On Friday evening, a small group of heavily armed men stormed the Crocus City Hall mall and entertainment complex and began gunning people down before setting fire to the theater where over 6,000 concertgoers had gathered for a sold-out rock show. As smoke began to fill the air, dozens of victims rushing for the exits discovered a horrible truth: as with many emergencies in Russia, several life-saving doors were closed and stairwells led not to freedom but dead ends. By the time rescuers finally arrived, they found bodies clustered in the bathrooms and the stairwells, where they had been frantically, hopelessly calling for help. As of Tuesday morning, at least 139 people were dead, with an unknown number unaccounted for among the ruins.

By Tuesday, it had also become clear how the Kremlin was going to spin the worst terrorist attack on Russian soil in 20 years. It took Vladimir Putin nearly 24 hours to speak to his people in the wake of this calamity, but when he did, in a taped speech on Saturday, he made sure to blame Ukraine. The four suspects who had been caught—and tortured—had been fleeing toward the Ukrainian border, Putin said, where “a window” was being opened for them, ostensibly to escape arrest. (How would they get past all the Russian soldiers and border guards? Putin left that part unanswered.)

Sure, the U.S. and U.K. governments had warned earlier this month of a potential terrorist attack in Moscow, and advised against large gatherings—warnings that Putin had angrily waved off as “blackmail.” Sure, the Russian authorities had themselves bragged about foiling an ISIS plot to target a Moscow synagogue right around that time. And sure, ISIS-K, the Afghan franchise of the terror group, had repeatedly claimed responsibility for the Crocus massacre. But Putin doubled down on Monday evening. The attack, he said at a meeting of his ministers and advisors, may have been committed “by the hands of radical Islamists,” but he wanted to know who was behind them, who had given the orders for the attack. “Who benefits from this?” the Russian president asked, invoking the cui bono analysis beloved by Russians. 

The question never begets the right answer, nor is it intended to. It is the inversion of Occam’s razor, a way to complicate what is obvious—nothing is as it seems—until reality melts away. It is a conspiratorial frame of thinking that proliferates not just among veterans of the F.S.B. and the special services, but among regular Russians, too. In a society where lies are rampant and the government is their chief purveyor, asking the question is a way of appearing to be a savvy, independent thinker, one on whom the lies don’t work. Someone who asks Who benefits from this? is not like all the other sheeple, so it seems, even if the conclusion one reaches is exactly the one that the government wants them to reach. 

Which is why Putin asked it. Sure, ISIS had taken responsibility—fought for responsibility, even—but that would be an inconvenient truth for Putin. It would mean that, in his maniacal focus on fighting the phantom Nazis of Ukraine and the so-called “collective West,” in using his growing security apparatus to go after peaceful dissenters and gay people, he failed to protect his flock from a real and dangerous threat. It would mean that he was asleep at the wheel or, at the very least, distracted. It would mean that he had failed. 

Which is why, by asking the question, Putin turned the focus back on the enemies he wants to be fighting: Ukraine and its American puppetmaster. “We see how, using different channels, the U.S.A. is trying to convince its satellites and other world countries that, according to their intelligence, there’s allegedly no trace of the Kyiv regime in the terrorist attack on Moscow,” Putin reasoned. 

So who benefits, according to Putin, from the attack on Moscow? Kyiv, of course. “This evil act can only be a link in a chain of a series of attempts by those who, since 2014, have been fighting against our country using the hands of the Kyiv regime,” Putin went on. Because the Ukrainian counteroffensive last year was unsuccessful, Putin explained, the Ukrainian government has had to resort to other measures, like bombing the Crimean bridge and civilians in the Russian regions that border Ukraine. Speaking of the mentality in Kyiv—or what he imagines it to be—Putin went on, “One just has to carry out the commands of one’s Western masters, … obey the commands coming from Washington … demand new weaponry for all of this and more money, the vast majority of which you can steal and put, as it’s common in Ukraine today, in your own pocket.”

Agitprop 101

No matter what ISIS or anyone else said, Putin was going to believe what he wanted to believe—and make sure his subjects did, too. The propaganda machine has, of course, followed Putin’s lead. In fact, it received instructions on Saturday to emphasize “the Ukrainian trace” in all of this. And even people in Moscow who told me they believe ISIS was, in fact, behind the attack, kind of see Putin’s logic. If ISIS attacks Russia while Russia is fighting Ukraine, a source close to the Kremlin told me, “that means they’re by default allies. This means ISIS is an ally of Ukraine. It’s a medical fact, you don’t even have to explain it.”

“You don’t have to convince people in Moscow that Ukraine regularly commits terrorist attacks,” said another well-connected source in the Russian capital. There were the repeated attacks on the Kerch Bridge, the source reminded me, the car bombings that killed Daria Dugina and war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, and injured the ultra-patriotic writer Zakhar Prilepin. “In Moscow, there’s a definite view that what Ukraine can’t achieve on the battlefield, it is trying to achieve through a wave of terror. And so the fact that Ukraine is the first suspect is logical.” 

As for the American and British warnings that ISIS was plotting something? Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-owned propaganda network RT and the most vicious of Putin’s attack dogs, claimed that the warnings were, in fact, proof that it was the Anglo-Saxons’ doing. The fact that Western intelligence services knew in advance that an attack was brewing, Simonyan tweeted, was “direct involvement.” 

Not everyone was willing to go that far. “The warnings were not very specific, they came on the eve of [Russia’s presidential] elections, and they were not specific enough to start investigating,” the well-connected Moscow source told me. “They said ‘in the next 48 hours.’ Well, 48 hours came and went, and there was no terror attack.” Moreover, said the source, the warning came a week before Russia’s presidential election. “They also came at the same time that Navalny was calling for people to do something maximally bad during the election,” the source explained, “so there was suspicion here that this [terror warning] was a way to scare people loyal to the government and to keep them from coming out so that only Navalnyists come out.” In 2017, the source pointed out, when the U.S. warned Russia about a coming terrorist attack, the warning was passed privately, through the appropriate channels, whereas “now, it was done publicly so that it looked like [the Americans] were trying to pursue political goals—and of course the Kremlin can’t support that.” 

Of course, things were different in 2017. The Russian and American governments still had channels of communication and continued to cooperate on counterterrorism. After February 2022, that all fell apart. And now, seven years later, Moscow is openly accusing Washington of waging a campaign of terror against it. Or, as the source in Moscow put it, at the very least, “Ukraine is carrying out these terrorist attacks and because the U.S. is not trying to prevent them, they carry the moral responsibility for it.”

Others, however, point to a different path Russia could have taken, one of forcing itself back into the West’s embrace. In 2015, after the Bataclan attacks in Paris, Putin did exactly that, using the commonality of the experience—terror in Paris, terror in Moscow—to come in from the cold of the sanctions and isolation where he found himself after illegally annexing Crimea and shooting down a Malaysian airliner full of Dutch tourists. “What the government is doing is pretty stupid because they got a gift dropped in their laps, to show that, for once, we’re on the side of good versus evil, at least in terms of terrorism,” the source close to the Kremlin complained. “It’s our 9/11. Instead of emphasizing that, they’re stupidly fighting it and trying to shift the blame to Ukraine. Instead of dealing with it, Putin is measuring trunk sizes with Zelensky. But who is Zelensky? He’s a microscopic figure. He’s not a figure of worldwide evil. Here’s ISIS, a universal enemy that could unify everyone. People [in the Kremlin] are thinking too small, losing the opportunity to unite themselves with the West.” The source sighed, “It’s just more political stupidity.”

Will Putin bear any political cost for missing the warning, I asked? “There’s no tradition in Russia that the government is responsible for everything,” the source close to the Kremlin said. “There’s a tradition of the good czar. Putin’s trying his best, but he doesn’t get everything right because he might have incompetent subordinates. But it doesn’t occur to people that an incompetent subordinate is also his responsibility. We don’t have that tradition. We have a tradition of the deification of power. The president is in the clouds and he’s holy.”

Putin’s Mandate

Regardless of who Putin thinks orchestrated Friday’s terror attack—or who benefits from it—the question remains: now what? Russia’s entire army is bogged down in Ukraine, so an operation in Afghanistan seems out of the question. Russian security services are focused on domestic enemies and on brutally occupying parts of Ukraine. Do they have the bandwidth to go after ISIS cells?

Perhaps that’s part of the point. Why turn the massive, violent ship of the Russian state and distract it from its main focus in Ukraine and at home? Maybe that’s also who benefits from asking who benefits: the siloviki, who get no new assignments, who don’t have to fragment their focus and can just keep on bombing Ukrainian civilians and rounding up Russian hipsters for social media posts. That’s why the source close to the Kremlin said they don’t foresee a change of direction in response to Friday. When I asked them if all the blame channeled at Ukraine would mean more (and more devastating) strikes, they shrugged. “I don’t see any radical changes ahead,” the source said. “Expanded strikes happened before and will happen again. What, they didn’t exist before this?”

But it may be different for the Moscow elite. Given the attack on Crocus City Hall and Putin’s North Korean-level 87 percent election victory, the well-connected Moscow source suggested that the elite sensed a real and forceful mandate to stay the course. “The results of the vote speaks to a consolidation around Putin,” the source said. “And now, after the terrorist attack, people feel they have to rally around Putin. Everyone I know says Putin warned us that we are surrounded by enemies and that they’re trying to destroy us. And now they see he’s right. It’s a moment of mass enthusiasm that the Kremlin can count in determining its policy.”