Former FSB officer , a defector , Alexander Litvinenko , along with a series of other authors such as Yury Felshtinsky , David Satter , Boris Kagarlitsky , Vladimir Pribylovsky , Mikhail Trepashkin ( also former FSB officer ) claimed in the early 2000s that the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities were a false flag attack coordinated by the FSB in order to win public support for a new full-scale war in Chechnya and boost former FSB Director Vladimir Putin 's , then the prime minister , popularity in the lead-up to parliamentary elections and presidential transfer of power in Russia later that year
apartment bombings
Russian apartment bombings
Federal Security Service