Tajikistan and the Tajiks living in Russia also feel it: whether there is a Ukrainian thread in the background or not, they are in trouble

Opening image: Commemoration at the site of the terrorist attack in Moscow on March 30. Photo: AFP / Sergei Ilnitsky

On March 22, Russia was rocked by a terrorist attack not seen since the Beslan massacre in 2004. 144 people died and 550 were injured in the attack at the Crocus City Hall event center in Moscow. Since then, the authorities have arrested eleven suspects, including four Tajiks, who are believed to be the direct perpetrators of the attack. Dalerzson Mirzoyev, Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, Muhammadsobir Fayzov and Fariduni Samsidin were found in a white Renault Symbol traveling to the triple border area of ​​Ukraine-Russia-Belarus. This is the numerical-factual surface – under which the depth boils.

After the Tajik origin of the perpetrators was revealed to the public as an irrefutable fact despite the desperate efforts of the Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the first days, there are two public interpretations of the attack. One is the media critical of the Russian regime and the interpretation of the West, let’s call it the Western narrative. According to that, one “used to” it is an Islamist terrorist attack carried out by a subsidiary of the Islamic State called Khorasan Vilayet, which has long been active in the radicalization of poor young people in Central Asia. The organization claimed responsibility for the attack.

Tajikistan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia, its economy is built on a single aluminum smelter and money sent home by Tajiks working in Russia. Unfortunately, it borders Afghanistan, with which it is unable to secure its common border. Russia traditionally helps him in this, which, on the other hand, was forced to withdraw its forces from the Tajik-Afghan border due to the war in Ukraine, so the cross-border activities of Khorasan Vilayet became easier. According to this interpretation, the Russian regime is doubly responsible for the terrorist attack: on the one hand, through the weakening of the protection of the Tajik-Afghan border, and on the other hand, because its anti-terrorist agencies were unable to prevent the terrorist attack, despite the fact that the United States, according to The Washington Post’s report, two weeks in advance informed the Russian government before the incident that several large event venues, including Crocus, were at risk. (According to Sergey Nariskin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the American warning was not detailed enough to identify the potential perpetrators.)

The narrative of the Putin regime, on the other hand, is that the Tajiks are not Islamic fundamentalists, but simple assassins, who were hired by Ukraine, which recruited large forces for the Ukrainian International Legion through its embassy in Tajikistan, to carry out the terrorist attack. Thus, the terrorist act in Crocus fits into a long line of previous ones: in August 2022, war correspondent Darja Dugina, the daughter of the well-known far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, died after a bomb exploded in their car. Two Ukrainian citizens were arrested in the case. Maksym Fomin, a war correspondent working under the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky, also died in an explosion in Saint Petersburg in April 2023, just as writer Zahar Prilepin, co-chairman of the Just Russia party, was also seriously injured by a bomb in his car last May. Recently, the former agent of the Ukrainian Security Service, who emigrated to Russia in 2018, Vasily Prozorov, was wounded in the same way in Moscow.

The Western narrative faces two difficulties: on the one hand, after the bombing of four public figures who could hardly be said to be opponents of the Russian regime and actively supported the war, resulting in death or serious injuries, it is difficult to claim that Ukraine does not commit terrorist attacks on Russian soil. Kiev, which is not very successful on the battlefield, is openly trying to signal to the Russian hinterland that they are not safe either, with drone attacks or the suffering of the residents of the Belgorod area, and that they would do better to get out from behind Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the other hand, there is no explanation as to what the car of the four Tajiks was doing at the triple border if Ukraine had nothing to do with the attack – they certainly did not want to flee to Belarus.

At the same time, questions also arise regarding the regime’s narrative. In his speech at a trade union meeting on April 4, Putin said: “In foreign policy, Russia behaves in such a way that it can hardly be a target of attack from the side of Muslim fundamentalists.” This is factually not true – Putin’s Russia has waged enough wars against Islamists in Syria and Africa to earn the hatred of the Islamic State, and fighters of the terrorist organization have also committed smaller or larger attacks against Russia in the previous ten years. The most serious case was the explosion of the Metrojet Airbus A321 from Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg in 2015 on the Sinai Peninsula, which killed all 217 passengers and the 7-person crew, but in 2017 there were also incidents in Surgut and in 2018 in Kizljar terrorist attacks. Both Ukraine and the Islamic State therefore had the interest and ability to carry out the terrorist attack.

It is interesting, but not conclusive evidence due to the politicization of the Russian justice system, that the four Tajiks who were arrested and tortured clearly confessed to Ukraine in a recording broadcast by a certain channel of the Russian public television (Perviy kanal): they all claimed that their destination was Kiev. According to Fayzov, their coordinator named Sayfullo directed someone to the Russian-Ukrainian border who would have helped them cross the border and get to Kiev, where they would have received one million rubles. There is also little evidence that pictures of the Ukrainian flag were found on the mobile phones of the arrested, since these pictures, based on the investigation of the Russian edition of Free Europe, come from the Depositphotos online photo bank. And it is always a warning sign when ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, takes a stand on a political issue – he expressed his opinion that “but these Sarhazians are religious fanatics who would be able to die for their faith”. According to him, the culprits are much more so “primitive assassins hired and trained to shoot for relatively little money”.

At the same time, the usually Bumford Russian domestic intelligence operation aimed at smearing Ukraine does not rule out the fact that Russia really has evidence incriminating Ukraine. Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasiliy Nyebenzja, tried to convince the international partners of this, saying that according to the preliminary results of the investigation “there is no doubt about the direct involvement of Ukraine”, and traces of customers lead to Kiev. He said: the investigation came to the conclusion that the Tajiks had planned to set their car on fire in a border forest in the Bryansk region and told their coordinator, who would have arranged the border crossing and the trip to Kyiv from there. According to “a similar scheme was recommended for the escape of the perpetrators both in the murders of Darya Dugina and Vladlen Tatarsky”. According to Nyebenzja, in addition “there are data that the Kyiv regime has been cooperating with Muslim radicals for a long time and using them for its own purposes.”

The Russian Ministry of Defense also spoke last week about the sudden increase in the number of volunteer soldiers for the Russian-Ukrainian war: sixteen thousand joined the army in ten days, and “the majority of them indicated that the main motivation for concluding the contract was to take revenge for the victims of the tragedy that happened in the vicinity of Moscow on March 22, 2024”.

Meanwhile, Tajikistan and the Tajiks living in Russia also feel: whether there is a Ukrainian thread in the background or not, they are in trouble. Ravil Gajnutdin, the Grand Mufti of the Muslims of Russia, hastened to state on the occasion of the breaking of the Ramadan fast that the perpetrators of the terrorist attack “they obeyed not Allah but the devils” Tajik Foreign Minister Sirojeddin Muhriddin emphasized in his meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that terrorist acts should not be linked to the ethnicity of their perpetrators. Semyon Grigoriev, the Russian ambassador to Tajikistan, said that Tajiks were chosen as perpetrators because “introduce the feeling of xenophobia and anti-migrants into Russian society and destroy its inter-ethnic, inter-religious world”.

And there are already signs of this – there are more and more reports in the press that the Russians are starting to boycott Tajik taxi drivers, that women wearing headscarves are not getting jobs, or that their families are being deported at the Vnukovo airport and banned from Russia for five to ten years Tajik workers returning from their visit. After eliminating a Tajik Islamist cell, Turkey did what Tajikistan feared the most: it reintroduced visa requirements for Tajiks. If Russia follows through on public pressure, it will be a massive kick to the Tajik economy on the floor.