Nor did he mention Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for Friday's Crocus City concert hall attack and which President Putin has repeatedly denounced as an enemy throughout Russia's long military intervention in Syria. In 2017, President Putin declared victory over the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Instead, in a five-minute televised address on Saturday, Putin said that the four direct perpetrators were “moving toward Ukraine” when they were captured, and that “there was a window for crossing the state border from the Ukrainian side.” “was prepared,” he emphasized. Although he did not directly criticize Ukraine, which denies involvement, his reference to “Nazis,” his usual term for the Ukrainian government, made it clear that he was blaming Kiev.
But gruesome video has been released showing an assailant armed with an automatic rifle murdering innocent concertgoers in cold blood and setting one of Russia's capital's most popular entertainment venues on fire. President Putin is trying to portray Russia as strong, united and resilient.
The strike came just five days after he triumphantly claimed a new six-year term in an election that was tightly controlled by the Kremlin and widely condemned abroad as failing to meet democratic standards. President Putin used the election to assert overwhelming public support for his policies.
Despite Putin's rhetoric seeking to involve Ukraine, analysts, former U.S. security officials and Russian elites say the assault highlights the fragility of Putin's wartime posture. , said that this was also evident during the short-lived revolt in which Evgeny Prigozhin led the Wagner mercenaries in an attempt to overthrow the top leader. Defense officials made the announcement in June.
“Just as it did during the Prigozhin rebellion, regimes show their weakness in such critical situations,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Center. Prigozhin abandoned the uprising, but the damage was obvious. Then, as he did during this weekend's events, Putin did not appear for hours before finally addressing the state of emergency. “In difficult moments, Putin always disappears,” Kolesnikov said.
Just three days before the Crocus City attack, President Putin called the US warning of a possible impending terrorist attack an “open threat” and “an attempt to terrorize and destabilize society.” I dismissed it as such.
But with his authoritarian grip on power and virtually no one willing to challenge him, the Russian leader faces criticism and consequences for not taking the warnings more seriously. It is unlikely that it will.
When Russia has been hit by terrorist attacks in the past, President Putin has often accused Western countries of inciting terrorism, most notably during the 2004 Beslan school siege in which more than 330 hostages were killed. It was an incident. He claimed that the attack was orchestrated by people who wanted to weaken Russia and “disintegrate” it.
Analysts say Russian leaders are almost certain to aim for something similar this time around. The Kremlin's main propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, the head of state broadcaster RT, had already claimed on Saturday that the American warnings before the attack showed they had taken part in preparations for the attack.
Former U.S. officials and analysts say Putin's rhetoric against Ukraine and the West is likely to continue as he tries to galvanize the country for a protracted war, leading to further crackdowns. He said there is a possibility of a connection.
The bloodshed evokes eerie echoes of an era Putin considered long gone, when Russia suffered deadly terrorist attacks during his first two terms as president in the 2000s. Some people say that. And to strengthen his control.
They pointed to a clear lack of adequate security at Crocus City, a huge entertainment and shopping venue on the outskirts of Moscow, despite warnings from the US government.
“Crocus City is a huge place with many concert halls,” said a Moscow businessman, noting that the offices of the Moscow region government are nearby. “There should have been tight security and more police present.”
“There is a lack of responsibility for security at large public events,” said the businessman, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. He referred to the 2002 hostage crisis in which Chechen terrorists took over a theater in central Moscow, killing more than 115 people. , nothing has changed since then.”
A Russian academic with close ties to senior diplomats in Moscow offered a similar assessment of Russia's failure to stop Friday night's attack. “It's clear that we're going to be looking for the fingerprints of Ukraine and perhaps the fingerprints of Western security services as well,” the academic said, speaking on condition of anonymity because Putin's government often retaliates against its critics. “But any investigation will probably find failures by our security services.”
Russian security services are devoting significant resources to monitoring the movements of those opposed to Putin's government, using facial recognition technology to track down those who took part in recent protests against Putin's election, as well as opposition leaders. People who laid flowers in honor of Alexei Navalny are being tracked down and interrogated. He died in prison last month.
But analysts say the country has faced consistent terrorist attacks over the years, including two in 2019 that were attributed to Islamic State. He said providing adequate security for the public against threats emanating from known terrorist groups appears to have fallen down the list of priorities.
Earlier this month, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced it had thwarted an attack on a Moscow synagogue prepared by the Islamic State and “neutralized” an unknown number of militants during an attack in the Kaluga region. did. southwest of the capital. Kazakhstan later confirmed that two of its citizens were killed in the attack.
Last year, TASS reported that the FSB killed two other Islamic State militants who were planning an attack on a chemical facility in Kaluga.
“There is a feeling everywhere that we live in a police state that strictly monitors every citizen,” Kolesnikov said. “People are now often stopped and searched at subway entrances. Security has become much tighter at airports. … There are real questions about how this could happen.”
Some said Russia's security failures were the norm, not the exception.
“Unless it's a very high-profile public event like the Olympics or involving President Putin, Russia's critical security guard is always relaxed,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Told. “We really need a sophisticated system that focuses on these types of threats. The threats were concentrated elsewhere.”
In a televised address on Saturday, Putin did not mention the assessment of U.S. officials who said there was “no reason to doubt” that an affiliate of the Islamic State group based in Afghanistan was responsible for the attack.
But Russian state media broadcast footage of at least two of the attackers being interrogated, including footage of the suspects speaking Tajik, the language of Tajikistan, a Central Asian country that borders Afghanistan. .
Former U.S. officials say that while Putin's government is focused on pursuing Russia's political opponents and the threats emanating from Putin's invasion of Ukraine, such as drone strikes and cross-border attacks, there are potential threats emanating from Central Asia. He said that the threat of terrorism had become a blind spot for the Putin administration.
“They haven't prioritized the threat of ISIS, which includes many Central Asians,” said Douglas London, a former senior CIA official who specializes in counterterrorism and Central Asia and is an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. . “Thousands of Central Asians have joined the Islamic State, many returning from Syria and Iraq after the fall of the caliphate. Many of them have been promoted to very senior positions, serving in the military, police, or many He was from an intelligence agency in a Central Asian country.”
“ISIS' Central Asian factions have always targeted Russia,” London added. “I don't think Russian intelligence is shocked or surprised that there was a problem. It just wasn't high enough on their agenda.”
Mary Ilyushina in Berlin and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia contributed to this report.
