What Really Happened in Tyumen? A Counter-Terrorism Action or an Exercise that Went Bad?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 12 – Today, something serious happened in Tyumen, one of Russia’s most important oil-producing centers. Officials said and most Russian media reported that it was a straightforward counter-terrorist operation in which Russian force structures combined to liquidate two ISIS followers intent on wreaking havoc there.

            The Russian media has been transfixed, with this story overwhelming everything else far more than any recent event not directly connected with Vladimir Putin or Ukraine.  But there are questions about what actually happened, questions that official reporting has done little or nothing to quiet.   

            Like most Moscow outlets, Moskovsky komsomolets has relied in its reporting on the Tyumen events on the local media. The latter say that local journalists are reporting that what happened may have been an exercise that became something more than that (mk.ru/incident/2019/04/12/v-tyumeni-nachalas-kontrterroristicheskaya-operaciya-fsb.html).

            That would explain why there were so many different siloviki forces in Tyumen; but the possibility that the destruction of the terrorists happened not in response to information about them but because of an exercise the siloviki had organized is troubling. It suggests those behind the exercise may have been looking for victims rather than crushing real threats.  

            And that possibility is further strengthened by the fact that the citation Moskovsky Komsomolets gives to the local media has been removed from the website of the Tyumen paper involved, something that suggests the Russian authorities want nothing to get in the way of the narrative they have chosen to put out.

            But some Tyumen bloggers insist this was an exercise gone wrong rather than a real counter-terrorist operation. “If the FSB knew where ISIS was, it would have dealt with the matter quietly!” one says, to which another adds “the special forces shot people” and came up with the terrorist version to conceal what they had done (nashgorod.ru/news/incident/13-04-2019/esli-by-fsb-znala-to-srabotala-by-po-tihomu-reaktsiya-sotssetey-na-kto).

            What is important here is not whether or not such suspicions are true but rather that many Russians now have them and are prepared to sign their names to blog posts outlining their distrust of the authorities, something they would not have done earlier and an indication of the collapse of public confidence in the powers that be.