Thom Hartmann wrote an ominous column about the possible origins and consequences of the terrorist attack in Moscow that killed scores of people at a concert.
He fears that Putin may use this horrific event as a pretext to step up his attacks on Ukraine and do to Ukraine what he did to Chechnya, which was to reduce the would-be breakaway region to a wasteland.
In his article, he recalls the Reichstag fire, which Hitler used as a pretext to initiate his dictatorship, crush democratic institutions, and round up dissidents.
He draws other analogies of leaders who were warned of pending catastrophes, but chose to ignore the warnings in order to solidify their hold on the population and secure their power.
In that group, he includes President George W. Bush, who ignored warnings about 9/11, and Benjamin Netanyahu, who ignored warnings about a likely attack by Hamas from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has written about the IDF “spotters,” the young women who watched activity at the Gaza border and warned their superiors about the military exercises they observed; they were ignored. Almost every one of these unarmed 18-and 19-year-old women were killed or taken hostage.
Hartmann wrote:
Like Hitler, Netanyahu, and Bush all did, Putin just claimed that up is down, that the terrorist attack he knew was coming was an unprovoked surprise, and that it came from Ukraine, not ISIS-K…
Friday, a group of ISIS extremists claimed credit for the attack on a Moscow theater that killed at least 133 people and left the building a smoldering ruin. But Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his public comments today, didn’t mention ISIS-K: instead, he placed the blame on Ukraine….
We’ve seen this movie before, both here, in Israel, and Germany, and it never ends well…
Ukraine, of course, has denied any involvement or knowledge of the attack. But don’t be surprised if Putin uses this as an excuse to massively bomb Kiev the way he utterly destroyed Grozny the capital of Chechnya, to subdue that nation. The attacks could begin as early as this coming week.
If that happens, it could provoke a stronger response from EU countries who see Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Moldova as being next on Putin’s menu: both he and his spokesmen have already said as much.
And that could lead to a major escalation of the Ukraine war beyond the borders of Ukraine and into Poland or the Baltics, triggering Nato’s Article 5 mutual defense provision, which would instantaneously draw the US directly into the conflict.
All because Republicans have convinced Putin that they can prevent further US aid, so he believes now is a good time to use the time-tested “pretext of an unexpected attack” strategy to go from a “military operation” to an all-out war.
In fact, just yesterday afternoon his official spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the country is now officially “at war.”
That Ukrainian conflict, particularly if Putin-aligned Republicans like Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Mark Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc. are able to continue to prevent the US from helping Ukraine push Russia into a stalemate, could make China’s dictator Xi Jinping think it’s a great time to attack Taiwan.
And that, particularly since we recently stationed troops on Taiwanese territory, throws us straight into WWIII, regardless of Republican obstructionism and isolationist rhetoric.
I hope I’m wrong. Praying, frankly, that I’m wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have, indeed, seen this movie before. This has long been Putin’s modus operandi. He is an extraordinarily evil creature. There is nothing so terrible that he is not capable of it. Russia could have been a flourishing part of the family of nations. But under Putin it is a pariah state. What an opportunity was flushed down the drain there by the bloody Chekist elf simply because all he ever really cared about was looting his country for personal gain.
nor should we excuse the West, which seemed content to allow the Soviets to dissolve into oligarchy so long as this oligarchy provided raw materials for an energy needy world.
The WaPost interview of former Ambassador Michael McFaul: if Russia continued to be part of the normal world economy instead of an aggressor, it would today be one of the richest nations in the world, with a rising standard of living.
YES!!!
But if you are a psychopath like Putin, it’s all good. He has had his pleasure palaces for decades now.
And the absolute groveling of those around him, which is a thrill to people of his type.
The moral depravity and evil scheming of Putin knows no bounds. ISIS-K claimed responsibility for the attack but Putin blames Ukraine as the culprit. The man is a shameless liar on an epic scale, will this be the excuse for him to use a tactical nuclear weapon on Kyev?
Putin is supposedly the all-knowing big boss man in Russia but this horrible massacre happened during his watch. Russia is a police state and yet these terrorists got through to commit this horrible attack? Lots of unanswered questions. The US warned Russia of the imminent attack but Putin dismissed the warning as so much propaganda.
Hartmann is an extremely bright and affable thinker.
He’s also prone to see conspiracies everywhere.
We will see.
The U.S. publicly announced the possibility of a terror attack in Moscow, specifically at a concert, two weeks before the event. Putin mocked the warning and accused the U.S. of trying to frighten the Russian people. A sane and prudent leader would have provided security at all large concerts. Not Putin.
It’s also interesting that he’s trying to blame Ukraine when ISIS took “credit.” And he’s stepping up attacks on Kyiv and energy stations in Ukraine.
Like I said, conspiracies everywhere.
There is only one card Putin has not played, the nuclear option, which he has threated to use to destroy the UK and any country in the EU that sends troops into Ukraine to fight against Putin’s military machine. Putin made a dangerous step in that direction when he moved tactical nukes into one of his allies, Belarus.
The Belarus-Russia Alliance: An Axis of Autocracy in Eastern Europe | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)
Putin has tried to bomb Ukraine into rubble but failed so far, because Russia doesn’t have enough ordinance to pull it off as long as Ukraine has the defensive and offense weapons it has been using, supplied by the US and NATO nations.
If Putin uses tactical battlefield nukes to decimate Ukraine’s military, there are two possible reactions.
FIRST OPTION: The world does nothing and that emboldens Putin to use tactical nukes more as he steps up his campaign to build an empire to rule the world from, until it’s too late to stop him without triggering the dreaded global nuclear war.
SECOND OPTION: The EU and NATO react in kind, hitting Russian troops in Ukraine with the same type of nuclear weapons that also may trigger the Domesday war.
The United States is not the only country in NATO with nuclear weapons. The British and French also have them, even nuclear missile subs.
I appreciate this thank you. I had a gut feeling when I heard about the opera house in Moscow that it might have been Putin himself.
Yes. He oversaw the apartment bombings in Moscow that raised his profile and made him president. So, this is just like him.
It’s possible that he got the intelligence from the U.S. that this was going to happen and purposefully ignored it because he felt he could turn it to good use by blaming it on Ukraine, which is just bizarre.
The U.S. intelligence agencies made the warning public on March 7. Putin scoffed.
At the opera house, Putin had his troops “rescue” hundreds of hostages by firing poison gas into the auditorium. Most if not all the hostages died.