Official: Russia is at war

Unofficially, Russia has been at war since 24 February, 2022, when Putin’s hordes invaded much of the Ukraine. That was the full-scale unofficial war. The lower-scale unofficial war has been going since February, 2014, when Putin’s smaller hordes invaded some of the Ukraine, starting with the Crimean peninsula.

We can argue whether the war has been going on for 10 years or a mere two, but no one could argue that it hasn’t been going on at all. Or so you’d think.

The received term for Russia’s belligerent action has been not ‘war’ but a ‘special military operation’. You might think that’s a distinction without a difference, but tell that to the dozens (hundreds? – no one knows for sure) of Russians serving long prison terms for using the w-word out of turn.

That expensive slip of the tongue was an imprisonable offence, with the punishment both severe and certain. Notice that I said ‘was’, not ‘is’. For last Friday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that Russia was indeed in “a state of war”. The announcement included two important omissions.

First, Peskov didn’t divulge who it was that Russia was at war with. However, juxtaposing that statement with hundreds of others made by Putin and his merry men, one can infer that Russia is at war with NATO. The Ukraine has been treated as merely the West’s proxy or its vanguard.

If so, then NATO ought to thank Peskov for elucidating the situation. For until now NATO not only has refrained from fighting in that war, but has seemed to be blissfully unaware that it was one of the warring parties.

Another omission has no geopolitical implications, but some legal ones. What will happen to those serving prison terms for calling the action exactly what Peskov has now called it? Will they be summarily released with profuse apologies?

I wouldn’t hold my breath. For Russia is now guaranteed to move towards putting even more people into prison, not releasing those already inside.

That announcement provides the starting point for both assessing things that have already happened, such as the terrorist attack on the Krasnogorsk theatre, and predicting things likely to happen soon.

The responsibility for the attack on the Crocus City Hall has been claimed by ISIS-Khorosan, a group with Afghan links mostly based in Tajikistan. So far 11 people have been arrested, including those four terrorists who killed up to 150 people (the exact number may be quite a bit higher because some 200 theatre-goers are still unaccounted for).

There are only two possibilities here: either ISIS is indeed responsible or the attack was a false-flag operation run out of the Kremlin. Much as the Russians would love to claim the terrorists were Zelensky’s best friends, even they realise the claim would sound too unbelievable.

In considering the first possibility, one should ask why ISIS would do such a thing. What’s its grudge against Russia, considering that Putin has been supporting lavishly every Muslim gang under the sun? Actually, a grudge does exist.

Putin has been funding and arming Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, which one would think should put him on the good side of any Muslim bandits. So it does, but that doesn’t include ISIS-K. As far as that group is concerned, Putin is backing the wrong side in Afghanistan, which is Taliban. And ISIS-K and Taliban are at daggers drawn or, more to the point, AKs locked and loaded.

Hence the mass murder at Crocus City may well have been designed to disrupt the friends of ISIS-K’s enemies. Yet the subsequent events are odd.

First, according to Russian reports, the four murderers were arrested when they attempted to cross the border of Russia. But which border? The Kremlin has a vested interest in putting the blame on the Ukraine, which is why its spokesman said the four terrorists were planning to get into that country, where a gap had been prepared for them to cross the frontline unmolested.

However, the vigilant Chechens fighting on the side of the angels, which is Putin, intercepted the evil-doers and arrested them. The released details of the arrest, including some video evidence, suggest a rather baroque nature of the procedure. Apparently, the captors cut off one of the terrorists’ ears and made him eat it, and he wasn’t even peckish.

But then the Belarus KGB announced that the terrorists had been moving in a different direction, way to the north of the one specified by the Kremlin. And it was Belorussian soldiers, not Chechens, who had arrested the Crocus four.

The divergence in the reports may testify to nothing more sinister than a mishandling of information. That possibility has the advantage of Occam-like simplicity, but it’s still not the only one. Another possibility is that the two security services hadn’t coordinated their reporting properly, and the whole thing had nothing to do with either Ukrainians or ISIS.

This leaves a false-flag operation as the only other possibility. First, I hope you don’t think Putin would have any compunction about murdering a couple of hundred Russians to achieve his goal, whatever that might be.

Both he and his KGB alma mater have form in this kind of monstrosity. In September, 1999, the KGB/FSB blew up four apartment blocks in Moscow, Buyansk and Volgodonsk, together with their residents. Over 300 were killed, more than 1,000 injured. The FSB blamed the Chechens for the atrocity, which started the second Chechen war and eased Putin’s transition from the office of prime minister to that of president, evidently for life.

As in that case, such a false-flag operation in Krasnogorsk might have been set up to tighten some screws both within and without Russia. Here we enter an area of irrelevance.

For whether or not the Russians are responsible for the terrorist act, and the cui bono logic does point a finger at them, they are going to use it to introduce some emergency measures. For one thing, they’ve already stated their intention to declare total or at least partial mobilisation.

The attack on Crocus City may provide a nice pretext for pressganging a few hundred thousand fresh targets for Ukrainian guns into acting in that capacity. Then again, there are signs that the Russians are becoming less enthusiastic than before about killing Ukrainians and especially being killed by them.

Hence it’s expected that Putin will soon turn even more despotic than he already is. Reintroducing the death penalty, shutting down the Internet and making it harder for Russians to leave the country are among the measures mooted. Again, the Krasnogorsk mass murder has come in handy as a way of explaining such developments to the population.

On balance, let me tell you: I’ve never felt nostalgic about Russia, and now even less so. Hold on, can anything be less than never? I don’t know. In grammar, probably not. But it’s possible in life, as proved by my feelings about the Russians’ savagery.