a decade later that the Russian authorities had violated European human rights law in their handling of the siege. The Kremlin rejected the conclusion.
Bombers detonated two explosives at landmark subway stations in Moscow in March 2010, killing at least 38 people. The attack, resembling a subway bombing that killed about 40 people in 2004, revived fears that the Chechen insurgency had not been quelled, and a Chechen militant leader claimed to have ordered the attack.
In 2011, a bomber attacked Moscow’s busiest airport, Domodedovo, killing 37 people. The Russian authorities later said that the bomber was a man from the North Caucasus.
A homemade device filled with shrapnel exploded during rush hour, killing at least 14 people. Officials named the bomber as a member of the Uzbek minority in southern Kyrgyzstan, and said they were investigating whether he had any links to Islamist extremists.
About 600 miles east of Moscow, a gunman attacked a school in the city of Izhevsk, killing 15 people, in what the Kremlin called a terrorist attack.
The authorities said the attacker, who had been armed with two pistols, “was wearing a black top with Nazi symbols and a balaclava” and was not carrying any ID.
There’s not really much to say about the horrific nature of these attacks on civilians.
That the United States is sharing intelligence with the Putin regime, which is labeled an “acute threat” in our national strategy documents, highlights the complexity of international politics. Our relationship with Moscow is decidedly more adversarial than it was with Beijing, even though that regime is our “pacing challenge.” But even adversaries need to communicate and we have both a humanitarian interest in preventing attacks on Russian civilians and a shared security interest in thwarting Islamic extremism.
UPDATE: BBC reports Putin gave a televised speech claiming the four terrorists “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border.” Ukrainian officials called the claim “absurd” and “Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukrainian defence intelligence, told the BBC the area is full of Russian military and security services. Any terrorist fleeing the scene of an attack would have to be ‘stupid or suicidal’ – or want to get caught – to head there, says Yusov.”
This is laughably pathetic but raises concerns that Putin will escalate violence in Ukraine to distract attention from his own failures here.
