Another terrorist attack exposes Russia’s vulnerable underbelly

A terrorist attack that killed at least 20 people over the weekend in Dagestan exposes some of Russia’s growing security weak spots deep in its hinterland, as the Kremlin focuses instead on pursuing its war in Ukraine and silencing its political opponents in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The past year has seen a trend of rising violence across Russia, undermining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims that only he can keep the country safe from threats both internal and from abroad. Many of the cases relate to longstanding tensions between Moscow and Muslim populations in Central Asia. Last week, security forces stormed a detention centre in the city of Rostov-on-Don and killed six men linked to Islamic State who had taken two guards hostage there. In March, heavily armed gunmen killed more than 140 people and wounded hundreds at a concert hall outside Moscow. The Islamist extremist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for that assault.

Sunday’s incident saw attacks on a synagogue, police station and two churches in Dagestan’s capital of Makhachkala and the city of Derbent. They are both in the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, where there is a long history of rebellion against Russian rule. At least 15 police officers were among those killed. On Monday, more than a dozen people remained hospitalised, authorities said. No group has so far claimed responsibility for this attack.

Six gunmen were later killed, Russian news agency TASS reported, citing Dagestan’s governor, Sergei Melikov.

Dagestan region governor Sergei Melikov (3R) visits a burned out synagogue, which was attacked by gunmen in Derbent. Picture: AFP.

The Investigative Committee, Russia’s main investigating agency, said it knows who the dead gunmen are, but didn’t disclose any details about them.

Government critics say authorities have diverted too many resources to cracking down on anything and anyone they feel could threaten Putin’s authority. The Kremlin has jailed opponents, muzzled the press and introduced laws to stamp out anything that could be considered criticism of his war in Ukraine. Prominent politicians, human-rights activists and journalists have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, given heavy fines or forced to flee the country. More than 20,000 people have been arbitrarily detained since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, according to human-rights groups.

Other groups have been subjected to repression, including Russia’s gay community. In November, the country’s supreme court outlawed what it called the international LGBT movement as an extremist organisation.

Analysts said the Russian government persistently raises the spectre of terrorism to justify its crackdowns, yet has repeatedly missed legitimate terrorist threats.

Orthodox volunteers attend a religious service at the makeshift memorial in memory of the victims of the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Krasnogorsk in March. Picture: AFP.

The fact that incidents keep “repeating time and again, it means that there are lessons which were not learned” neither by the Kremlin nor by the federal security services, said Nikolai Petrov, a consulting fellow on the Russia and Eurasia program at the British think tank Chatham House.

Instead, Russian authorities have sought to pin the blame for the domestic security shortcomings on the usual scapegoats: Ukraine and the West.

Following the concert-hall massacre in March, Russian officials went into overdrive advancing a narrative that Ukraine was behind the attack, and forces in the West the mastermind. Putin acknowledged that the attack was conducted by Islamist radicals, but hinted, without providing evidence, that Kyiv and its U.S. backers were somehow involved.

Several Russian officials were quick to jump on the blame-Ukraine bandwagon following Sunday’s attack in Dagestan, conflating it with an attack on Russian-occupied Crimea earlier in the day that officials said killed four people and injured more than 150 others.

Leonid Slutsky, head of the State Duma’s committee on international affairs, wrote on the Telegram app that both attacks were “inspired from outside with the aim of sowing panic and dividing the people of Russia.” He accused the U.S. and its European allies of state-sponsored terrorism.

Emergency services personnel work by the burnt-out Crocus City Hall concert venue in Krasnogorsk, in March. Picture: AFP.

Valentina Matvienko, chair of Russia’s Federation Council, wrote on Telegram that “the enemy is looking for any ways to blow up Russian society from the inside.” Senator Dmitry Rogozin, former director of the Russian State Space Corporation, Roscosmos, cautioned against blaming Kyiv and the West for Sunday’s assault.

“If we attribute every terrorist attack involving national and religious intolerance, hatred and Russophobia to the machinations of Ukraine and NATO, then this pink fog will lead us to big problems,” he said Monday, writing on Telegram.

Still, the rhetoric that any misfortune the country suffers is the fault of Kyiv and its backers hits home for many Russians, according to analysts familiar with the workings of Russia’s propaganda spin machine.

Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said there is a reluctance on the part of the “passive majority” to think about the real source of the terrorist attacks on their country and the Russian leadership knows this. As a result, “this kind of blaming Ukraine and the West becomes a social norm,” he said.

“It’s much easier to explain everything by conspiracies and by the West and Ukraine,” said Petrov, who is also a professor in the political-science department at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it was using Ukraine and the West as scapegoats for its shortcomings.

In addition, authorities are especially eager to avoid any suggestion that there might be any interethnic or religious tensions inside Russia. Putin has often praised the country’s ethnic and religious diversity, telling the participants at the opening ceremony of the World Youth Festival in March that “multiethnic unity is our greatest value.” The Russian leader wasn’t expected to address the nation following Sunday’s attack, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday. Instead, Peskov said the Kremlin would wait for investigative authorities to complete their work, “then we can draw some conclusions,” he said.

Putin’s circumspect response was no surprise, Kolesnikov said. “The Kremlin doesn’t want to pay a lot of attention to it in order not to bother people when they prefer the sense of normality,” he said.

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