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But while we’re on the subject, the alleged author of this video claims that he was working as a videographer and that he thought the gunmen were part of a “performance”, because—as he claims—that’s something that the band Picnic would do. No, I’m not making this up. Turn on the auto-generated subtitles if you don’t believe me:
“At first I thought this was some kind of performance by Picnic [the band playing that evening]. They love to organize all sorts of such performances,” the videographer said.
Opinions? Follow the initial link (this one) and read the whole thing.
17 comments to The Crocus incident in Russia – what to make of this?
On the one hand, the US is doing everything it can to play into the Russian narrative about it being something the US/Ukraine is involved in. If they weren’t, they’d be staging their warnings and the aftermath a lot differently; sources for why they made the warning would have been at least explained. So, there’s that: More grist for the hypothesis that the US isn’t really on Ukraine’s side at all, especially the Democrats.
Secondly, the quite bizarre event itself along with the Russian security forces responses. This whole incident just screams “Keystone Kops” and/or “false flag”. You would think they’d be able to do the play-acting better, but… No.
Just like with Nordstream: You’re sitting in Plato’s Cave, watching the shadows on the wall, wondering just what the hell is really making them… We still haven’t had a truly definitive explanation for what happened in the Baltic, and ain’t nobody talking about it. The “right people” want to blame the US, but… Can someone explain to me why Sweden would do the investigation, and then join a US-dominated alliance, if the US was even potentially involved? That seems… Unlikely.
One of the major problems dealing with Russia is that they’re so embedded into this “espionage and intelligence” game that they think they’re so good at that I suspect that even they don’t know what the hell is going on. “Oh, sure, Yuri… We here at the GRU have investigated, and not a one of our people are involved… What about you, over at the KGB? Were you?” “Oh, no, not at all…”
Meanwhile, both parties get off the phone going “Those bastards… I knew they did it!!!”
And, odds are that it wasn’t Soviet or Russian, at all. Might even have been just plain bad luck, like the Kursk.
At some point, you just get “conspiracy exhaustion”, and you stop caring who did what to who, and what agency they worked for.
Lots of strange stuff and incongruities with this one, though.
The most straightforward (least complicated) answer is normally (normally – not always) correct.
In this case the most straightforward answer is that the forces of Islam committed this act of mass murder, an an act of revenge against Russian actions against Islamic forces in Syria is recent years, and in Chechnya before that.
This may be quite mistaken – but it is how things presently appear to be.
My humble speculation is that Russians won’t react by singing Don’t Look Back in Anger.
My humble speculation is the Russians are prone to committing domestic atrocities in order to focus Russian public sentiment & justify whatever murderous deeds that were planning on doing anyway.
The most straightforward (least complicated) answer is normally (normally – not always) correct.
I usually agree with you that things are often exactly what they seem. And sure, the Islamic States said they did it & I’m usually one to take them at their word.
But did you follow the link? Those videos seem to preclude a straightforward uncomplicated explanation. To put it bluntly, that’s some weird shit that’s hard to explain.
You want to tell me that in the most heavily secured, closely monitored city on the face of this planet, it took over an hour for an armed response to arrive? That the perpetrators drove up, parked next to a police car, got out, did their thing, went back to the same car as if they had just gotten done doing their shopping, and drove off into the sunset, only to be captured hours later damn near to Belarus?
Huh?
I can buy one or two “system failures” enabling some of this to have happened. All of it? Nope; not even a bit. Then, the images of those guys in the blue shirts inside the venue, who happen to look an awful lot like some of the arresting officers? Hmmm?
No idea what happened here, but the surface optics are screaming “INCONSISTENCY!!! INCONSISTENCY!!!” all over the place.
I mean, sure, yeah… Maybe the ISIS-K guys just got super-lucky, but… WTF? I mean, there were supposedly heavily-armed security guys working directly for that venue, the Rosvguardia station is literally within about a five-minute walk, and you want to make me believe it took an hour for them to get there…?
These are either the luckiest unlucky terrorists in the history of ever, or there’s something else going on in conjunction with it all. Occam’s Razor says “False Flag Operation”, just like the deal with that apartment building that blew up in conjunction with Putin’s taking over, back in the day.
At least, these days? A lot of Russians are finally rolling their eyes and saying “Oh, sure… You betcha’… We believe everything they say…”
It’ll be nice if Russia ever pulls its collective head out of its ass, but I don’t see that happening. You look at the history of it all, and what you find at the roots of modern terrorism? Russian/Soviet/Russian all over the place. They seeded the Anarchist movement, assassinated their own reformist Tsar for some damn reason, used terrorism to start WWI (for which they’ve never been held accountable, BTW…), and the Soviets just kept right on developing and using it. The vast majority of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East? Soviet intel agencies behind it… Remember how it all dropped off, so thoroughly after the Berlin Wall came down…? Was that enough of a clue, for you?
David Levi – yes I have followed the link. It does not really enlighten me – other than people did not, at first, think the shooting was real. I think the shooting was real.
As for Russia – well over five thousand years ago the descendants of the Eastern Hunter Gatherers (the people who wandered about from what is now Poland to eastern Siberia – from the last Ice Age onwards) became the Yamnaya culture – an inventive lot (use of horses, spoked wheels, and so on) – but rather brutal. They spread out from what is now Russia and the Ukraine – we call them Indo Europeans.
According to the Woke they are the ancestors of all white people – which makes them evil, but I suspect that is NOT true, as (for example) the Sardinians are not Indo Europeans genetically (although they speak an Indo European language – Italian, from Latin) and they look white to me.
Mr Putin would have us believe that Russian is closest to the original Indo European language – but he is wrong, the closest language to it still spoken is Lithuanian.
The Lithuanians even kept a version of the old religion into the late Middle Ages.
As for Mr Putin’s theory that Russians can be long term friends of the Chinese (ignoring a history if ethnic conflict between population groups that goes back before even China, as such, existed – what is now Siberia was inhabited by people of a certain sort – then it was not, for a long time, and then in recent centuries it was again) and with Islam (enemies of Russians, and Slavs generally, for 13 centuries) – well with his rather over optimistic theories Mr Putin reminds me of President George Walker Bush.
As for Mr Hitler’s theory that Russians are not Europeans – well there is a bit of east Asian DNA (not that Mr Hitler knew what DNA was) more than there was a thousand years ago, but it is not much. And it may be no bad thing – helping people be better cold adapted. The theory that Russians are more conformist than Ukrainians because of a bit of east Asian DNA is wildly far fetched.
The rulers of Moscow managed, by various edicts and laws, to force serfdom on some of the people (never all of them – there was always free peasants especially in the far north) – and the borderlands (the Ukraine) was more Cossack (ironically a Turkish word – it means free booter) and so for a long time the people were a bit freer down there (when they were not being captured and sold in slave markets in the Middle East) – the difference was cultural not racial.
Will they ever be one people again? Most likely NOT – even if the Ukrainians could overlook the millions murdered by “Lenin” and “Stalin” (and they murdered millions of Russians as well) – Mr Putin has buggered up any hope of unity.
The final break may come in a few days – I am told that the Ukrainians are going to celebrate Easter on the Western date – not the Orthodox date.
What Polish warriors failed to do – over centuries of trying, Mr Putin has (without intending to) managed to do. Get the Ukrainians to celebrate Easter on the Western date.
The Ukrainian Cossacks (of course there were always Russian speaking Cossacks as well – nothing is simple) always wanted to be independent (Mr Putin’s theory that the Austro-Hungarian intelligence service invented this desire in the late 19th century is wrong) – but they disliked the Westerners more than Moscow, for religious reasons. So when they had to choose they chose Moscow. Although then the Russians moved the capital to Saint Petersburg. Charles XII of Sweden could have snuffed that out – but he decided to march hundreds of miles inland (closer to the Black Sea than the Baltic) – Peter guessed the reason, Charles was trying to prove he was a second Alexander the Great. That the normal rules of war did not apply to him (Charles XII) and he could win even when greatly outnumbered and fighting in lands many hundreds of miles from home. However, “I am not Darius” was the reply of Peter.
Mr Putin has managed to change the choice of the Ukrainians – he has managed to get the Ukrainians and the Poles to like each other, an astonishing achievement (given their history) – but not one he intended.
Some Russian rulers rather liked war and were rather good at it – Peter the Great springs to mind, others did not like war but were rather good at it (Alexander II), still others did not like war and were no good at it (Nicholas II).
But Mr Putin is the first Russian ruler who likes war, but is no good at it.
Even if Russia wins this war (and she still may) – it will be in spite of him.
ou want to tell me that in the most heavily secured, closely monitored city on the face of this planet,
You’re joking, right?
You think a city run by gangsters is secure? Where every second person is on the take is properly monitored?
Modern Russia can’t stop its refineries being blown up by Ukrainian drones. A few Tajiki terrorists, entering by car, would be the easiest thing in the world.
The only thing that limits this sort of atrocity is the number of people prepared to commit suicide to do it.
@JuliaM They certainly didn’t treat the suspects with the sort of kid-glove, overly solicitous treatment they’d have got from the Met.
No doubt. Doesn’t that provoke just a twinge of jealousy in you? Sure Putin’s regime is horrible and tyrannical, sure I believe innocent until proven guilty, no cruel and unusual punishment and so on, all the foundations of English and American common law. But don’t you just wish you could get one of these guys, who sets off a bomb in a theater full of teenage girls, so excited to see their pop idol. Don’t you just wish you could take that guy and beat the crap out of him every day for the rest of your life, or set the parents loose on him?
Being civilized has its downsides. Vengeance is a part of the criminal law, and locking him away with three squares a day doesn’t do all that great a job of cooling the fire in the blood. It has been years since that Ariana Grande concert, and someone mentioning it above still fills me with rage. Rage without much of an outlet.
“Can someone explain to me why Sweden would do the investigation, and then join a US-dominated alliance, if the US was even potentially involved? That seems… Unlikely.”
It could be down to the calculation ‘Is it better to be on the side of the psychopaths or to be seen (by them) as somehow siding with ‘the enemy’ by attempting to be neutral?’
If one is caught in a turf war between two gangs of murderous nutters and cannot leave the area (as a country cannot) at some point you have to choose to side with one of them, in order to get some degree of protection. Maybe Sweden decided joining NATO was the best bet out of two not very great options, even if they did have proof the US did blow up Nordstream. In fact even better if you have some dirt on the leader of the gang, it gives you a bit of leverage once you’re in.
You think a city run by gangsters is secure? Where every second person is on the take is properly monitored?
Apparently, you’ve rather missed the observation that just standing around a Moscow venue with a blank sheet of paper will get you arrested within moments of doing so. This was a fairly major venue, like the equivalent of Madison Square Gardens or the stadium at Wembley. The idea that they’re not monitoring sites like this for signs of dissent…? Ludicrous.
I’d buy it if we were talking about some podunk rinky-dink rural auditorium, about like the school at Beslan. Yeah, I can see that taking hours for the security forces to saddle up and deal with things… Damn near downtown Moscow?
In no way does that aspect even begin to make sense. You tell me that they deliberately let this happen, wellllll… I see nothing to argue against that idea. Nothing.
The inconsistencies are all there, and are all unexplained, so far. I doubt they’re going to be; this was play-acting, a staged affair for domestic audiences. Nothing else really makes much sense, with what evidence we have.
Do remember that this is the same “security” operation that delivered an evidence package of Sims games, rather than the probable SIM cards. It’s not filled with really competent people…
Kirk – Moscow is a city of millions of people, and this was in a suburb – miles from the centre of Moscow where security is tight.
Mr Putin’s regime is saying that the West “let it happen” (or worse) – because of the warning that Western governments issued a few days before. But, in reality, all the Western governments knew was that there was chatter in Islamic circles that “something big” was going to go down in the Moscow region soon.
Where specifically? Do not know.
Remember Mr Putin’s regime has been trying to make friends with Islam (RT is non stop pro Hamas propaganda – I would not be surprised if Neil Oliver got a job at RT), so arresting Islamic activists and torturing-drugging them till they said whether-and-where the attack was going to take place (and if the particular activists arrested really did not know – then arresting other activists and torturing-drugging them, till, eventually, you got the right ones) was NOT an option – as far as Mr Putin was concerned.
I would guess he has changed his position on that now. But is is a very difficult position – as so many people in Russia are Muslim, and infiltrating Islamic groups is rather difficult. Someone you think is working for you is, in fact, really loyal to Islam (believing that they will get eternal reward in Paradise if they serve Islam – and eternal punishment in Hell if they do not) – so your double-agent turns out to be a triple-agent working against you. And threats in relation to their families can be countered by Islamic groups also threatening their families (and, if they are loyal to Islam, the families will go to Paradise anyway – or so they believe).
Still Mr Putin could have wanted the attack to go ahead – in order to have an excuse for a crack down, it is hard to know. The world if intelligence services is very much a looking-glass world, or a carnival mirror – everything is distorted, bent and twisted.
As the Byzantines found out in the 7th century, and the Visigoths (when they were conquered in Spain) and the Chinese (when they lost Central Asia) found out in the 8th century, Islam is very good at all this.
In the middle of a battle your “allies” can turn on you – and you lose and die.
People who think they can outsmart Islam and manipulate Muslims – normally come off worse.
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Very little about this attack adds up.
On the one hand, the US is doing everything it can to play into the Russian narrative about it being something the US/Ukraine is involved in. If they weren’t, they’d be staging their warnings and the aftermath a lot differently; sources for why they made the warning would have been at least explained. So, there’s that: More grist for the hypothesis that the US isn’t really on Ukraine’s side at all, especially the Democrats.
Secondly, the quite bizarre event itself along with the Russian security forces responses. This whole incident just screams “Keystone Kops” and/or “false flag”. You would think they’d be able to do the play-acting better, but… No.
Just like with Nordstream: You’re sitting in Plato’s Cave, watching the shadows on the wall, wondering just what the hell is really making them… We still haven’t had a truly definitive explanation for what happened in the Baltic, and ain’t nobody talking about it. The “right people” want to blame the US, but… Can someone explain to me why Sweden would do the investigation, and then join a US-dominated alliance, if the US was even potentially involved? That seems… Unlikely.
One of the major problems dealing with Russia is that they’re so embedded into this “espionage and intelligence” game that they think they’re so good at that I suspect that even they don’t know what the hell is going on. “Oh, sure, Yuri… We here at the GRU have investigated, and not a one of our people are involved… What about you, over at the KGB? Were you?” “Oh, no, not at all…”
Meanwhile, both parties get off the phone going “Those bastards… I knew they did it!!!”
And, odds are that it wasn’t Soviet or Russian, at all. Might even have been just plain bad luck, like the Kursk.
At some point, you just get “conspiracy exhaustion”, and you stop caring who did what to who, and what agency they worked for.
Lots of strange stuff and incongruities with this one, though.
The most straightforward (least complicated) answer is normally (normally – not always) correct.
In this case the most straightforward answer is that the forces of Islam committed this act of mass murder, an an act of revenge against Russian actions against Islamic forces in Syria is recent years, and in Chechnya before that.
This may be quite mistaken – but it is how things presently appear to be.
My humble speculation is that Russians won’t react by singing Don’t Look Back in Anger.
To me, this means the attack was supremely successful. Just like Nordstream. Always leave ’em hurt but wondering . . .
My humble speculation is the Russians are prone to committing domestic atrocities in order to focus Russian public sentiment & justify whatever murderous deeds that were planning on doing anyway.
I usually agree with you that things are often exactly what they seem. And sure, the Islamic States said they did it & I’m usually one to take them at their word.
But did you follow the link? Those videos seem to preclude a straightforward uncomplicated explanation. To put it bluntly, that’s some weird shit that’s hard to explain.
You want to tell me that in the most heavily secured, closely monitored city on the face of this planet, it took over an hour for an armed response to arrive? That the perpetrators drove up, parked next to a police car, got out, did their thing, went back to the same car as if they had just gotten done doing their shopping, and drove off into the sunset, only to be captured hours later damn near to Belarus?
Huh?
I can buy one or two “system failures” enabling some of this to have happened. All of it? Nope; not even a bit. Then, the images of those guys in the blue shirts inside the venue, who happen to look an awful lot like some of the arresting officers? Hmmm?
No idea what happened here, but the surface optics are screaming “INCONSISTENCY!!! INCONSISTENCY!!!” all over the place.
I mean, sure, yeah… Maybe the ISIS-K guys just got super-lucky, but… WTF? I mean, there were supposedly heavily-armed security guys working directly for that venue, the Rosvguardia station is literally within about a five-minute walk, and you want to make me believe it took an hour for them to get there…?
These are either the luckiest unlucky terrorists in the history of ever, or there’s something else going on in conjunction with it all. Occam’s Razor says “False Flag Operation”, just like the deal with that apartment building that blew up in conjunction with Putin’s taking over, back in the day.
At least, these days? A lot of Russians are finally rolling their eyes and saying “Oh, sure… You betcha’… We believe everything they say…”
It’ll be nice if Russia ever pulls its collective head out of its ass, but I don’t see that happening. You look at the history of it all, and what you find at the roots of modern terrorism? Russian/Soviet/Russian all over the place. They seeded the Anarchist movement, assassinated their own reformist Tsar for some damn reason, used terrorism to start WWI (for which they’ve never been held accountable, BTW…), and the Soviets just kept right on developing and using it. The vast majority of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East? Soviet intel agencies behind it… Remember how it all dropped off, so thoroughly after the Berlin Wall came down…? Was that enough of a clue, for you?
David Levi – yes I have followed the link. It does not really enlighten me – other than people did not, at first, think the shooting was real. I think the shooting was real.
As for Russia – well over five thousand years ago the descendants of the Eastern Hunter Gatherers (the people who wandered about from what is now Poland to eastern Siberia – from the last Ice Age onwards) became the Yamnaya culture – an inventive lot (use of horses, spoked wheels, and so on) – but rather brutal. They spread out from what is now Russia and the Ukraine – we call them Indo Europeans.
According to the Woke they are the ancestors of all white people – which makes them evil, but I suspect that is NOT true, as (for example) the Sardinians are not Indo Europeans genetically (although they speak an Indo European language – Italian, from Latin) and they look white to me.
Mr Putin would have us believe that Russian is closest to the original Indo European language – but he is wrong, the closest language to it still spoken is Lithuanian.
The Lithuanians even kept a version of the old religion into the late Middle Ages.
As for Mr Putin’s theory that Russians can be long term friends of the Chinese (ignoring a history if ethnic conflict between population groups that goes back before even China, as such, existed – what is now Siberia was inhabited by people of a certain sort – then it was not, for a long time, and then in recent centuries it was again) and with Islam (enemies of Russians, and Slavs generally, for 13 centuries) – well with his rather over optimistic theories Mr Putin reminds me of President George Walker Bush.
As for Mr Hitler’s theory that Russians are not Europeans – well there is a bit of east Asian DNA (not that Mr Hitler knew what DNA was) more than there was a thousand years ago, but it is not much. And it may be no bad thing – helping people be better cold adapted. The theory that Russians are more conformist than Ukrainians because of a bit of east Asian DNA is wildly far fetched.
The rulers of Moscow managed, by various edicts and laws, to force serfdom on some of the people (never all of them – there was always free peasants especially in the far north) – and the borderlands (the Ukraine) was more Cossack (ironically a Turkish word – it means free booter) and so for a long time the people were a bit freer down there (when they were not being captured and sold in slave markets in the Middle East) – the difference was cultural not racial.
Will they ever be one people again? Most likely NOT – even if the Ukrainians could overlook the millions murdered by “Lenin” and “Stalin” (and they murdered millions of Russians as well) – Mr Putin has buggered up any hope of unity.
The final break may come in a few days – I am told that the Ukrainians are going to celebrate Easter on the Western date – not the Orthodox date.
What Polish warriors failed to do – over centuries of trying, Mr Putin has (without intending to) managed to do. Get the Ukrainians to celebrate Easter on the Western date.
The Ukrainian Cossacks (of course there were always Russian speaking Cossacks as well – nothing is simple) always wanted to be independent (Mr Putin’s theory that the Austro-Hungarian intelligence service invented this desire in the late 19th century is wrong) – but they disliked the Westerners more than Moscow, for religious reasons. So when they had to choose they chose Moscow. Although then the Russians moved the capital to Saint Petersburg. Charles XII of Sweden could have snuffed that out – but he decided to march hundreds of miles inland (closer to the Black Sea than the Baltic) – Peter guessed the reason, Charles was trying to prove he was a second Alexander the Great. That the normal rules of war did not apply to him (Charles XII) and he could win even when greatly outnumbered and fighting in lands many hundreds of miles from home. However, “I am not Darius” was the reply of Peter.
Mr Putin has managed to change the choice of the Ukrainians – he has managed to get the Ukrainians and the Poles to like each other, an astonishing achievement (given their history) – but not one he intended.
Some Russian rulers rather liked war and were rather good at it – Peter the Great springs to mind, others did not like war but were rather good at it (Alexander II), still others did not like war and were no good at it (Nicholas II).
But Mr Putin is the first Russian ruler who likes war, but is no good at it.
Even if Russia wins this war (and she still may) – it will be in spite of him.
You’re joking, right?
You think a city run by gangsters is secure? Where every second person is on the take is properly monitored?
Modern Russia can’t stop its refineries being blown up by Ukrainian drones. A few Tajiki terrorists, entering by car, would be the easiest thing in the world.
The only thing that limits this sort of atrocity is the number of people prepared to commit suicide to do it.
They certainly didn’t treat the suspects with the sort of kid-glove, overly solicitous treatment they’d have got from the Met.
@JuliaM
They certainly didn’t treat the suspects with the sort of kid-glove, overly solicitous treatment they’d have got from the Met.
No doubt. Doesn’t that provoke just a twinge of jealousy in you? Sure Putin’s regime is horrible and tyrannical, sure I believe innocent until proven guilty, no cruel and unusual punishment and so on, all the foundations of English and American common law. But don’t you just wish you could get one of these guys, who sets off a bomb in a theater full of teenage girls, so excited to see their pop idol. Don’t you just wish you could take that guy and beat the crap out of him every day for the rest of your life, or set the parents loose on him?
Being civilized has its downsides. Vengeance is a part of the criminal law, and locking him away with three squares a day doesn’t do all that great a job of cooling the fire in the blood. It has been years since that Ariana Grande concert, and someone mentioning it above still fills me with rage. Rage without much of an outlet.
Mr Navalny used to say there were too many followers of Islam in Russia – especially in Moscow. Mr Putin’s people accused him of Islamophobia.
“Can someone explain to me why Sweden would do the investigation, and then join a US-dominated alliance, if the US was even potentially involved? That seems… Unlikely.”
It could be down to the calculation ‘Is it better to be on the side of the psychopaths or to be seen (by them) as somehow siding with ‘the enemy’ by attempting to be neutral?’
If one is caught in a turf war between two gangs of murderous nutters and cannot leave the area (as a country cannot) at some point you have to choose to side with one of them, in order to get some degree of protection. Maybe Sweden decided joining NATO was the best bet out of two not very great options, even if they did have proof the US did blow up Nordstream. In fact even better if you have some dirt on the leader of the gang, it gives you a bit of leverage once you’re in.
Chester Draws (somewhat naively…) said:
Apparently, you’ve rather missed the observation that just standing around a Moscow venue with a blank sheet of paper will get you arrested within moments of doing so. This was a fairly major venue, like the equivalent of Madison Square Gardens or the stadium at Wembley. The idea that they’re not monitoring sites like this for signs of dissent…? Ludicrous.
I’d buy it if we were talking about some podunk rinky-dink rural auditorium, about like the school at Beslan. Yeah, I can see that taking hours for the security forces to saddle up and deal with things… Damn near downtown Moscow?
In no way does that aspect even begin to make sense. You tell me that they deliberately let this happen, wellllll… I see nothing to argue against that idea. Nothing.
The inconsistencies are all there, and are all unexplained, so far. I doubt they’re going to be; this was play-acting, a staged affair for domestic audiences. Nothing else really makes much sense, with what evidence we have.
Do remember that this is the same “security” operation that delivered an evidence package of Sims games, rather than the probable SIM cards. It’s not filled with really competent people…
Kirk – Moscow is a city of millions of people, and this was in a suburb – miles from the centre of Moscow where security is tight.
Mr Putin’s regime is saying that the West “let it happen” (or worse) – because of the warning that Western governments issued a few days before. But, in reality, all the Western governments knew was that there was chatter in Islamic circles that “something big” was going to go down in the Moscow region soon.
Where specifically? Do not know.
Remember Mr Putin’s regime has been trying to make friends with Islam (RT is non stop pro Hamas propaganda – I would not be surprised if Neil Oliver got a job at RT), so arresting Islamic activists and torturing-drugging them till they said whether-and-where the attack was going to take place (and if the particular activists arrested really did not know – then arresting other activists and torturing-drugging them, till, eventually, you got the right ones) was NOT an option – as far as Mr Putin was concerned.
I would guess he has changed his position on that now. But is is a very difficult position – as so many people in Russia are Muslim, and infiltrating Islamic groups is rather difficult. Someone you think is working for you is, in fact, really loyal to Islam (believing that they will get eternal reward in Paradise if they serve Islam – and eternal punishment in Hell if they do not) – so your double-agent turns out to be a triple-agent working against you. And threats in relation to their families can be countered by Islamic groups also threatening their families (and, if they are loyal to Islam, the families will go to Paradise anyway – or so they believe).
Still Mr Putin could have wanted the attack to go ahead – in order to have an excuse for a crack down, it is hard to know. The world if intelligence services is very much a looking-glass world, or a carnival mirror – everything is distorted, bent and twisted.
As the Byzantines found out in the 7th century, and the Visigoths (when they were conquered in Spain) and the Chinese (when they lost Central Asia) found out in the 8th century, Islam is very good at all this.
In the middle of a battle your “allies” can turn on you – and you lose and die.
People who think they can outsmart Islam and manipulate Muslims – normally come off worse.