Moscow Apartment Bombings and the Second Chechen War

A series of apartment block bombings in Moscow, Buynaksk, and Volgodonsk in September 1999 killed around 300 people. The government blamed Chechen militants and used the attacks to justify launching the Second Chechen War under newly appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose approval ratings surged on the back of the war. Independent investigators and defectors including former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko later alleged the FSB itself was involved in staging at least some of the bombings — allegations Russia has always denied and no court has definitively proven, but which remain a serious, unresolved question in Western and independent Russian journalism.