Lower than every week in the past, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth time period as president 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.
Simply days later got here a searing counterpoint: His vaunted safety equipment failed to stop Russia’s deadliest terror assault in 20 years.
The assault, which killed a minimum of 133 individuals at a suburban Moscow live performance corridor, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a frontrunner for whom nationwide safety is paramount. That’s very true after two years of a battle in Ukraine that he describes as key to the nation’s survival — and which he forged as his high precedence within the aftermath of final Sunday’s election.
“The election demonstrated a seemingly assured victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, mentioned in a cellphone interview from Moscow. “And immediately, in opposition to the backdrop of a assured victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”
It took Mr. Putin greater than 19 hours to deal with the nation in regards to the assault, the deadliest in Russia for the reason that 2004 faculty siege in Beslan, within the nation’s south, that claimed 334 lives. When he did, Mr. Putin mentioned nothing in regards to the mounting proof that the assault was dedicated by a department of the Islamic State.
As an alternative, he hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and mentioned the assailants 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 obligation 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 his five-minute speech, attempting to conflate the struggle in opposition to terrorism along with his invasion of Ukraine.
The query is how a lot of the Russian public will purchase into his argument. They may query whether or not Mr. Putin, along with his invasion of Ukraine and his battle with the West, really has Russia’s safety pursuits at coronary heart — or if he’s woefully forsaking them, as a lot of his opponents say he’s.
The truth that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from america a few potential terrorist act is prone to deepen the skepticism. As an alternative of performing 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 Western warnings. Within the aftermath of Friday’s assault, a few of his exiled critics have cited that response as proof of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true safety issues.
Mr. Kynev mentioned he believes that many Russians at the moment are in “shock,” as a result of “restoring order has at all times been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.” However given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and on the information media, he predicted that the political penalties of the assault can be restricted, so long as the violence just isn’t repeated.
“To be trustworthy, our society has gotten used to preserving quiet about inconvenient matters,” he mentioned.
Even because the Islamic State repeatedly claimed duty 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 army intelligence had discovered assailants “who would seem like ISIS. However that is no ISIS.”
Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT tv community, wrote that reviews of Islamic State duty amounted to a “fundamental sleight of hand” by the American information media.
