Washington appears desperate to prevent Ukraine from being associated, in any way, with the horrific murderous rampage in the Russian capital

By Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the Valdai Club

The United States of America is trying to control and manipulate the media and political interpretation of the tragic terrorist attack in Moscow last month. In the Western information space, Washington is forming a narrative to try to distract attention from its proxy, Ukraine.

At certain points, ISIS was a useful tool for the Americans in Syria. There is published evidence suggesting that the US operated in parallel with the terrorist group against the Syrian government. The fact that Washington was ready to offer a coherent version of events from the first minutes after the attack in Moscow is in itself extremely paradoxical.

Consider this. The Americans have spent decades trying to determine the cause of crimes on their own soil, such as the assassinations of leading US political figures. They lack the resources, attention and enthusiasm to determine who was behind the sabotage of pan-European energy infrastructure: the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

However, within 15 minutes, they provided “accurate” information about who organized the terrorist attack in Moscow.

I am convinced that the Russian government has no intention of defending ISIS if this organization is indeed behind it. The statements of President Vladimir Putin and senior officials show that the Russian position is strictly based on facts. They indicate that the terrorists who carried out the attack were heading towards the Russia-Ukraine border, which they intended to cross.

Does this mean, to interpret the American line, that ISIS and the Ukrainian government are coordinating their actions? The creators of this tale should have thought several steps ahead about what conclusions could be drawn from it.

What’s clear is that the US is trying to fill the information vacuum, to offer its interpretation of events in order to divert any suspicion from those it needs now – it looks like some sort of cover-up operation. After all, when American leaders are taken by surprise and such episodes occur, intelligence chiefs often admit directly in congressional hearings that the services did not foresee this or that event. In the case of the Moscow attack, however, the Americans suddenly came up with a coherent version of events within 15 minutes. This is reminiscent of how, within 24 hours of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 American elections, false accusations of Russian involvement in the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States were beginning to circulate.

Kiev understands that its own space for maneuver is shrinking and its resources are being depleted. In fact, it is fighting “on life support”: if the flow of resources dries up, the conflict will stop then and there. All that remains is the gradual radicalization of its own people. Ukraine’s habit of dehumanizing its opponent promotes increasingly irrational thinking, and it is only a short step away from justifying terrorist acts.

I believe that the calibrated, reasoned, fact-based line that the Russian government is now taking will eventually lead us to a point where we know exactly who ordered this crime. We see a significant gap between how calmly and rationally (as much as possible in this situation), our country’s top officials are handling the investigation and how our Western opponents are trying to present us with their pseudo-reality. The aims of the organizers of the terrorist attack will not be achieved: one of them was to strike at the weak points of our society.

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