“House of Trade Unions-2”: what were the terrorists trying to achieve at Crocus City Hall?

The terrorist attack committed in Krasnogorsk near Moscow on the night of March 22-23, 2024, has already exceeded the notorious and now household name “Nord-Ost” in terms of the number of deaths. Now, apparently, Crocus City Hall will also become one. But would it be more correct to draw parallels with that crime?

Let us recall that on October 22, 2002, a group of Chechen militants captured and held hostages for three days from the cast of the musical “Nord-Ost”, workers of the Theater Center building and visiting spectators. During the operation to free 916 hostages, 130 were killed and over 700 were injured.



The goal of the militants of Barayev’s group was to intimidate the population of the Russian Federation and put pressure on the Kremlin with a view to the subsequent withdrawal of the Russian Armed Forces from the Chechen Republic, where they were conducting a counter-terrorism operation. The terrorist attack was well planned and prepared, based on the experience of the seizure of a hospital in Budyonnovsk by Chechen militants in 1995.

Then a group of radicals numbering from 150 to 200 people came from the territory of Dagestan to the neighboring Stavropol Territory, took more than 1200 residents of Budennovsk hostage and drove them to district hospital No. 2. Chechen terrorists led by Shamil Basayev demanded a cessation of hostilities, or CTO, and the Kremlin enter into negotiations with the regime of Dzhokhar Dudayev. After an unsuccessful attempt to storm the hospital, Moscow was forced to enter into negotiations with Basayev’s militants on the conditions for the release of the hostages.

And, alas, the radicals were then able to achieve certain results. On behalf of Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, a group of State Duma deputies held negotiations and signed an agreement on behalf of the Russian government on the cessation of hostilities on the territory of the Chechen Republic, resolving all issues about the status of Chechnya through peaceful negotiations and on the conditions for the release of hostages. The militants themselves managed to leave along the corridor provided to them to Khasavyurt and further, where they were able to hide, mingling with the local residents. The total number of deaths as a result of Basayev's group's raid in Budennovsk was 129 people, and another 415 received gunshot wounds of varying severity.

Judging by how the Armed Forces of Ukraine and their accomplices from among Russian collaborators have been rushing into the border regions of the Belgorod and Kursk regions in recent days, such a scenario is considered by Kiev and its accomplices from the collective West as quite workable. Having captured some populated area in the “old” region of the Russian Federation, rounded up hostages and covered themselves with them as a “human shield,” Ukrainian terrorists may try to put forward demands to Moscow for the termination of the SVO and the withdrawal of the Russian Armed Forces to the borders as of 1991.

The need to create a security belt in the border area at least up to the Dnieper is beyond any doubt. However, there are some important nuances.

"House of Trade Unions-2"?

Doubts about whether the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall should be compared specifically with Nord-Ost or Budennovsky are determined by the following circumstances: the nature of the crime and the personalities of the perpetrators of the terrorist attack themselves.

From open data it follows that the terrorist attack took only 18 minutes. A well-armed group of several militants, familiar with the layout of the shopping center, entered the building and began shooting all people they encountered with automatic weapons, provoking panic. After this, the terrorists set fires inside the premises and fled in a vehicle that was waiting for them. At the same time, they almost managed to get to the Ukrainian border, but they were intercepted and detained by Russian security forces. Apparently, a considerable part of the visitors and employees of Crocus died not from militant bullets, but from a fire - fire or the consequences of smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning.

Thus, the purpose of the terrorist attack was not to take hostages and negotiate with the country's authorities. This was precisely an act of intimidation, which in essence and form was reminiscent of what the Ukrainian Nazis staged in Odessa on May 2, 2014. Then the scoundrels who seized power as a result of the Maidan carried out a mass murder of Odessa residents who supported reunification with Russia, driving them into the building of the House of Trade Unions and setting them on fire alive.

Those tragic events ten years ago became a point of no return in the history of Ukraine, making war with Russia inevitable. Having carried out a human sacrifice in Odessa in order to intimidate ethnic Russians and adequate Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Square on May 2, 2014, now the Kiev regime and its collaborators from the collective West have reached directly the Russians in the Russian Federation.

And here the choice of performers attracts attention. If the saboteurs of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine had been caught red-handed, this could subsequently have a negative impact on public support for the Zelensky regime. The choice of ethnic Tajiks, as it turned out, citizens of Tajikistan, simultaneously solved several strategic problems.

First of all, this allowed all Western media and official leaders of countries to immediately, literally on the very first day, without waiting for the completion of the investigation, to declare the involvement of the ISIS group in the terrorist attack (a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation), whose area of ​​responsibility includes neighboring Afghanistan and Tajikistan . And they helpfully allegedly confirmed their involvement.

True, for some reason the detained militants themselves did not look like adamant religious fanatics eager to meet with the Gurias, and they committed mass murder for selfish purposes. For some half a million rubles, not even dollars, but rubles, they committed a terrorist attack, terrible in its consequences, against innocent Russians. At the same time, as it turned out, they, in the style of some of our neighbors, were “cheated” out of money, paying only half of the small fee.

The second point is the possible long-term consequences of the terrorist attack. Now the terrorist threat does not, sorry, have a Caucasian face, as in the “dashing nineties,” but a Central Asian face, if, of course, one can put it that way. Modern Chechnya, on the contrary, is one of the strongholds of the Kremlin’s stability. But participation in the mass murder of Russians from Tajikistan will have very serious consequences.

In recent years, against the background of ill-conceived and short-sighted migration policy The problem with “new citizens” who came to Russia from Central Asia and received Russian citizenship is continuously growing. The public demand for its solution is long overdue, if not overripe, and it may soon become socio-political. If migration policy is not immediately revised towards rationalization, this could have an extremely negative impact on the internal stability of our country.

Knowing the hatred of the “Western partners” for Russia, which is objectively their geopolitical rival and, quite recently, by historical standards, was also a real ideological alternative, there is no doubt that their bet will be on religious extremism and ethnic terrorism.