Telephone Bomb Threats Return to Moscow, Adding to Sense of Looming Disaster

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 14 – Over a million Russians were evacuated from buildings between September 2017 and September 2018 because of telephone bomb threats that proved to be false (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/09/more-than-million-russians-have-been.html). There’ve been more since (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/11/telephone-bomb-threats-again-empty.html).

            But most of these were not in Moscow, thus allowing the Russian authorities to either ignore them altogether or play them down in state-controlled media. Now, however, they have come to Moscow, emptying a major shopping districts and the three airports of the capital (echo.msk.ru/news/2351777-echo.html and echo.msk.ru/news/2351761-echo.html).

                As in the past, the police initially refused to confirm what people could see with their own eyes (kp.ru/daily/26928/3978827/), until they could claim that they had identified those responsible, in this case, someone from Tatartan they described as mentally ill (znak.com/2019-01-14/v_tatarstane_zaderzhan_muzhchina_kotoryy_segodnya_zaminiroval_aeroporty_moskve  and lenta.ru/news/2019/01/14/zaminiroval/).

            Because these bomb threats involve Moscow locations and because they come on top of what is becoming a wave of gas explosions and other technogenic disasters (vpressa.ru/accidents/article/221638/), they can’t be ignored and thus are adding to a sense among many Russians that the situation in their country is out of control.

            Such feelings are only likely to grow if more gas explosions take place in the coming winter months, when they are most likely, and if others engage in copycat crimes and telephone in even more bomb threats that the authorities will have little choice but to take seriously even if they try to play them down.