Russian Apartment Bombings Part II

 

Suspects and accused

In September 1999, hundreds of Chechen nationals (out of the more than 100,000 permanently living in Moscow) were briefly detained and interrogated in Moscow, as a wave of anti-Chechen sentiments swept the city. However, no Chechens were tried for the Buinaksk, Moscow or Volgodonsk attacks. Rather, it were Dagestani Wahhabis in the case of the Buinaksk bombing, and Karachay Wahhabis in the case of Moscow and Volgodonsk attacks.

According to the official investigation, the following people either delivered explosives, stored them, or harbored other suspects:

Moscow bombings

Ibn al-Khattab (a Saudi-born Mujahid), who was poisoned by the FSB in 2002.

Achemez Gochiyayev (an ethnic Karachai, has not been arrested; he is still at large)

Denis Saitakov (an ethnic Tatar from Uzbekistan), killed in Georgia in 1999–2000

Khakim Abayev (an ethnic Karachai), killed by FSB special forces in May 2004 in Ingushetia

Ravil Akhmyarov (a Russian citizen), Surname indicates an ethnic Tatar, killed in Chechnya in 1999–2000

Yusuf Krymshamkhalov (an ethnic Karachai and resident of Kislovodsk), arrested in Georgia in December 2002, extradited to Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004, after a two-month secret trial held without a jury

Stanislav Lyubichev (a traffic police inspector, resident of Kislovodsk, Stavropol Krai), who helped the truck with explosives pass the checkpoint after getting a sack of sugar as a bribe, sentenced to four years in May 2003

Volgodonsk bombing

Timur Batchayev (an ethnic Karachai), killed in Georgia in the clash with police during which Krymshakhalov was arrested

Zaur Batchayev (an ethnic Karachai) killed in Chechnya in 1999–2000

Adam Dekkushev (an ethnic Karachai), arrested in Georgia, threw a grenade at police during the arrest, extradited to Russia and sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2004, after a two-month secret trial held without a jury

Buinaksk bombing

Isa Zainutdinov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2001

Alisultan Salikhov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2001

Magomed Salikhov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, arrested in Azerbaijan in November 2004, extradited to Russia, found not guilty on the charge of terrorism by the jury on 24 January 2006; found guilty of participating in an armed force and illegal crossing of the national border, he was retried again on the same charges on 13 November 2006 and again found not guilty, this time on all charges, including the ones he was found guilty of in the first trial. According to Kommersant Salikhov admitted that he made a delivery of paint to Dagestan for Ibn al-Khattab, although he was not sure what was really delivered.

Ziyavudin Ziyavudinov (a native of Dagestan), arrested in Kazakhstan, extradited to Russia, sentenced to 24 years in April 2002

Abdulkadyr Abdulkadyrov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to 9 years in March 2001

Magomed Magomedov (Sentenced to 9 years in March 2001)

Zainutdin Zainutdinov (an ethnic Avar) and native of Dagestan, sentenced to 3 years in March 2001 and immediately released under amnesty

Makhach Abdulsamedov (a native of Dagestan, sentenced to 3 years in March 2001 and immediately released under amnesty).

Attempts at an independent investigation

The Russian Duma rejected two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the Ryazan incident.

An independent public commission to investigate the bombings was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalyov. The commission started its work in February 2002. On 5 March Sergei Yushenkov and Duma member Yuli Rybakov flew to London where they met Alexander Litvinenko and Mikhail Trepashkin. After this meeting, Trepashkin began working with the commission.

However, the public commission was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, both Duma members, have died in apparent assassinations in April 2003 and July 2003, respectively. Another member of the commission, Otto Lacis, was assaulted in November 2003 and two years later, on 3 November 2005, he died in a hospital after a car accident.

The commission asked lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin to investigate the case. Trepashkin claimed to have found that the basement of one of the bombed buildings was rented by FSB officer Vladimir Romanovich and that the latter was witnessed by several people. Trepashkin also investigated a letter attributed to Achemez Gochiyayev and found that the alleged assistant of Gochiyayev who arranged the delivery of sacks might have been Kapstroi-2000 vice president Alexander Karmishin, a resident of Vyazma.

Trepashkin was unable to bring the alleged evidence to the court because he was arrested in October 2003 (on charges of illegal arms possession) and imprisoned in Nizhny Tagil, just a few days before he was to make his findings public. He was sentenced by a Moscow military closed court to four years imprisonment on a charge of revealing state secrets. Amnesty International issued a statement that "there are serious grounds to believe that Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and convicted under falsified criminal charges which may be politically motivated, in order to prevent him continuing his investigative and legal work related to the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other cities".

In a letter to Olga Konskaya, Trepashkin wrote that some time before the bombings, Moscow's Regional Directorate against Organized Crimes (RUOP GUVD) arrested several people for selling the explosive RDX. Following that, Nikolai Patrushev's Directorate of FSB officers came to the GUVD headquarters, captured evidence and ordered the investigators fired. Trepashkin wrote that he learned about the story at a meeting with several RUOP officers in the year 2000. They claimed that their colleagues could present eyewitness accounts in a court. They offered a video tape with evidence against the RDX dealers. Mr Trepashkin did not publicize the meeting fearing for lives of the witnesses and their families.

According to Trepashkin, his supervisors and the people from the FSB promised not to arrest him if he left the Kovalev commission and started working together with the FSB "against Alexander Litvinenko".

On 24 March 2000, two days before the presidential elections, NTV Russia featured the Ryazan events of Fall 1999 in the talk show Independent Investigation. The talk with the residents of the Ryazan apartment building along with FSB public relations director Alexander Zdanovich and Ryazan branch head Alexander Sergeyev was filmed few days earlier. On 26 March, Boris Nemtsov voiced his concern over the possible shut-down of NTV for airing the talk. Seven months later, NTV general manager Igor Malashenko [ru] said at the JFK School of Government that Information Minister Mikhail Lesin warned him on several occasions. Malashenko's recollection of Lesin's warning was that by airing the talk show NTV "crossed the line" and that the NTV managers were "outlaws" in the eyes of the Kremlin. According to Alexander Goldfarb, Mr. Malashenko told him that Valentin Yumashev brought a warning from the Kremlin, one day before airing the show, promising in no uncertain terms that the NTV managers "should consider themselves finished" if they went ahead with the broadcast.

Artyom Borovik was among the people who investigated the bombings. He received numerous death threats and died in a suspicious plane crash in March 2000 that was regarded by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky as a probable assassination.

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former security service member Alexander Litvinenko, who investigated the bombings, were killed in 2006.

Surviving victims of the Guryanova street bombing asked President Dmitry Medvedev to resume the official investigation in 2008, but it was not resumed.

In a 2017 discussion at the RFE/RL Sergei Kovalyov said: "I think that the Chechen trace was skillfully fabricated. No one from the people who organized the bombings was found, and no one actually was looking for them". He then was asked by Vladimir Kara-Murza if he believes that several key members of his commission, and even Boris Berezovskiy and Boris Nemtsov who "knew quite a few things about the bombings" were killed to prevent the independent investigation. Kovalev responded: "I cannot state with full confidence that the explosions were organized by the authorities. Although it's clear that the explosions were useful for them, useful for future President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, because he had just promised to "waste in the outhouse" (as he said) everyone who had any relation to terrorism. It was politically beneficial for him to scare people with terrorism. That is not proven. But what can be stated with full confidence is this: the investigation of both the Moscow explosions and the so-called "exercises" in Ryazan is trumped up. There can be various possibilities. It seems to me, that Ryazan should have been the next explosion, but I cannot prove that."

Russian government involvement theory

According to David Satter, Yuri Felshtinsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Vladimir Pribylovsky and Boris Kagarlitsky, the bombings were a successful false flag operation coordinated by the Russian state security services to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and to bring Putin to power. Some of them described the bombings as typical "active measures" practiced by the KGB in the past. The war in Chechnya boosted Prime Minister and former FSB Director Vladimir Putin's popularity, and brought the pro-war Unity Party to the State Duma and Putin to the presidency within a few months.

During the testimony of David Satter in the United States House of Representatives, he stated that:

With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, however, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For "Operation Successor" to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.

According to a reconstruction of the events by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky:

The bombings in Buynaksk were carried out by a team of twelve GRU officers who were sent to Dagestan and supervised by the head of GRU's 14th Directorate General Kostechenko. That version was partly based on a testimony by Aleksey Galkin. The bombing in Buynaksk was conducted by the GRU to avoid an "interagency conflict between the FSB and the Ministry of Defense".

In Moscow, Volgodonsk and Ryazan, the attacks were organized by the FSB through a chain of command that included director of the counter-terrorism department General German Ugryumov, FSB operatives Maxim Lazovsky, Vladimir Romanovich, Ramazan Dyshekov and others. Achemez Gochiyayev, Tatyana Korolyeva, and Alexander Karmishin rented warehouses that received shipments of hexogen disguised as sugar and did not know that the explosives were delivered.

Adam Dekkushev, Krymshamkhalov, and Timur Batchayev were recruited by FSB agents who presented themselves as "Chechen separatists" to deliver explosives to Volgodonsk and Moscow.

Names and the fate of FSB agents who planted the bomb in the city of Ryazan remain unknown.

Support

Historians, journalists and politicians

The view about the bombings being organized and perpetrated by Russian state security services was originally put forward by investigative journalist David Satter and historians Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, in co-authorship with Alexander Litvinenko. It was later supported by a number of historians. Amy Knight, a historian of the KGB, wrote that it was "abundantly clear" that the FSB was responsible for carrying out the attacks and that Vladimir Putin's "guilt seems clear," since it was inconceivable that the FSB would have done so without the sanction of Putin, the agency's former director and by then Prime Minister of Russia. In her book Putin's Kleptocracy, historian Karen Dawisha summarized evidence related to the bombings and concluded that "to blow up your own innocent and sleeping people in your capital city is an action almost unthinkable. Yet the evidence that the FSB was at least involved in planting a bomb in Ryazan is incontrovertible." According to Timothy Snyder, "it seemed possible" that the perpetrators of the apartment bombings were FSB officers. David Satter considered the bombings as a political provocation by the Russian secret services that was similar to the burning of the Reichstag.

This view has been also supported by investigative journalists. In 2008, British journalist Edward Lucas concluded in his book The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West that "The weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation: that the attacks were a ruthlessly planned stunt to create a climate of panic and fear in which Putin would quickly become the country's indisputable leader, as indeed he did." In the September 2009 issue of GQ, veteran war correspondent Scott Anderson wrote about on Putin's role in the Russian apartment bombings, based in part on his interviews with Mikhail Trepashkin. The journal owner, Condé Nast, then took extreme measures to prevent an article by Anderson from appearing in the Russian media, both physically and in translation.

Former Russian State Security Council chief Alexandr Lebed in his 29 September 1999 interview with Le Figaro said he was almost convinced that the government organized the terrorist acts. Andrei Illarionov, a former key economic adviser to the Russian president, said that FSB involvement "is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no other element that could have organized the bombings except for the FSB." Later Lebed's public relations staff claimed that he was quoted out of the context.

Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer noted that "The FSB accused Khattab and Gochiyaev, but oddly they did not point the finger at Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov's regime, which is what the war was launched against."

A number of US politicians commented that they consider credible the allegations about Russian state security services as the actual organizers of the bombings. In 2003, U.S. senator John McCain said that "It was during Mr. Putin's tenure as Prime Minister in 1999 that he launched the Second Chechen War following the Moscow apartment bombings. There remain credible allegations that Russia's FSB had a hand in carrying out these attacks. Mr. Putin ascended to the presidency in 2000 by pointing a finger at the Chechens for committing these crimes, launching a new military campaign in Chechnya, and riding a frenzy of public anger into office."

On 11 January 2017, senator Marco Rubio raised the issue of the 1999 bombings during the confirmation hearings for Rex Tillerson. According to senator Rubio, "there's [an] incredible body of reporting, open source and other, that this was all—all those bombings were part of a black flag operation on the part of the FSB." On 10 January 2018, senator Ben Cardin of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report entitled "Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security". According to the report, "no credible evidence has been presented by the Russian authorities linking Chechen terrorists, or anyone else, to the Moscow bombings."

According to Satter, all four bombings that occurred had a similar "signature" which indicated that the explosives had been carefully prepared, a mark of skilled specialists. There is also no explanation as to how the terrorists were able to obtain tons of hexogen explosive and transport it to various locations in Russia; hexogen is produced in one plant in Perm Oblast for which the central FSB is responsible for the security. The culprits would also have needed to organize nine explosions (the four that occurred and the five attempted bombings reported by the authorities) in different cities in a two-week period. Satter's estimate for the time required for target plan development, site visits, explosives preparation, renting space at the sites and transporting explosives to the sites was four to four and a half months.

Books and films

The theory of Russian government involvement has been supported in a number of books and movies on the subject.

David Satter, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, authored two books Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State and The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin (published by Yale University Press in 2003 and 2016) where he scrutinized the events and came to the conclusion that the bombings were organized by Russian state security services.(Satter 2003)

In 2002, former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and historian Yuri Felshtinsky published a book Blowing up Russia: Terror from within.(Felshtinsky & Litvinenko 2007) According to authors the bombings and other terrorist acts have been committed by Russian security services to justify the Second Chechen War and to bring Vladimir Putin to power.

In another book, Lubyanka Criminal Group, Litvinenko and Alexander Goldfarb described the transformation of the FSB into a criminal and terrorist organization, including conducting the bombings. (Litvinenko 2002) Former GRU analyst and historian Viktor Suvorov said that the book describes "a leading criminal group that provides "protection" for all other organized crime in the country and which continues the criminal war against their own people", like their predecessors NKVD and KGB. He added: "The book proves: Lubyanka [the KGB headquarters] was taken over by enemies of the people. ... If Putin's team can not disprove the facts provided by Litvinenko, Putin must shoot himself. Patrushev and all other leadership of Lubyanka Criminal Group must follow his example."

Alexander Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko published a book Death of a Dissident. They asserted that the murder of Mr. Litvinenko was "the most compelling proof" of the FSB involvement theory. According to the book, the murder of Litvinenko "gave credence to all his previous theories, delivering justice for the tenants of the bombed apartment blocks, the Moscow theater-goers, Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya, and the half-exterminated nation of Chechnya, exposing their killers for the whole world to see."

A PBS Frontline documentary on Vladimir Putin also mentioned the theory and FSB involvement, citing the quick removal of rubble and bodies from the bombing scenes before any investigation could take place, the discovery of the Ryazan bomb, the deaths of several people who had attempted to investigate the bombings, as well as the defused Ryazan bomb being made of Russian military explosives and detonators.

A documentary film Assassination of Russia was made in 2000 by two French producers who had previously worked on NTV's Sugar of Ryazan program.

A documentary Nedoverie ("Disbelief") about the bombing controversy made by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov was premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the story of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, the two Russian-American sisters, who had lost their mother in the attack, and decided to find out who did it. His next film on the subject was Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case. The film doesn't intend to investigate the Litvinenko murder, rather than that, its goal is to put the case into a wider context of the events unfolding in post-Soviet Russia.

Yuli Dubov, author of The Big Slice, wrote a novel The Lesser Evil, based on the bombings. The main characters of the story are Platon (Boris Berezovsky) and Larry (Badri Patarkatsishvili). They struggle against an evil KGB officer, Old man (apparently inspired by the legendary Philipp Bobkov), who brings another KGB officer, Fedor Fedorovich (Vladimir Putin) to power by staging a series of apartment bombings.

Criticism

In March 2000, Putin dismissed the allegations of FSB involvement in the bombings as "delirious nonsense." "There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such crime against their own people. The very allegation is immoral," he said. An FSB spokesman said that "Litvinenko's evidence cannot be taken seriously by those who are investigating the bombings". According to Strobe Talbott who was a United States Deputy Secretary of State during the events, "there was no evidence to support" the "conspiracy theory, although Russian public opinion did indeed solidify behind Putin in his determination to carry out a swift, decisive counteroffensive."

According to Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, "From the start, it seemed that the Kremlin was determined to suppress all discussion ... When Alexander Podrabinek, a Russian human rights activist, tried to import copies of Litvinenko's and Felshtinsky's Blowing up Russia in 2003, they were confiscated by the FSB. Trepashkin himself, acting as a lawyer for two relatives of the victims of the blast, was unable to obtain information he requested and was entitled to see by law". However, Soldatov believed that the obstruction might reflect "'paranoia' rather than guilt on the part of the authorities". Consequently, Soldatov argued, that paranoia has produced the very conspiracy theories that the Russian Government intended to eradicate. In their book The New Nobility, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan believe that the Ryazan incident had actually been a training exercise. According to the authors, such exercises are typical for Vympel, a unit of the FSB whose mission is to verify the efficacy of counter-terrorism measures at sites such as nuclear plants. In authors' opinion, the book Blowing Up Russia by Felshtinsky and Litvinenko contained no new evidence against the FSB, and claims by Trepashkin were highly dubious. Soldatov and Borogan noted that the main point of allegations against the FSB was that Achemez Gochiyaev was an innocent businessman, who was made a scapegoat by the FSB and falsely accused of perpetrating the bombings. However, according to Soldatov and Borogan, Gochiyaev was a leader of a local Islamist group since the mid-1990s, and Dekkushev and Krymshamkhalov were members of the same group called "Muslim Society No. 3". According to Russian state security services, the group was founded in 1995, counted more than 500 members by 2001, and was responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in the 2000s. Soldatov and Borogan have also noted a partial admission of guilt by Dekkushev and Krymshamkhalov during a trial in 2003.

According to Robert Bruce Ware, the simplest explanation for the apartment block blasts is that they were perpetrated by Islamist extremists from North Caucasus who sought retribution for the attacks of the Federal forces against the Islamist enclave in the central Dagestan, known as the Islamic Djamaat. Ware points out that that would explain the timing of the attacks, and why there were no attacks after the date on which the insurgents were driven from Dagestan. It would also explain why no Chechen claimed responsibility. Also it would explain Basayev's reference to responsibility of Dagestanis and it would be consistent with the initial vow of Khattab to set off the bombs blasting through Russian cities. Ware also criticizes an argument that David Satter and Rajan Menon use to support the view of Russian security services responsibility for the bombings—that the apartment block explosions involved hexogen, which is a highly controlled substance in Russia and is extraordinarily difficult to obtain. According to Ware, that's not the case, as sizable amounts of hexogen (as well as other weaponry) were readily available in Dagestan. As a proof, Ware cites the police reports of the program for voluntary surrender of arms in Dagestan which ran for a couple of months in 2003 and revealed large quantities of hexogen and ammonite.

Max Abrahms, a researcher who is critical of the efficacy of terrorism in general, argued that the bombings were detrimental for the self-determination of Chechnya. He noted that the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria has achieved a de facto independence from Russia after the Khasavyurt Accord, with two thirds of Russian citizens favoring the separation of the breakaway republic. However, the public opinion in Russia has changed dramatically after the bombings. Most Russians started "baying for blood" and strongly supporting the war with Chechnya that became inevitable and led to the loss of the independence as a result of the bombings. According to Abrahms, this supports his theory that attacks by terrorist organizations have been always counterproductive for the perpetrators and therefore gave rise to conspiracy theories about alternative perpetrators who actually benefited from the events.

Political scientist Ronald R. Pope in his review of David Satter's book Darkness at Dawn cited Kirill Pankratov's criticism, published as a contribution to Johnson's Russia List. Regarding the apartment bombings, Pankratov argued that the Russian authorities did not need an additional justification to wage a war against Chechnya, in view of high-profile kidnappings and the invasion of Dagestan. One of his other arguments was that the theory of FSB responsibility for the bombings implied that it had been able to keep the lid on the operation much more effectively than the FSB had been able to execute it.

Political scientist Brian Taylor believes that there's too little evidence to decide which version of the events is correct, as the available evidence is fragmentary and controversial. Taylor identifies several reasons to doubt the conspiracy version. First, while the bombings did propel Putin to power, by itself it's not the evidence that this was the goal of the attacks. Second, there was a casus belli even without the bombings—namely, the invasion of Dagestan and multiple kidnappings in the region in the preceding years. Third, if the goal of the bombings was to justify a new war, one or two bombings in Moscow would be more than adequate. Any subsequent bombings would be potentially dangerous, because they would increase the risk to expose the conspiracy. Fourth, he believes that a plot involving multiple players and a large number of FSB operatives could not be kept secret. According to Taylor, it's plausible that FSB "simulated" an attack in Ryazan in order to claim credit for "uncovering" it; however the plot was foiled by vigilant local denizens and law enforcement personnel. The "training exercise" justification was improvised after the plot failed.

Yuri Luzhkov, a mayor of Moscow at the time of the bombings, believed that the bombings in Moscow were facilitated by the new piece of legislation that established Freedom of movement within the country—which was restricted prior to 1993. According to Luzhkov, the law made it possible for Chechen terrorists to bring weapons to Moscow and store them there, as well as purchase auto vehicles and provide housing for tens of bandits who had arrived in Moscow. According to Luzhkov, "for three months, after having arrived in Moscow, a terrorist could live wherever he wanted and stay with anyone, without notifying the police", which allowed the criminals to prepare the bombings.

Aimen Dean, a Western spy within the al-Qaeda, reported on a phone call with Abu Said al-Kurdi—a logistics chief for Chechen jihadis in 1999, according to Dean. Al-Kurdi admitted that the apartment bombings were perpetrated by the Islamic Emirate to revenge the atrocities committed by the Moscow OMON in the Caucasus. It took 19 months of surveillance and preparations, which involved bribing to facilitate smuggling bombs, materials and trucks. Only Shamil Basayev and Ibn Khattab were aware of the plan, while Maskhadov didn't know about it.

Sealing information by the US government

On 14 July 2016, David Satter filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the State Department, the CIA and the FBI, inquiring about documents pertaining to the apartment bombings, the Ryazan incident and persons who tried to investigate the bombings and were killed. The agencies acknowledged receipt of the requests, but Satter received no other response within the statutory time limit. On 29 August 2016, Satter filed suit against the Department of Justice and other agencies involved. However, CIA refused even to acknowledge the existence of any relevant records because doing so would reveal "very specific aspects of the Agency's intelligence interest, or lack thereof, in the Russian bombings."

The State Department responded with a redacted copy of a cable from the U.S. embassy in Moscow. According to the cable, on 24 March 2000, a former member of Russian intelligence services told a U.S. diplomat that the real story about the Ryazan incident could never be known because it "would destroy the country." The informant said the FSB had "a specially trained team of men" whose mission was "to carry out this type of urban warfare". The informant has also said that Viktor Cherkesov, the FSB's first deputy director and an interrogator of Soviet dissidents was "exactly the right person to order and carry out such actions."

David Satter made a renewed FOIA request, and on 22 March 2017, State Department responded that documents concerning the U.S. assessment of the bombings would remain secret. A draft Vaughn index, a document used by agencies to justify withholdings in FOIA cases, said that the release of that information had "the potential to inject friction into or cause serious damage" to relationships with the Russian Government that were "vital to U.S. national security".

On 16 March 2018, the case Satter v. Department of Justice was closed.

Impact on survivors

Multiple survivors of the bombings have developed disabilities, many of them were diagnosed with a post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2006 Irina Khalai, a survivor of the Volgodonsk bombing, has founded an NGO "Volga-Don", which promotes legislation for the legal recognition of victims of terrorist attacks.

Chronology of events

5 August 1999: Shamil Basayev enters western Dagestan from Chechnya, starting the War of Dagestan

9 August 1999: Stepashin is dismissed and Putin becomes prime minister

22 August 1999: The forces of Shamil Basayev withdraw back into Chechnya

25 August 1999: Russian jets make bombing runs against 16 sites in Chechnya

4 September 1999: Bombing in Buynaksk, 64 people killed, 133 are injured

9 September 1999: Bombing in Moscow, Pechatniki, 94 people are killed, 249 are injured

13 September 1999: Bombing in Moscow, Kashirskoye highway, 118 are killed

13 September 1999: A bomb is defused and a warehouse containing several tons of explosives and six timing devices are found in Moscow

13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov makes an announcement about bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that took place only three days later, on 16 September

16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 18 are killed, 288 injured

23 September 1999: An apartment bomb is found in the city of Ryazan. Vladimir Rushailo announces that police prevented a terrorist act. Vladimir Putin praises the vigilance of the citizens and called for the air bombing of Grozny

23–24 September 1999: According to David Satter, FSB agents who planted the bomb in Ryazan are arrested by local police

24 September 1999: Nikolai Patrushev declares that the incident was a training exercise

24 September 1999: Second Chechen War begins