On the evening of March 22, 2024, the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, was the site of a horrifying act of brutality. During the run up to a highly anticipated concert by the Russian band Picnic, a nightmare unfolded as four gunmen unleashed a savage assault on a crowd of innocent civilians. The ensuing carnage resulted in a tragic loss of 144 lives and left over 551 people injured, with more than a few children among the dead. The attack was the most devastating act of terrorism in Russia since the tragic Beslan school siege in 2004..
While the attack was quickly claimed by the Islamic State - Khorasan Province, who took responsibility through its Amaq News Agency, the truth is that the evidence that is currently available to us points in one direction, and one direction only: toward Ukraine.
From the moment the very first details of the attack began to leak out, it became more and more obvious that this wasn’t any run of the mill Islamist terror attack.
Jihadist terrorists have an extensive history, and although there certainly have been variations in tactics and ideology over the years they tend to have some distinctive characteristics that unite them, many of which are completely absent from the Crocus attack.
Perhaps the most galling detail from that attack that just doesn’t fit into a normal Jihadist terror blueprint is the fact that the crew who committed the massacre had a detailed escape plan. Something which is entirely foreign to true Jihadists who have already decided to give their life for their cause and look forward to divine rewards in the afterlife. In the rare instances in which they do decide to make their escape, it is usually only so that they can continue their attacks, and almost always end with the terrorists going down in a “blaze of glory” via a hail of gunfire or by detonating their suicide vest.
In contrast, not only did the four perpetrators have a plan for escape, but when their plan was foiled they timidly surrendered and allowed themselves to be taken alive—a significant error on their part, judging by the consequences they suffered in the hours after they were apprehended by the Russians)— again something that Jihadists never do.
To make things even weirder they also claim that they had carried out the attack for money, having been promised the equivalent of a few thousand dollars U.S. by an unknown benefactor they contacted through the internet. Actual jihadists carry out their attacks for theological, political, and sometimes psychological reasons, but never for money.
Oh and I forgot to mention, that escape plan mentioned earlier? It involved them getting out of Russia by…get this: going to Ukraine! Ukraine, the country that is currently at war with Russia. Which means the border is impassable to any kind of civilian traffic, any of which would be one hundred percent intercepted by members of the Ukrainian military. Which seems to indicate that their plan must have involved the assumption that Ukrainian forces would welcome them.
In the weeks since the attack, Russian investigators have now officially pointed the finger at Ukraine directly, accusing members of the Ukrainian secret services with directly inspiring and financing the attackers, and have detailed how funds and cryptocurrency payments were received by the men with direct links to the country. A seeming smoking gun.
For its part, Ukraine has denied any involvement and repeated attempts to insinuate that Russia carried out the attack itself (akin to claiming that the Bush administration was secretly behind 9/11, but with even less evidence). Of course Ukraine publicly denied its involvement in the murder of Daria Dugin and the terrorist bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline too, both things which even the U.S. mainstream media was later forced to admit was the work of the Ukrainian secret services.
And although ISIS did take responsibility for the attack this doesn’t mean they had much of a hand in actually planning the attack itself. As all one has to do in order to “join ISIS” is contact the group online before a planned attack and claim you’re doing it in honor of the group. A mostly meaningless gesture, particularly in this instance, but certainly one that would be logical to do if, say, you were a Ukrainian SBU operative assigned to coordinating an ‘asymmetrical’ attack against Russia. The very same kind of attacks the notorious neocon warmonger and former career State Department toad Victoria Nuland
