So who really committed the terrorist attack on a Russian theatre full of people last week, killing some 133 people?

ISIS has claimed "credit" for the attack with its operatives, supposedly Tajik-speaking Central Asians.

Whoever they are, they are small fry, well-trained in ISIS attack techniques, but obviously with someone bigger backing them.

There are plenty of others who may have been, not the least of whom is Vladimir Putin, who has been implicated in other terror attacks done for political purposes in his past.

Putin's political frenemies, the Yevgeny Prigozhin types looking for some kind of revenge, could have done it, as well.

The Ukrainians themselves, who are suspected of other attacks on Russian soil, and who are at war with Russia, also could have done it.

It's telling that the men apprehended for the act were headed for the Ukraine border, not Central Asia, nor the restive Caucasian states.

Now a new name emerges, none other than pro-Ukraine warmongering Democrat State Department operative Victoria Nuland, who left office for greener, swampier pastures a few weeks ago.

According to Mark Wauck, writing on his Substack:

In the previous post I referenced Victoria Nuland’s recent claim that “Putin will face some nasty surprises on the battlefield”—that’s the actual direct quote. But she also refers in that exact context to “asymmetric warfare.” In the context of her remarks she’s clearly not referring to bombs and missiles and artillery shells. “Asymmetric” is a very specific word, a word intended to distinguish that type of warfare from “symmetric” warfare: shell for shell, bomb for bomb, missile for missile. The next tweet contains the 24 second clip of Nuland making that statement, in which she touts Ukraine’s “asymmetric warfare” capabilities. Yeah, I thought we just gave the Ukro-Nazis money and munitions? How does Nuland know about the Ukrainian “asymmetric warfare that has been most effective"?

DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics

A month ago (to the day!) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Victoria "F the EU" Nuland promised the aid to Ukraine would allow them to "accelerate the asymmetric warfare that has been most effective" and that Putin is "sure to face some nasty surprises." Nuland left her post as the Deputy Secretary of State 10 days prior to this video. Moscow civilians were killed today in an act of terrorism (asymmetrical warfare).

Nuland is often blamed for the no-name attack on the Nord Stream II pipeline, for which no one has claimed credit and no one for sure has been blamed, but many believe that she or her allies were behind.

She bragged that it would happen before it happened, Wauck noted, and her bragging about asymmetric warfare now would seem to be part of the same she-can't-help-herself spilling of secrets.

(A lot of Democrat operatives are like that, actually, as Molly Ball's piece in Time magazine in 2021 about the deep-state/social media/Democrat operative "conspiracy" to "save" the election would attest.)

Maybe it's all a coincidence, of course, that she bragged about "nasty things" and "asymmetric warfare." Maybe she meant something else, some different "nasty things." And yes, we should consider that possible because it's natural for people like us to suspect her, given that she is so loathesome. As Eric Hoffer once noted, intense haters are the worst forecasters.

Because, actually, there are a lot of potential perpetrators. Knowing which one really did it (or more important, who Putin thinks did it) tells us a lot about whether we can expect retaliation here in the states or not, as well as an escalation of the Ukraine war we are mired in. That's why it's important to know.

So here are a few of the other potential perpetrators and their motives:

First, ISIS, which has claimed "credit" for the atrocity. ISIS hates Putin because he's sidelined them in Syria, propping up Syria's established dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

What's more, ISIS has struck at Russia at least three times in recent years.

According to Joshua Keating, writing a good piece at Vox of all places, they've proved their loathing for both Putin and his ally, Iran:

It seems far more likely that ISIS, the group that has claimed responsibility and has shown itself in the past to have both the means and motivation to pull off precisely this kind of attack, was the actual perpetrator. In addition to the attempted Moscow synagogue attack, a pair of ISIS-K suicide bombings killed nearly 100 people in the Iranian city of Kerman in January. And this: Why would an ISIS offshoot attack Russia?

Islamist extremist groups like ISIS-K have long-standing grievances against Moscow dating back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as well as the Russian Federation’s brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Chechnya and the North Caucasus in the 1990s and 2000s and its support for Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. More recently, ISIS-K carried out a suicide attack targeting the Russian embassy in Kabul in 2022.

The simple explanation that ISIS was responsible would be an inconvenient one for Putin. It would mean that he had ignored the US warning of an imminent attack, which at the time he dismissed as “blackmail” intended to destabilize Russian society. (In fairness, he would definitely not be the only world leader to recently ignore such a warning.)

Keating notes that the four terrorists might have been fleeing to Belarus, not Ukraine, given that they were picked up by Russian authorities near Bryansk, which is very close to both countries.

As for the Muslim fundamentalist angle from it, which the New York Times notes, Putin is actually avoiding, it seems significant to me, and no one has brought it up, that the death count from the Ukraine war has been born largely by Central Asian and Caucasian Muslims.

Regular Russians aren't dying in the meat grinder of the Ukraine war, the peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasian states are. Might that have radicalized some of them towards Islamist fundamentalism? It seems possible to me, even as the Russians insist that the terrorists were all foreigners. The ethnic ties between the Tajiks -- which is a former Soviet republic-- and Russia, very likely intertwine.

As for Putin doing it, well, he's been implicated before in mass terrorist attacks, such as the apartment bombings of the early aughts. But a note of caution: The people most convinced that Putin Did It are the world's biggest Putin-haters, often for good reason, but Putin-haters nevertheless. Bad forecasters, to bring up Hoffer again. Putin has just "won" re-election and seemingly has disposed of his opposition, so it seems farfetched that he would need to rally the public at this point, when he has already shown that he can rig his way into getting what he wants. But of course, he might be in very bad shape domestically. All the same, it seems unlikely.

There's also Ukraine, which has struck hard inside Russia on its oil installations and the like, in a bid to take its war to the invaders. While they have not engaged in mass death attacks on civilians, and would stand to lose Western support if they did, they do seek to destroy Putin. Is it that farfetched that they might do something like this, to take the war to Moscow itself? It's possible, and Putin, according to the New York Times, seems to be leaning this way, ignoring the Muslim angle.

That may mean the Muslim angle is something he doesn't want to admit or look at, or have other people look at, because the problem is politically inconvenient, or just too big for him.

Keating at Vox thinks it was most likely a bona fide ISIS attack.

But the Nuland angle is interesting, too, as she's fanatically pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin, and has engaged in warmongering, coups, and other stunning manipulations in the past, and often bragged about it, too.

We don't know what she is doing now that she is out of office but it seems she's unlikely to be suddenly uninterested in the topic now that she's off the government payroll because for the swamp with all its consultant contracts, that could be irrelevant.

It's worth watching what happens now, because it could draw the U.S. into a deeper conflict with Putin, which seems like the kind of thing she would like. That's the main thing to watch for.

Was it ISIS? Or did Nuland and her Ukrainian buddies have something nefarious to do with this awful act?

Image: Twitter screen shot