EGN NEWS DESK
Less than per week in the past, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth time period along with his highest-ever share of the vote, utilizing a stage-managed election to point out the nation and the world that he was firmly in management.
Just days later got here a searing counterpoint: His vaunted safety equipment failed to stop Russia’s deadliest terrorist assault in 20 years.
The assault on Friday, which killed a minimum of 133 folks at a live performance corridor in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a pacesetter for whom nationwide safety is paramount. That is particularly true after two years of a battle in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he forged as his high precedence after the election final Sunday.
“The election demonstrated a seemingly assured victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, mentioned in a cellphone interview from Moscow. “And abruptly, towards the backdrop of a assured victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”
Mr. Putin appeared blindsided by the assault. It took him greater than 19 hours to deal with the nation concerning the assault, the deadliest in Russia for the reason that 2004 college siege in Beslan, within the nation’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian chief mentioned nothing concerning the mounting proof {that a} department of the Islamic State dedicated the assault.
Instead, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and mentioned the assailants had acted “identical to the Nazis,” who “as soon as carried out massacres within the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.
“Our widespread responsibility now — our comrades on the entrance, all residents of the nation — is to be collectively in a single formation,” Mr. Putin mentioned on the finish of a five-minute speech, attempting to conflate the struggle towards terrorism along with his invasion of Ukraine.
The query is how a lot of the Russian public will purchase into his argument. They would possibly ask whether or not Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his battle with the West, really has the nation’s safety pursuits at coronary heart — or whether or not he’s woefully forsaking them, as lots of his opponents say he’s.
The proven fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States a couple of potential terrorist assault is more likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of appearing on the warnings and tightening safety, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”
“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin mentioned on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s home intelligence company, referring to the Western warnings. After the assault on Friday, a few of his exiled critics have cited his response as proof of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true safety issues.
Rather than preserving society secure from precise, violent terrorists, these critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling safety companies to pursue dissidents, journalists and anybody deemed a menace to the Kremlin’s definition of “conventional values.”
A working example: Just hours earlier than the assault, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. motion” to an official listing of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the homosexual rights motion final 12 months. Terrorism was additionally among the many many prices prosecutors leveled towards Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition chief who died final month.
“In a rustic through which counterterrorism particular forces chase after on-line commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian navy analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will all the time be at liberty.”
Even because the Islamic State repeatedly claimed accountability for the assault and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to attempt to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse.
Olga Skabeyeva, a state tv host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian navy intelligence had discovered assailants “who would appear like ISIS. But that is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT tv community, wrote that experiences of Islamic State accountability amounted to a “primary sleight of hand” by the American information media.
On a prime-time tv speak present on the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s management and “their puppet masters within the Western intelligence companies” had absolutely organized the assault.
It was an effort to “undermine belief within the president,” Mr. Dugin mentioned, and it confirmed common Russians that that they had no alternative however to unite behind Mr. Putin’s battle towards Ukraine.
Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a automotive bombing close to Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officers mentioned was certainly licensed by elements of the Ukrainian authorities, however with out American involvement.
U.S. officers have mentioned there isn’t any proof of Ukrainian involvement within the live performance corridor assault, and Ukrainian officers ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a consultant of Ukraine’s navy intelligence company, mentioned Mr. Putin’s declare that the attackers had fled towards Ukraine and supposed to cross into it, with the assistance of the Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.
In latest months, Mr. Putin has appeared extra assured than at another level since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative on the entrance line, whereas Ukraine is struggling amid flagging Western help and a scarcity of troops.
Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined consequence — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.
Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, mentioned he believed many Russians have been now in “shock,” as a result of “restoring order has all the time been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”
Mr. Putin’s early years in energy have been marked by terrorist assaults, culminating within the Beslan college siege in 2004; he used these violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Before Friday, the newest mass-casualty terrorist assault within the capital area was a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 folks.
Still, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the information media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political penalties of the live performance corridor assault could be restricted, so long as the violence was not repeated.
“To be trustworthy,” he mentioned, “our society has gotten used to preserving quiet about inconvenient matters.”
Constant Méheut contributed reporting.
