Blowing up Russia: Terrorism from Within

By: Brent Parrish
The Right Planet

Via YouTube/LibertyInOurTime:

Documentary film describes the September 1999 Russian apartment bombings as a terrorist act committed by Russian state security services. Written and directed by Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko. “We just cannot go out and say that the president of Russia is a mass murderer. But it is important that we know it.”

In September 1999, a series of explosions rocked four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing 293 people and injuring 651. Several other bombs were reportedly discovered in other locations and defused.

One incident that occurred in the Russian city of Ryazan, located approximately 122 miles southeast of Moscow, raises some very disturbing questions about who was behind the bombings.

On September 22, 1999, at 9:10 p.m. in the evening a car pulled up to an apartment building in Ryazan. A woman and a two men exited the vehicle and unloaded three large bags out of the trunk bags and placed them in the building’s basement.

A Ryazan resident, Akeksei Kartofelnikov, noticed something was amiss with the license plate. After the suspicious characters left, building residents went down to the basement and discovered three large bags containing a powdery substance and a makeshift detonator fashioned out of a digital clock, a battery, and a shotgun shell.

Ryazan detonator

Two days later, FSB (formerly the KGB) Director Nikolai Patrushev claimed the Russian secret service was merely conducting an “exercise” and that the bags were simply “sacks of sugar.”

Hexogen (RDX) is a military-grade explosive resembling sugar. (Photo credit: prvaiskra-namenska.com)

At the time the documentary was made, there was a bit more freedom of speech than there is now under Putin’s current crackdown on the free press. Russian officials Vladimir Rushailo, Minister of Internal Affairs; Nikolai Patrushev, Director of FSB; Stanislov Voronov, Chief of FSB Investigation Department; and Gen. Aleksandr Zhdanovich, FSB spokesman, were directly questioned in March 2000 about the suspicious scene that played out on September 22, 1999, by Ryazan residents on the then independent NTV news channel.

Why would the Russian government allegedly blow up their own people and blame it on Chechen terrorists? Some believe the Russian government might have conducted a black flag operation in order to incite the Russian people’s ire against the Chechens so they would support the Second Chechen War, which started in August of 1999.

Vladimir Putin in uniform after becoming a KGB officer.

It is interesting to note that Vladimir Putin was appointed head of the FSB in 1998.

Via the Brookings Institute:

[Vladimir Putin] assumed a number of other responsibilities within the Kremlin before being appointed head of the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, the successor to the KGB) in July 1998. A year later, in August 1999, Vladimir Putin was named, in rapid succession, one of Russia’s first deputy prime ministers and then acting prime minister by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who also indicated that Putin was his preferred successor as president. Finally, on December 31, 1999, Putin became acting president of Russia after Yeltsin resigned. He was officially elected to the position of president in March 2000.