Does Putin’s war in Ukraine distract from the Islamist threat in Russia?

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks on two synagogues and Orthodox churches which shook southern Russia on Sunday.

On the Orthodox Pentecost, 16 police officers, an Orthodox priest and several civilians were killed in raids in the predominantly Muslim region, but the Kremlin is trying to downplay the possibility that Islamist militants were behind the attacks.

The organization’s attempts to distract from a possible connection may be indicative of the growing vulnerability of President Vladimir Putin, whose attention and resources are fully focused on the war in Ukraine and those fighting it in Russia.

Politicians with links to the Kremlin have claimed, without evidence, that the attacks were organized by foreign “enemies,” specifically by Ukrainian and NATO intelligence services. Putin himself, however, has not commented directly on the attacks.

It is the same narrative that was used just a few months ago when armed militants killed 145 people at the Crocus City Hall concert hall near Moscow, although an Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility.

Instead of investigating how Russia’s intelligence services could have missed an attack of this magnitude, Moscow immediately accused Kyiv and its Western allies of being involved in orchestrating the attack. Such accusations reinforce the Kremlin’s public narrative that the West is the greatest existential threat to the security of ordinary Russians.

But two major terrorist attacks in such close succession “raise the question of whether the war in Ukraine has distracted the Kremlin from what is happening inside Russia,” says Neil Melvin, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

Melvin added that the renewed flare-up of violence in Dagestan this week posed a threat to regional stability in the North Caucasus and to Putin’s claim to have restored order there.

The Kremlin has not always been particularly keen to stand in the way of portrayals of violent Islamism.

Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim region of Russia in the North Caucasus. Extremist violence increased there in the early 2000s after Russian forces fought two wars in neighboring Chechnya. These conflicts allowed Putin to claim he had brought peace and stability to the troubled region and to burnish his image as Russia’s security guarantor.

But more recently, Dagestan – like other ethnic minority regions – has borne the brunt of Putin’s sometimes unpopular efforts to mobilize men for the Ukraine war. The region also made headlines in October when an anti-Israel mob stormed the airport in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, after a passenger plane arrived from Israel just weeks after the October 7 attack.

In the past, the Kremlin has blamed “international terrorism” and “jihadism” for new outbreaks of violence in Russia’s Caucasus, putting itself in line with Western countries facing similar threats, said Michael Clarke, visiting professor of war studies at King’s College London. “But since 2022, the Kremlin has worked hard to suggest that these attacks are somehow externally inspired and, more specifically, that they lead back, however tenuously, to Kyiv,” he said.

On Monday, Dagestan Governor Sergei Melikov said authorities knew who was behind the attacks and what their goals were. However, he did not name any perpetrators and mentioned only internationally controlled “sleeper cells.”

The official reactions to previous terrorist attacks on Russian soil were also characterized by opaque and contradictory messages.

A few days after the attack on Crocus Town Hall in March, Putin said it was carried out by “radical Islamists” but asked who was directing them. Two weeks later, he said Russia could not have been the target of “Islamic fundamentalists” because it was a “unique example of interfaith agreement and unity.”

The denial could mean that “the security services’ distraction from the war in Ukraine has not abated since the attack on Crocus City Hall,” says Harold Chambers, a Russia policy analyst at Indiana University Bloomington.

Most notably, Russian state media reported after Sunday’s attack that a local official, Magomed Omarov, had been removed from his post and expelled from the ruling United Russia party. According to these reports, Omarov’s son and nephew were involved in the attacks. If true, these allegations will raise uncomfortable questions for the Kremlin.

“The increased status of the latest Dagestani militants indicates that the counterterrorism landscape in the North Caucasus has changed significantly,” Chambers said.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Monday that he had no idea who carried out the attack. Three U.S. officials told NBC News that no branch of ISIS has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack, but other local extremist groups may be responsible.

Telegram channels of the IS-affiliated group that carried out the Crocus attack praised Sunday’s attack by “our brothers from the Caucasus” but did not take responsibility for it.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War believes that the North Caucasus branch of the terrorist militia “Islamic State”, Vilayat Kavkaz, is probably behind the attack. The attack was “complex and coordinated”, the report says.