MOSCOW – At a memorial service this week outside the concert hall where Islamic extremists are suspected of carrying out a deadly terrorist attack, one of Russia’s most popular pro-Kremlin rappers warned “right-wing and far-right groups” that they must not “incite ethnic hatred”.

At a televised meeting about the attack, Russia’s top prosecutor Igor Krasnov pledged that his service was paying “special attention” to preventing “inter-ethnic and interfaith conflicts”.

And when Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first comments on the tragedy recently, he said he would not allow anyone to “sow the poisonous seeds of hatred, panic and discord in our multi-ethnic society”.

In the wake of the assault near Moscow that killed 139 people on March 22, there has been a recurring theme in the Kremlin’s response: a fear that the tragedy could spur ethnic strife inside Russia.

While Mr Putin and his security chiefs are accusing Ukraine – without evidence – of having helped organise the killing, the fact that the four detained suspects in the attack are from the predominantly Muslim Central Asian country of Tajikistan is stoking anti-migrant rhetoric online.

For Mr Putin, the problem is magnified by the competing priorities of his war in Ukraine. Members of Muslim minority groups make up a significant share of the Russian soldiers fighting and dying. Migrants from Central Asia are providing much of the labour that keeps Russia’s economy running and its military supply chain humming.

But many of the most fervent supporters of Mr Putin’s invasion are Russian nationalists whose popular, pro-war blogs on the Telegram messaging app have been brimming with xenophobia in the days since the attack.

“The borders have to be shut down as much as possible, if not closed,” said one. “The situation now has shown that Russian society is on the brink.”

As a result, the Kremlin is walking a fine line, trying to keep war supporters happy by promising tougher action against migrants while trying to prevent tensions from flaring across society. The potential for violence was highlighted in October, when an anti-Semitic mob stormed an airport in the predominantly Muslim-Russian region of Dagestan to confront a passenger plane arriving from Israel.

“The authorities see this as a very big, serious threat,” Mr Sergey Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst in Moscow and a former Kremlin adviser, said in a phone interview. “That’s why all efforts are being made now to calm down public opinion.”

Caught in the middle are millions of migrant workers and ethnic-minority Russians who are already facing on city streets an increase in the kind of racial profiling that was commonplace even before the attack. Ms Svetlana Gannushkina, a long-time Russian human rights defender, said on March 26 that she was scrambling to try to help a Tajik man who had just been detained because the police “are looking for Tajiks” and “saw a person with such an appearance”.

“They need migrants as cannon fodder” for the Russian army “and as labour”, Ms Gannushkina said in a phone interview from Moscow. “And when they need to fulfil the plan on fighting terrorism, they’ll also focus on this group” of Tajiks, she said.

Nearly one million citizens of Tajikistan, which has a population of about 10 million, were registered in Russia as migrant workers in 2023, according to Russian government statistics.

They are among the millions of migrant labourers in Russia from across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, a driving force in Russia’s economy – from food delivery to construction to factory work.

A manager of a food business in Moscow that employs Tajiks said in an interview that the mood in the Russian capital reminded her of the 2000s, when Muslims from the Caucasus region faced widespread discrimination in the wake of terrorist attacks and the wars in Chechnya.

Tajiks in Moscow are so apprehensive that they are hardly going outside at all, she said, requesting anonymity because she feared repercussions for speaking to a Western journalist. “There’s already no supply of labour because of the SVO,” she added, using the common Russian abbreviation for the Kremlin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine. “And now it’ll be even worse.”

In his speeches on the war, Mr Putin has paid frequent lip service to Russia as a multi-ethnic state – a legacy of the Russian and Soviet empires.

In March 2022, after describing the heroism of a soldier from Dagestan, Mr Putin enumerated some of Russia’s ethnic groups by saying: “I am a Lak, I am a Dagestani, I am a Chechen, an Ingush, a Russian, a Tatar, a Jew, a Mordvin, an Ossetian.”

In his rhetoric about his conflict with the West, Mr Putin has frequently accused Russia’s adversaries of trying to stir up ethnic strife in Russia. That was his response to the Dagestan airport riot in October, which he baselessly blamed on Western intelligence agencies and Ukraine.

That is also increasingly at the centre of his response to March 22’s terrorist attack, which the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed responsibility for and United States officials say was carried out by a branch of the extremist group. On March 26, the head of Russia’s domestic intelligence agency claimed that Ukrainian, British and American spies might have been behind it.

The upshot appears to be that the Kremlin is seeking to refocus anger over the attack towards Ukraine while trying to show the public that it is taking concerns about migration into account.

“They’re going to grab the Tajiks and blame the Ukrainians,” Ms Gannushkina, the human rights defender, said. “It was clear from the very beginning.”

Still, Mr Markov, the pro-Kremlin analyst, said he saw tensions over migration policy even inside Mr Putin’s powerful security establishment. Anti-immigrant law enforcement and intelligence officials, he said, were at odds with a military-industrial complex that needs migrant labour.

“It’s a contradiction,” he said. “And this terror attack has sharply aggravated this problem.” NYTIMES