Trudy Rubin

Vladimir Putin and his intelligence agencies are already blaming the hideous ISIS terror attack on a concert venue near Moscow on — you guessed it — Ukraine, the United States, and Great Britain.

Putin needs to distract attention from either the incredible failure of his security agencies to prevent the attack or from their possible complicity in the massacre at the Crocus City Hall music center.

Pardon my paranoia, but I lean toward the second explanation.

Either way, it’s clear Putin will take advantage of the terror attack. He will hype the baseless charge of Ukrainian and Western complicity as an excuse for a new military mobilization and increased industrial production for his war on Ukraine, and to justify the sacrifice to the Russian people.

And Putin will be helped by the do-nothing, destructive, MAGA-driven minority in the U.S. House of Representatives, who were still blocking a vote on Ukraine aid as they took off for a two-week vacation on Friday.

This MAGA myopia feeds Putin’s obvious belief that he can exploit the ISIS attack at home and with propaganda overseas. So, it’s worth examining a bit of background behind the Russian security services’ bungling — or worse — of the terror attack.

ISIS took immediate responsibility for the assault that killed more than 130 people. U.S. intelligence specifically attributed it to an Afghanistan-based affiliate known as ISIS-K, which is known to despise Putin’s Russia for repressing Muslims in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Yet, the Kremlin rebuffed a U.S. intelligence alert issued March 7 that ISIS-K was planning an attack in Moscow in the coming days, and warned that large gatherings, including concert halls, should be avoided.

Putin called the warning a “provocative” effort to “destabilize Russian society.”

Perhaps this was just more evidence of the oft-displayed incompetence of Russia’s main FSB intelligence service (the successor to the Soviet KGB). “When it comes to real work against terrorists, they don’t do that,” I was told by Natalia Gevorkyan, one of the first Russian journalists to write about the KGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “They are tremendously useless at the moment they are needed.”

Indeed, during two of the most famous Islamist terror attacks inside Russia, the security services not only failed to prevent them but were responsible for most of the casualties.

When terrorists from the North Caucasus burst into the Nord-Ost theater in Moscow in 2002 and took more than 700 audience members, players, and staff hostage, Russian special forces pumped toxic gas into the theater, killing most of the attack’s 130 victims. Many initial survivors died when the special forces refused to give doctors the formula of the gas, so no antidote could be administered.

And when Chechen militants took more than 1,000 pupils, parents, and staff hostage at a school in the town of Beslan, Russian security forces stormed the school in a bungled rescue attempt in which 334 died, mostly children.

But the alleged terror attack that first comes to mind, after last week’s killings, is a series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999. These were attributed by then-Prime Minister Putin to Chechens as an excuse to launch the brutal Second Chechen War, which eased his ascent to the presidency in 2000.

I will never forget the chill I felt when I visited an apartment building bomb site in Moscow in 1999 with a Russian friend who was paying tribute to the 119 innocent victims who had died there.

Subsequent and detailed investigations, both by courageous Russian journalists and a former FSB agent, ultimately revealed compelling evidence that the FSB had staged these bombings, presumably to help elect Putin. The Russian leader then went on to pulverize Chechen cities and villages with Russian bomb attacks, just as he is now doing to Ukraine.

Even if Friday’s attack was not a pre-planned false flag operation, it is hard to grasp why Russia’s intelligence services, given the U.S. warning, did not provide extra security at the concert venue — or why they let the carnage continue for more than an hour and permitted the terrorists to escape.

Although four supposed culprits have been arrested, we will likely never know whether they were really the culprits or merely four hapless Tajik migrants conveniently picked up and tortured into confessions.

What we do know is that on March 22, the same day as the music venue attack, Putin issued an order for a new mobilization of 300,000 to seize Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv. And that on that day, the Kremlin spokesman said publicly for the first time that Russia was in a “state of war” in Ukraine, finally abandoning Putin’s fake claim of the past two years that it was only a “special military operation.”

We also know that on Tuesday, Russia’s FSB chief, Alexander Bortnikov, falsely told Russian TV that Ukraine and Western special services “facilitated” the attack by “Islamist radicals.”

The message is clear: While MAGA legislators block Ukraine aid, leaving Ukrainian troops and civilians short of defenses, Putin is using a deadly terror attack to justify ramping up his terrorist war on Ukrainian civilians. In a strange way, ISIS-K, Putin, MAGA maestro Donald Trump, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene are all linked in facilitating terrorist crimes in Ukraine.

House Speaker Mike Johnson can still break this chain by bringing a clean Ukraine aid bill to the floor. He can still help save Ukraine, with the aid of GOP legislators who continue to admire Ronald Reagan.

But will he and GOP realists have the guts to act, and to act in time?

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for The Philadelphia Inquirer.