Less than every week in the past, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a 5th time period along with his highest-ever proportion of the vote, the use of a stage-managed election to turn the country and the sector that he used to be firmly in regulate.
Just days later got here a searing counterpoint: His vaunted safety equipment failed to stop Russia’s deadliest terrorist assault in two decades.
The attack on Friday, which killed a minimum of 133 other folks at a live performance corridor in suburban Moscow, used to be a blow to Mr. Putin’s air of mystery as a pacesetter for whom nationwide safety is paramount. That is particularly true after two years of a struggle in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he solid as his most sensible precedence after the election closing Sunday.
“The election demonstrated a seemingly confident victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, stated in a telephone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the backdrop of a confident victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”
Mr. Putin appeared blindsided by way of the attack. It took him greater than 19 hours to deal with the country in regards to the assault, the deadliest in Russia because the 2004 faculty siege in Beslan, within the nation’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian chief stated not anything in regards to the mounting proof {that a} department of the Islamic State dedicated the assault.
Instead, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine used to be in the back of the tragedy and stated the assailants had acted “just like the Nazis,” who “once carried out massacres in the occupied territories” — evoking his widespread, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by way of neo-Nazis.
“Our common duty now — our comrades at the front, all citizens of the country — is to be together in one formation,” Mr. Putin stated on the finish of a five-minute speech, looking to conflate the combat 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 ask whether or not Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his struggle with the West, really has the rustic’s safety pursuits at center — or whether or not he’s woefully abandoning them, as lots of his fighters say he’s.
The incontrovertible fact that Mr. Putin it appears neglected a caution from the United States a couple of possible terrorist assault is more likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of performing at the warnings and tightening safety, he brushed aside them as “provocative statements.”
“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin stated on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s home intelligence company, regarding the Western warnings. After the assault on Friday, a few of his exiled critics have cited his reaction as proof of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true safety considerations.
Rather than retaining society secure from exact, violent terrorists, the ones critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling safety services and products to pursue dissidents, reporters and someone deemed a risk to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”
A working example: Just hours prior to the assault, state media reported that the Russian government had added “the L.G.B.T. movement” to an respectable listing of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the homosexual rights motion closing yr. Terrorism used to be additionally a number of the many fees prosecutors leveled in opposition to Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition chief who died closing month.
“In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian army analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”
Even because the Islamic State again and again claimed duty for the assault and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers driven into overdrive to check out to steer the Russian public that this used to be simply a ruse.
Olga Skabeyeva, a state tv host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian army intelligence had discovered assailants “who would look like ISIS. But this is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT tv community, wrote that experiences of Islamic State duty amounted to a “basic sleight of hand” by way of the American information media.
On a prime-time tv communicate display at the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s management and “their puppet masters in the Western intelligence services” had no doubt arranged the assault.
It used to be an effort to “undermine trust in the president,” Mr. Dugin stated, and it confirmed common Russians that they’d no selection however to unite in the back of Mr. Putin’s struggle in opposition to Ukraine.
Mr. Dugin’s daughter used to be killed in a automobile bombing close to Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officers stated used to be certainly licensed by way of portions of the Ukrainian executive, however with out American involvement.
U.S. officers have stated there’s no proof of Ukrainian involvement within the live performance corridor assault, and Ukrainian officers ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a consultant of Ukraine’s army intelligence company, stated Mr. Putin’s declare that the attackers had fled towards Ukraine and meant to pass into it, with the assistance of the Ukrainian government, made no sense.
In contemporary months, Mr. Putin has seemed extra assured than at another level since he introduced his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative at the entrance line, whilst Ukraine is suffering amid flagging Western toughen and a scarcity of troops.
Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined consequence — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the country’s politics.
Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, stated he believed many Russians have been now in “shock,” as a result of “restoring order has always been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”
Mr. Putin’s early years in energy have been marked by way of terrorist assaults, culminating within the Beslan faculty siege in 2004; he used the ones violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Before Friday, the latest mass-casualty terrorist assault within the capital area used to be a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 other folks.
Still, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the scoop media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political penalties of the live performance corridor assault could be restricted, so long as the violence used to be now not repeated.
“To be honest,” he stated, “our society has gotten used to keeping quiet about inconvenient topics.”
Constant Méheut contributed reporting.
