Notably, US embassy made a statement that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and US citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours a couple of weeks ago.
Then why kill the people they love so much? This is obviously russophobic driven terrorism, the cowards are shooting indiscriminately at innocent people, you need to see them as animals to be able to do it that easily. Definitely organized by NATO/US.
I was pointing out the usage of language and its intersubjectivity to create narratives, I wasn’t insinuating it was RDK or Russian Neo-Nazis specifically.
In this context the usage of extremist is null if I’ve seen Western news articles call actual extremists patriots and omit their extremist ideology.
To what end, strategically? Possibly none whatsoever. I’ve always had a hard time believing empire can be so petty, but the evidence keeps accumulating.
I think they still have the delusion that they can use terrorism to turn the public against the government in Russia somehow. They're basically realizing that they lost the conventional war, so now it's gonna be straight up terrorism.
With a popularity rating consistently crossing 80% in the most recent years, especially as a Russian victory in the Ukraine war began to look a plausible reality, the outcome of last weekend’s election was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the estimation of Putin’s massive popularity is attributed to a US government-funded polling organisation known as the Levada Center.
Hence the covert operations and terrorist acts to create disturbed conditions within Russia and discredit or undermine the election process. Hundreds of drones were fired from Ukraine at targets inside Russia in recent weeks, some aimed at Moscow and others at St. Petersburg, mainly at power plants and some airfields including Domodedovo located south of Moscow and the second busiest airport in Russia.
The high noon came when a 1500-strong strike force that included Russian speakers in a special unit, a large number of foreign fighters, supported by tanks and armoured personnel carriers (including Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles), and elite Ukrainian units tried in vain a fortnight ago to invade Russian territory in an operation lasting four days. Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov since reportedly told President Vlodomyr Zelensky that the planning of the operation was compromised by a traitor — or so he believed.
The Ukrainian leaders and their backers in NATO calculated that an invasion would work and somehow the Russian elections would be discredited! But it turned out to be a fantasy. It appears that Russia’s battle-hardened security agencies were throughout one step ahead of Ukrainian intelligence and its western mentors.
Vicky specifically mentioned asymmetric warfare in her comment, trying to do incursions into Russia isn't new either. Ukraine has been trying to do raids off and on for a while.
Why? US has delayed plans by months before. Who knows what operational reasons they might have had.
Also something of this scale the US probably didn't want to directly tip its hand. So it warned people weeks in advance, specified a false timeline knowing most Americans likely to heed it anyways would probably avoid such gatherings for even longer than that.
Also could have been Ukrainian SBU, the certain parts of the US learned of it or were informed, issued that alert and maybe knowing their chances were worse with that alert out they rescheduled and tried to keep it from the Americans next time.
Edit: Now it's being claimed it's IS(IS) who is claiming responsibility. IS is an arm's length plausibly deniable CIA proxy. They knew what they were going to do, but they may not have known when or had control of when as is the case with proxies (they may have even known when but tipping their hand caused a change in plans and had it pushed back). Needless to say even if one doesn't accept IS as a CIA proxy, the US is ultimately responsible for the creation of the group and its power via their campaign against Assad. Thus the US is responsible once again for the deaths of many Russian civilians.
I would not be surprised if they try again with more, the US would love to turn Russia's attention to Syria, to split it's military operations between that and Ukraine to give Ukraine more time.