(1)

The incident occurred at a rock concert venue (Crocus City Hall) on the outskirts of Moscow around 8 o’clock in the evening on March 22nd. Several armed men wearing camouflaged battle dress burst into the hall and shot automatic rifles randomly at an audience of several thousand who were waiting for a performance. The moment the attackers broke in, a fire broke out with an explosive sound, causing part of the roof to collapse. 144 people were killed in this attack (as of March 29th) and many others injured. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that four of the attackers who had fled by car from the hall were arrested in the Bryansk Oblast, a southwestern region of the country. (The authorities later announced that they also arrested seven members of the Islamic State (IS) who were active in Russian territory.)

Just after the incident, IS issued a statement through its Amaq news agency: ‘IS fighters attacked a crowd of Christians in the city of Krasnogorsk, killing and wounding hundreds.’ IS also released a video showing the shooting scene. The Russian security authorities themselves confirmed that all the attackers were IS members of Tajik nationality.

Reportedly, the Russian government at first, at its consultation meeting attended by Vladimir Putin himself, reached to the conclusion that there was no evidence to show Ukraine’s involvement. Putin’s so-called assistants therefore unanimously said that allegations about Ukraine’s involvement had no evidence.

But Putin in his video speech said nothing about IS when he referred to the incident for the first time, fully 16 hours after the attack (March 23rd). Presumably this change was initiated by Nikolai Patrushev and other state bureaucrats of the FSB-helmed authoritarian state. Putin brazenly claimed: ‘The terrorists tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border,’ and ‘Ukraine’s involvement is evident.’

(2)

From these things alone briefly mentioned above, it can easily be inferred that, behind the scenes, there were manoeuvres of the FSB, which has Vladimir Putin act as its public face.

The Putin regime is now frantically spreading a ‘Ukraine’s involvement’ theory, saying that Ukraine gave funds and bitcoins to the criminals and that US and European officials were also behind the scenes. Conversely, however, it is becoming more obvious day by day that the Russian rulers themselves were behind the incident.

In the first place, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, supposed to be a close ally of Putin, contradicted Putin’s allegations that the attackers ‘tried to move towards Ukraine’, which is the single ground for Putin’s theory of ‘Ukraine’s involvement’.

Lukashenko said that the attackers initially intended to enter Belarus but that he received a phone call from Putin, who asked him to close the border to prevent them from entering. He said, ‘That’s why there was no chance they could enter Belarus, and they headed to the Ukraine-Russia border, where they were arrested.’

Furthermore, the Biden administration of US imperialism claimed, after the incident occurred, that it warned the Russian authorities, according to its long-standing ‘duty to warn’ policy, of ‘imminent plans’ of attack about two weeks before the incident. Whether this claim is true or not, it is a fact that a warning was posted on the official Web site of the US Embassy in Moscow on March 7th: ‘There are reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts.’ And the Biden administration was warning US citizens in Russia to avoid big events.

It is now obvious that, although the Russian government was aware of this plan, it did nothing to prevent it. It rather intended to use it for its war of aggression in Ukraine.

In fact, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with a pro-government newspaper published on March 22nd, before the incident: ‘We are in a state of war.’ ‘Everyone should understand this for their internal mobilization.’ Right before the incident, the Russian government suddenly started to press its people to ‘understand that Russia is in a state of war’, though it had so far referred to its invasion in Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’. This also bespeaks that the FSB-helmed authoritarian state of Russia manoeuvred behind the incident.

(3)

The above-mentioned are not all that show the nature of this incident as a conspiracy.

The attackers, as we mentioned, headed at first to Belarus and changed their direction to Ukraine. Then they were arrested in the Bryansk Oblast by Russian security officials. But, surprisingly, these officials had already been in the concert hall before the attack started.

In that bloody auditorium, many people were taking videos with their smartphones. Their recorded shots show several men wearing identical blue sweatshirts and jeans. These men, sitting separately but close to each other, remain calm with their legs crossed while the rest of the crowd are panicked and stampeding to the exits. And the videos released later by the Russian authorities show a number of men ‘arresting the criminals’ in Bryansk. These arresters are identical with those who were in the auditorium, in clothing, facial feature and the watch they wear.

This was reported by a number of European experts in image analysis, who checked the videos taken in the auditorium and the arresting spot. The point of view now spreading wide in Europe is that those men, dubbed ‘men in blue’, were the parties deeply involved in the incident, and therefore that the incident was in fact a conspiracy that the FSB itself planned and conducted.

To add, the IS-released video shows attackers handling automatic rifles. It is said that rifles of this type called AK-12 can only be acquired by officials related to the military and the security service. This is also seen as ‘evidence’ indicating that the FSB is the mastermind.

This is not all. On March 21st and 22nd, just before the incident, Russia launched unprecedentedly massive attacks on Ukraine. This must by no means be coincidental. (See the March 22nd statement issued by the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU).)

(4)

This gun-shooting, mass killing attack is either ‘instigated’ by the FSB or both planned and conducted by the FSB itself. Almost no one in the world doubts that.

The reason why Putin and those evildoers of the FSB launched this bloody conspiracy is that they were obsessed with utmost irritation. Despite the fact that hopes for the counter-offensive launched by Ukraine to drive out the Russian occupation troops were not fulfilled due to the so-called ‘aid fatigue’ of the West and other factors, and despite the fact that US support for Ukraine is actually running aground due to obstructions by Trumpists in the Republican Party, Russian rulers fear for a gloomy future closing in on them. Why?

America’s halt to support has rather united European member states of NATO to support Ukraine. Some of them are accelerating the moves to conclude bilateral security agreements with Ukraine. On top of those, Finland and Sweden’s entries in NATO have isolated Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave, causing Russia to lose its maritime supremacy in the Baltic Sea. Russian rulers are suffering from these developments, which they had never expected before they invaded Ukraine two years ago. Their worst miscalculation is that, even though they rain missiles over Ukraine, Ukrainian people’s resistance is never discouraged.

At present, Ukrainian forces and working people united in resistance endure the shortage of ammunition and are preparing to launch a major counteroffensive in 2025 by arming themselves with F-16 fighters and advanced defence systems to be supplied from European countries, as well as with their home-made drones.

Faced with this reality, Russian rulers fear that, if they do not consolidate the four oblasts now, whose annexation they declared in October 2022, as ‘Novorussia (new Russia)’, everything will come to naught. Already the toll of casualties on the part of Russian troops has risen to 350,000 in two years. Despite this, they reportedly have a plan to launch a new offensive, which is to begin in May and, for that purpose, are moving to carry out additional mobilization amounting to 150,000 to 200,000.

However, the Putin regime has so far mobilized people mainly from ethnic minorities and ethnic groups in peripheral areas - Buryats and other Mongolian minorities and Muslim people including Chechens and Dagestanians. People in these areas are filled with mounting anger against the Putin regime. Above all, Tajikistan, a Muslim country and erstwhile constituent republic of the Soviet Union, is the poorest of all five nations in Central Asia. Roughly 20 percent of its population of 10 million are said to be working as migrant workers in Russia. It has a lot of IS members who flowed into this country after they were bombed in Syria and Iraq, not only by the US-led Coalition of the Willing but also by Russia. It is said that there are not a few Tajiks who have joined IS in Russia.

Muslims in Russia can be said to be a thorn in the side of the FSB-helmed authoritarian state topped with Putin, who espouses a ‘Russkiy Mir (Russian World)’. For the Putin regime, it is an urgent task to eradicate the so-called Muslim ‘extremists’. And this constitutes one reason why the Putin regime manipulated those Tajik members of IS to stage the attack in Moscow.

But the crucial point of this regime’s wicked aim lies in the following. Russian power-holders are today besieged with mounting dissatisfaction among people, especially among young people living in urban areas. In the mid-March presidential election, the Putin regime resorted to the replacement of ballots, introducing an e-voting system that allowed the regime to manipulate the votes at will and forced residents (in those four Russian-occupied oblasts) to vote by pointing a gun, etc., and by so doing, staged the ‘all-time high turnout of 74 percent’ and ‘87 percent of votes for Putin’. It’s perfectly obvious that the Russian presidential election is no more than an empty ritual whereby people pledge obedience to Tsar Putin. The staging of such a farce is, however, causing extensive ill feelings among Russian people towards the ‘Putin regime’ that is to last until 2030 (according to one political scientist in Russia, the actual approval rating for Putin amounts only to around 50 percent, and that mainly from old people).

Despite that, the Putin regime is hell-bent on continuing its war of aggression against Ukraine to fulfill its ambition of absorbing Ukraine into Russia. In order to do so, they need to arouse hatred towards Ukraine in the urban youth who are becoming more and more skeptical about this war, and particularly in the situation where there are already one million people who have skipped the country. Precisely for this reason, the rulers of Russia perpetrated this heinous conspiracy.

Those brutes must have recalled that major incident which took place in the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow 22 years ago, in October 2002, that is, the incident where an armed Muslim group occupied the theatre to demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya and, in response, special forces of the Russian government used poison gas and guns to kill more than a hundred and dozens of people in total, including the armed group and spectators.

Owing to this incident, the approval rating of President Putin, who used to be a minor KGB officer, skyrocketed to 83 percent. This event boosted him into a ‘president who symbolizes strong Russia’.

Later on, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for an independent paper, Novaya Gazeta, disclosed to the public that the Russian government had been involved in that attack. But Politkovskaya was shot dead at her apartment building while six of her colleagues were also murdered. Moreover, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer who knew the truth behind the incident, was assassinated in England.

That was indeed a major conspiracy schemed and perpetrated by the FSB, with the aim of consolidating the FSB-helmed authoritarian state of Russia with Putin set as a public face.

The incident this time and the Dubrovka incident in 2002 have many things in common. The difference lies in that, 22 years ago, Russian people were delighted at the ‘advent of a strong leader’, while today, there is no one in the world who believes in the story faked by Putin, and that many of the Russian people, too, have seen through his lies.

It is just an illusion of those arrogant power-holders to believe that working people can be controlled forever by means of conspiracy, violence and lies. Clearly, Russian rulers have dug their own graves by sacrificing Russian people for their crazy ambition. They are now following in the wake of the rulers in the era of the Stalinist Soviet Union.

We call on all the working people in Russia: Rise up now to bring down the Putin regime, which has laid bare its nature against working people!

Together with Ukrainian working people who are unyieldingly fighting against Putin’s brutalities, we are determined to continue fighting to give a finishing blow to the Putin regime.

(March 31st, 2024)