The terror attack on a Moscow concert hall last Friday exposed deep flaws in the security apparatus that underpins Vladimir Putin’s regime, but the autocratic system built by Russia’s veteran leader will ensure that he evades responsibility for its failings.
During 24 years in power, Putin has portrayed himself as Russia’s defender-in-chief against domestic and international enemies – initially pro-independence and Islamist groups based in the North Caucasus area, and now pro-democracy activists like the late Alexei Navalny and his supporters, and Ukraine and its western allies.
Two decades ago, militants from Chechnya, Dagestan and other restive regions often launched deadly gun and bomb attacks and major raids, including the 2002 Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow and the 2004 attack on a school in the southern town of Beslan.
[ Moscow attack: Putin vows to ‘punish’ those behind shooting that killed 133Opens in new window ]
In recent years, however, Putin has ploughed vast resources into the military for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and into domestic security forces that he uses to crush non-violent opposition movements that pose no threat to ordinary Russians but expose the corruption and impunity of his rule.
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Two years into a war of choice that Putin falsely portrays as a defensive operation to fend off a “Nazi-run” Ukraine and a “Russophobic” West, his FSB security service is focused on protecting his regime from peaceful political opponents whom he depicts as traitors conspiring with western powers and Kyiv to destroy Russia.
Russia now prosecutes more people for “extremism” and “justifying terrorism” than at any time since the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, yet most of the accused have done nothing more than criticise Putin and his war in Ukraine.
One survivor of the concert hall attack compared the lax security there to the tight control exerted at Navalny’s burial last month: “I was in line at Alexei’s funeral and there was a policeman there for every person, here there wasn’t a single law enforcer.”
Putin and the FSB have not commented on the Islamic State group’s credible claim of responsibility for the attack but allege – without providing evidence - that the gunmen had accomplices in Ukraine.
On March 7th, the US embassy in Moscow warned that extremists planned to “target large gatherings” in the city. Last Tuesday, after securing another six years in power in a choreographed presidential election, Putin told FSB officers that these “provocative statements” resembled “outright blackmail” and attempts to “intimidate and destabilise our society”.
Russian media and politicians are now amplifying his deeply dubious claim of a Ukrainian link to Friday’s attack, while ignoring his very public dismissal of specific US warnings about such a threat and saying nothing about security service failings.
“Putin and his huge machine for suppressing civil society cope well with people who express alternative views,” political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov wrote for Russian opposition outlet New Times.
“Catching real terrorists is not twisting the arms of students in squares… Here, as well as having a talent for using brute force, you actually have to be able do something.”
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