Three days earlier than Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Moscow’s home intelligence company accused Ukraine of shelling a home utilized by Russian border guards and launched a brief video exhibiting a destroyed constructing dangling a Russian flag.
The declare by the Federal Safety Service, or F.S.B., of a Ukrainian assault, was shortly dismissed as a hoax. There was no crater in or across the constructing within the video, which regarded extra like an deserted hut than a border guard shelter. The closest Ukrainian army outpost was 25 miles away.
The episode recalled a sequence of occasions in 1939, when the Soviet Union shelled a village on its border with Finland. The Soviets blame Finland for the assault as a pretext to invade. That case helps clarify why, on Monday, skepticism greeted claims by the F.S.B. that it had recognized a Ukrainian lady because the perpetrator in a deadly automotive bombing close to Moscow over the weekend.
The F.S.B. had seemingly solved the homicide of Daria Dugina, the daughter of a infamous ultranationalist ideologue, with uncharacteristic pace. However the company is much less a critical legislation enforcement company than a political software. And like its Soviet-era predecessor, the Okay.G.B., the F.S.B. has been dogged for years by suspicions that it blames others for crimes it both dedicated itself, or had no actual curiosity in fixing as a result of they concerned well-connected Russians it dared not contact.
Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, presided over one of many murkiest and most infamous examples of this whereas serving a primary minister in 1999, when he blamed Chechen militants for a sequence of residence bombings in Moscow that killed greater than 300 folks.
These allegations had been significantly undermined when residents in an residence block in Ryazan, a city southeast of Moscow, discovered sacks of what regarded like explosives of their constructing. It turned out that the sacks had been planted there by the F.S.B., which apologized and claimed that that they had been put there as a part of an antiterror drill and contained solely sugar.
Greater than 20 years later, the affair remains to be shrouded in thriller, although one factor is obvious: The residence bombings opened the way in which for a brand new Russian miliary onslaught towards Chechnya and for the ascension of Mr. Putin — till then a little-known former Okay.G.B. spy — to the Russian presidency only a few months later.
Chechens had been additionally blamed by the F.S.B. for the 2015 homicide of Boris Y. Nemtsov, a distinguished opposition politician. Many imagine his killing, on a bridge subsequent to the Kremlin, was ordered by the Kremlin or its loyal safety companies.
One other distinguished Kremlin critic, Anna S. Politkovskaya, was assassinated in 2006. A number of males had been convicted in connection along with her killing, however they didn’t embrace the individual extensively suspected of getting orchestrated it: an F.S.B. colonel.
