Shootings at Crocus City Hall in Moscow
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Putin said that the warnings that the US sent about a possible terrorist attack were not specific.
More than two weeks before terrorists staged a bloody attack in the suburbs of Moscow, the U.S. government told Russian officials that Crocus City Hall, a popular concert venue, was a potential target, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The high degree of specificity conveyed in the warning underscores Washington’s confidence that the Islamic State was preparing an attack that threatened large numbers of civilians, and it directly contradicts Moscow’s claims that the U.S. warnings were too general to help preempt the assault.
The U.S. identification of the Crocus concert hall as a potential target — a fact that has not been previously reported — raises new questions about why Russian authorities failed to take stronger measures to protect the venue, where gunmen killed more than 140 people and set fire to the building. A branch of the Islamic State has taken credit for the attack, the deadliest in Russia in 20 years. U.S. officials have publicly said the group, known as Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, “bears sole responsibility,” but Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried to pin the blame on Ukraine.
The attack has further dented the image of strength and security that the Russian leader seeks to convey and exposed fundamental weaknesses in the nation’s security apparatus, which has been consumed by more than two years of war in Ukraine. Domestically, Putin’s operatives appear more concerned with silencing political dissent and opposition to the president than rooting out terrorist plots, according to analysts and observers of Russian politics.
The Russian leader himself publicly dismissed U.S. warnings just three days before the March 22 attack, calling them “outright blackmail” and attempts to “intimidate and destabilize our society.”
