ISIS’s claim of responsibility for the slaughter at the concert at Moscow Friday will focus on a war of revenge against President Putin for intervening in Syria against a terror group that declared a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq. The death toll in Friday’s attack hit 115 with dozens more injured.

“Islamic State fighters attacked a large gathering of Christians in the city of Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of the Russian capital, Moscow, killing and wounding hundreds and causing great destruction to the place before they withdrew to their bases safely,” the group’s Amaq agency said on Telegram.

In 2015, Mr. Putin changed the course of the Syrian civil war by intervening to support the tyrant at Damascus, Bashar Al-Assad, against the Islamic State. The terror group has in recent years increasingly fixated on wreaking revenge. During the first 20 years of the Putin presidency, Russia suffered a spate of terrorist attacks, largely carried out by men from the Caucasus.

The last one was in 2017. Friday night’s concert attack came one week after Mr. Putin was re-elected to a new, six-year term. Earlier this month, Russia’s security agency, the FSB, said it had foiled an attack on a Moscow synagogue by Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan. Known as ISIS-Khorasan or ISIS-K, it seeks a caliphate across Afghanistan.

Today, the FSB said four suspects were arrested in a car in Bryansk region. They had traveled four hours southwest of Moscow down the Kiev Highway. There were about two thirds of the way — 120 miles — from the Ukraine border where the state security service said they had contacts.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Friday night that Kyiv had nothing to do with the terror attack. “Let’s be straight about this: Ukraine had absolutely nothing to do with these events,” he said in a video on Telegram. “We have a full-scale, all-out war with the Russian regular army and with the Russian Federation as a country. And regardless of everything, everything will be decided on the battlefield.”

Russian authorities, however, insisted Saturday on a Ukraine connection. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said on Telegram: “Now we know in which country these bloody bastards planned to hide from pursuit — Ukraine.” A senior Russian lawmaker, Andrei Kartapolov, said that if Ukraine was involved, then Russia must deliver a “worthy, clear and concrete” reply on the battlefield.

The four suspects reportedly are from Ingushetia, an impoverished republic on Russia’s southern fringe, bordering Georgia. With a highly militant culture, the mountainous Ingush have resisted domination since they were colonized by the Russian Empire in the 1850s.

Last month, as part of a movement to strengthen independence movements among Russia’s ethnic republics, Ukraine’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, voted to recognize the right of the Ingush people to form an independent state. The vote came February 23, the 80th anniversary of Stalin’s deportation of virtually all Ingush and Chechens to Central Asia. 

In October 2022, the Rada voted to declare Chechnya, Ingushetia’s eastern neighbor, a temporarily occupied country. Several hundred ethnic Chechens fight alongside Ukrainian troops against Russia inside Ukraine. Earlier this month, Chechens were among those participating in the cross-border raids from Ukraine into western Russia’s Belgorod Region.

On March 2, one week after the Ukrainian vote, Russian police engaged in a 13-hour firefight at the Ingush town of Karabulak with six men advocating independence for Ingushetia. The six were killed. A few days later, a video appeared from Abdullah Egia, who said he was part of the Ingush Liberation Army. He said the underground group would continue its “jihad for the destruction of the Evil Empire” and the triumph of the Islamic values.

Ingushetia, the smallest republic in Russia, has little industry, no tourism, and an unemployment rate of about 50 percent. Most men migrate to work in the cities of European Russia, areas where they encounter discrimination. 

“In 14 of the 22 autonomous republics, Russians are no longer the majority — the Russian element is shrinking, the ethnic element is rising,” a senior Jamestown Foundation fellow, Janusz Bugajski, said in an interview before the Moscow terrorist attack. “Ingush exiles see the war in Ukraine as an example.”

Reversing a 20th-century colonization policy, the Russian population of Ingushetia has dwindled to less than one percent today from 46 percent in 1960. Of the republic’s half a million inhabitants, 96 percent are Ingush and 96 percent are Muslim.

Several ethnic republics, such as Chechnya and Ingushetia, could go their own way in a post-Putin Russia, opposition leader Gary Kasparov said last month, on the sidelines of the 12th Free Russia Forum at Vilnius, Lithuania.

A co-founder of the opposition group, Mr. Kasparov told Radio Free Europe: “It is perfectly obvious that the imperial center in its current form cannot continue to exist because it will always be a generator of hyper-centralization and at the same time of military expansion.”

In 1918 and 1919, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Ingush were part of a short-lived  Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus. Today some Western observers reckon that the future of the Turkic people of southernmost Russia will be in some form of autonomous federation of independence.

“If the center doesn’t hold post-war in Moscow, all bets are off,” author and veteran Russia watcher Diane Francis writes in a recent in a column headlined “Turkey’s Russia.” She adds that “as Russia heads for the ditch, Russia’s Turkic people finally have a chance to find good leaders in order to liberate themselves.”