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Europe | Carnage at Crocus City Hall

Headline: Who was behind the massacre in Moscow?

Sub-headline: Islamic State claims responsibility, but Vladimir Putin tries to implicate Ukraine

https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/03/22/who-was-behind-the-massacre-in-moscow?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

The Economist offers ‘the most likely culprit’ & ‘But there is no shortage of other potential suspects’ framed in the final three paragraphs of it’s ‘news story’.

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Who might have been behind the attack? The claim, and American officials’ apparent agreement with it, does make Islamic State the most likely culprit. But there is no shortage of other potential suspects. The Kremlin’s brutal two-year war in Ukraine has created new enemies and increased the amount of arms in open circulation among returnee soldiers. There is a strong nationalist and vigilante movement at home. The Kremlin’s involvement in bloody conflicts internally in Chechnya and Dagestan have also long made Russia a target for Islamist terrorist groups of various stripes. But its intervention in Syria, where Russian soldiers have supported the Assad regime against Islamic State and other rebels, does support that group’s claim of responsibility.

Ukraine immediately denied any involvement in the attack. A high-level intelligence source told The Economist that the Ukrainian government had been worried that the Kremlin might try to weaponise a terror event of this sort, especially as Mr Putin weighs up whether to risk a new wave of mobilisation. The source said it was necessary to wait to see how Russia would officially classify the event: “Whether they will say it is Chechnya, or Dagestan, perhaps that we are involved somehow, or just simply blame us directly.” The reality is that it would be an act of pure insanity for Ukraine to attempt anything of the sort. Killing civilians would be a sure way to alienate the Western supporters on whom Ukraine so heavily depends.

Still, the Kremlin is trying to implicate Ukraine, even if, in an address to the nation on the afternoon of March 23rd Mr Putin stopped short of directly accusing it of mounting the attack. Instead, he claimed that Ukraine had provided a “window” of escape for the terrorists, who had fled towards that country before supposedly being captured, without saying where they had actually come from.

Should the object lesson of Seymour Hersh’s expose, offer room for doubt on the Economist Questions/Answers?

Headline: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

Sub-headline: The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

Seymour Hersh

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure th…

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a year ago · 13251 likes · Seymour Hersh

The Editor of The Economist Zanny Minton Beddoes was former employee of the notorious Jeffrey Sachs.

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist

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Sachs’s message of urgency is not universally accepted. Plenty of Western as well as Russian economists contend that a more gradual approach is not only possible but necessary. “Economic reform is a political process,” says Padma Desai at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. “First, you must build consensus.”

And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”

Still, Sachs’s brand of “shock therapy” has worked elsewhere. And there is good reason to believe that Russia’s future will turn on how well its leaders learn the catechism of change that he has worked so hard to promulgate.

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Here is Beddoes on The Daily Show reciting the Neo-Conservative Catechism of this historical moment.

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