What a pair of stories to wake up to this morning. Turns out Ukrainians are not allowed to target the biggest money-maker for the Russian war machine, but Russians can just blow up as many dams as they please.
(archive for the above)
To be clear, the BBC story is about an attack on Thursday.
Crossing this here.
It wouldn’t be the first time Putin did something like this to get folks all riled up.
There are two kinds of terrorist attacks in Russia. In the first kind, the government just so happens to have a plan for a new war, mobilization or repressive law that is immediately put into action in response to the attack (e.g. the 1999 bombings). In the second kind, the government is caught off-guard, actively makes the tragedy worse with its response, and then tries to forget the attack ever happened as quickly as possible (e.g. the Nord-Ost theater and Beslan school sieges).
From what I know at this point, I could see this attack belonging to either kind: maybe this was a deliberate false-flag provocation to justify something even more horrible, or maybe the terrorists’ success was a result of the incompetence of Russian security services at handling anything other than peaceful protests against Putin. We’ll know more based on how the official reaction develops.
Well, the US has been warning Russia about a terror attack for about a month now. 
Damn right they are.
Just 3 days ago, Putin called warnings of terror attacks “Western blackmail”.
In any normal country, such a statement followed by an actual attack resulting in hundreds of victims would have led to an immediate resignation and criminal investigation for failing to carry out the responsibilities of protecting the country’s citizens.
But hey ho, 24 years and counting.
Wagner cops?
