London:

Russia’s security state has been highly effective at detaining opponents of Vladimir Putin, but a mass shooting near Moscow caught it off guard and raised questions about its priorities, resources and intelligence gathering. question.

Russia’s FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, is tasked with hunting down Ukrainian saboteurs in Russia, controlling anti-Kremlin activists and disrupting the operations of hostile foreign intelligence services.

Former U.S. intelligence officials and Western security analysts said that helps explain why it may have overlooked other threats, including those posed by Islamist militants such as ISIS-K, which claimed responsibility for the attack.

“You can’t do it all,” Daniel Hoffman, a former senior CIA operations officer who served as CIA station chief in Moscow, told Reuters.

“You put pressure on locals and sometimes you don’t get intelligence about potential terrorist attacks. That’s where they failed.

“They may have gone too far in dealing with the war in Ukraine and the political opposition. This time it was ignored.”

The Federal Security Service said Friday’s concert hall attack was “carefully” planned and the gunman carefully concealed his weapon.

Putin said on Monday that the attack was carried out by radical Islamists, but he said Russia still wanted to know who ordered it and said Ukraine had many questions to answer. Ukraine denies any involvement.

Asked on Monday whether the attack represented an intelligence failure, the Kremlin said Russia’s standoff with the West meant intelligence sharing no longer happened as before.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Unfortunately, our world has shown that no city, no country can be completely immune to the threat of terrorism.” He added that Russian intelligence services are working to defend the country And make unremitting efforts.

Still, Friday’s shootings, which left at least 139 people dead and 180 injured, undermined one of Putin’s long-standing promises to the Russian people: ensuring stability and security.

It has also shaken some residents of the Russian capital, who have been largely untouched by the violence of Ukraine’s war, despite occasional drone strikes.

Putin, a former KGB officer who won another six years in power earlier this month, has weathered similar crises before and now sees no apparent threat to his grip on power.

Judging from his previous behavior and Saturday’s statement, his response will be with greater force.

Four of the 11 men detained over the attack were charged with terrorism and appeared in court after being questioned: one was apparently missing an ear and another was in a wheelchair, with some lawmakers calling for a new Introducing the death penalty. Peskov declined to answer reporters’ questions about whether they were tortured.

Missed the warning?

Whether these individuals were assigned by the Islamic State, as militant groups and the West have asserted, or had some links to Ukraine, as Putin has suggested (Kiev flatly denies it), there were warning signs that do not appear to have been confirmed. Attention.

Security analysts said the manner of the attack and escape proved extensive reconnaissance of the site beforehand, with Russian media publishing CCTV footage of an earlier visit by a gunman.

On March 7, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow issued a security alert to Americans, telling them it was “monitoring reports of imminent plans by extremists to target large gatherings in Moscow, including concerts.”

On March 19, three days before the massacre, Putin addressed the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, in which he dismissed “provocative” warnings from Western countries about acts of terror.

“All these actions are akin to blatant blackmail and are aimed at intimidating and destabilizing our society,” Putin said.

Nina Krushcheva, a professor of international affairs at New York’s New School, said Russia’s Federal Security Service appears to have included Islamic State in its surveillance.

But she said Putin sees Russia as locked in an existential struggle with the U.S.-led West, making it difficult for Moscow to take U.S. security warnings at face value.

“There’s a lot of distrust. It’s not like the United States hasn’t been involved in misinformation,” she said.

“In Putin’s world it’s a life and death war between Russia and the West and they want to weaken Russia and destroy it, which of course he won’t believe because how does he know from his KGB background that the US didn’t create Own country? False flag (operation).”

A false flag operation is an action designed to conceal the source of responsibility and place the blame on another party.

islamic state

John Sipher, who spent time working in the CIA’s national secrets division, said he believes Russia’s FSB may have failed because it was too busy focusing on political and other threats to Putin and his government .

“(The security services) are more about protecting the Kremlin than they are about protecting the people,” Silver said, predicting that Putin will now use the attack to justify some new actions or actions against the West and Ukraine.

Another warning came in southern Russia on March 2, when FSB special forces killed six gunmen they identified as members of the Islamic State.

Three of the men are on federal wanted lists and militants killed three police officers last year. The Federal Security Service discovered the cache of weapons.

On March 7, Russia’s Federal Security Service said it had thwarted an attack on a Moscow synagogue planned by the Islamic State group and that the attacker had been killed in a shootout.

Jihadist movement researcher Riccardo Valle said the events of March 2 should raise warning lights.

“I think the discovery by security forces of an Islamic State network in Russia, and that this network is very powerful and able to acquire weapons and mount strong resistance to special forces, should alarm Moscow’s security agencies,” Valle said by phone. said in the interview.

“That may be true, but they were not able to stop the attack in time,” said Walai, director of research at Khorasan Diaries, an Islamabad-based research and news platform.

He said it was also clear from ISIS-K’s previous statements and attacks, including the 2022 attack on the Russian Embassy in Kabul, that the group was targeting Russia.