Less than a week ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin served in his fifth term in office along with his highest vote share ever, using staged elections to point out the nation and the world that he was in complete control.
Just days later, a searing counterpoint emerged: His notorious security apparatus had failed to stop Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years.
Friday’s attack, which killed at the least 133 people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, was a blow to Putin’s aura as a leader who puts national security above all. This is particularly true after two years of war in Ukraine, which he describes as key to Russia’s survival and which he made his top priority after last Sunday’s elections.
“The elections showed a seemingly certain victory,” Russian political scientist Aleksandr Kynev said in a telephone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the background of a certain victory, there is demonstrative humiliation.”
Putin seemed blindsided by the attack. It took him greater than 19 hours to deal with the nation on the attack, which was Russia’s deadliest since the 2004 siege of a school in the southern city of Beslan, which killed 334 people. When he did so, the Russian leader made no mention of the mounting evidence that the attack was carried out by an Islamic State affiliate.
Instead, Putin suggested that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the attackers had behaved “just like the Nazis” who “once committed massacres in occupied territories,” invoking his frequent false description of modern Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.
“Our common duty – our comrades on the front, all the citizens of the country – is to unite in one formation,” Putin said at the end of a five-minute speech, attempting to link the fight against terrorism along with his invasion of Ukraine.
The query is how much of the Russian public will imagine his argument. They may ask whether Mr. Putin, in the face of invasion and conflict with the West, truly has the country’s security interests at heart – or whether he’s woefully abandoning them, as many of his opponents claim.
The incontrovertible fact that Putin apparently ignored a U.S. warning about a potential terrorist attack is prone to deepen skepticism. Instead of responding to the warnings and tightening security measures, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”
“All this resembles open blackmail and a desire to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the FSB, Russia’s intelligence agency, referring to Western warnings. After Friday’s attack, some exiled critics cited his response as evidence of the president’s disconnection from Russia’s real security concerns.
Critics say that as an alternative of protecting society from actual, brutal terrorists, Putin has ordered his extensive security service to search out dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”
Example: a few hours before the attack, state media reported that Russian authorities had added the “LGBT movement” to the official list of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia banned the gay rights movement last yr. Terrorism was also amongst the many charges brought by prosecutors against Alexei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader who died last month.
“In a country where anti-terrorist special forces hunt down Internet commentators” – Ruslan Leviev, exiled Russian military analyst, – he wrote in a post on social media on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”
Even though Islamic State has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine has denied any involvement, Kremlin messengers have gained momentum in attempting to persuade the Russian public that it was merely a ruse.
Olga Skabeyeva, a presenter on state television, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian military intelligence found attackers “who looked like ISIS. But this is not ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, editor of state television RT, wrote that claims of Islamic State responsibility constitute a “basic marketing gimmick” of US media.
On a prime-time talk show on state-owned Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue Aleksandr Dugin declared that Ukraine’s leaders and “their puppet masters in the Western intelligence services” had definitely orchestrated the attack.
It was an try to “undermine trust in the president,” Dugin said, and showed ordinary Russians that they had no choice but to unite in Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a car bombing near Moscow in 2022, which U.S. officials say was actually approved by part of the Ukrainian government, but without American involvement.
U.S. officials said there was no evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the concert hall attack, and Ukrainian officials ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukrainian military intelligence, said that Putin’s claim that the attackers fled towards Ukraine and intended to enter it with the help of Ukrainian authorities makes no sense.
In recent months, Putin has appeared more confident than ever since he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have regained the initiative on the front lines, while Ukraine struggles amid waning Western support and a troop shortage.
In Russia, elections – and their predetermined results – underlined Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.
Political scientist Kynev said he thinks many Russians are currently in “shock” because “restoring order has at all times been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”
The beginnings of Putin’s rule were marked by terrorist attacks, which culminated in the siege of a school in Beslan in 2004; used these brutal episodes to justify his withdrawal of political freedoms. Before Friday, the last mass terrorist attack in the capital region was a 2011 suicide bombing at Moscow’s airport that killed 37 people.
But given the Kremlin’s effectiveness in cracking down on dissent and the media, Kynev predicted that the political consequences of the concert hall attack would be limited unless the violence repeated itself.
“Frankly,” he said, “our society has become accustomed to remaining silent on uncomfortable topics.”
Permanent Méheut reporting contributed.
