He also made no reference to the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attack at the Crocus City concert hall on Friday and which Putin denounced repeatedly as an enemy throughout Russia’s long military intervention in Syria. In 2017, Putin declared victory over the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Putin instead used his five-minute televised address on Saturday to emphasize that the four direct perpetrators were “moving toward Ukraine” when they were detained and that “a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border.” He did not directly accuse Ukraine, which has denied any involvement, but a reference to “Nazis” — his usual label for the Ukrainian government — made clear that he was blaming Kyiv.
But the gruesome videos of the attackers with automatic weapons coldly murdering innocent concertgoers and setting ablaze one of the Russian capital’s most popular entertainment venues smashed through Putin’s efforts to present Russia as strong, united and resilient.
The strike occurred just five days after his triumphant claim of a new six-year term in an election that was heavily controlled by the Kremlin and widely denounced abroad as failing to meet democratic standards. Putin used the election to assert huge public support for his policies.
Despite Putin’s rhetoric seeking to implicate Ukraine, analysts, former U.S. security officials and members of the Russian elite said the assault underscored the vulnerabilities of Putin’s wartime regime, which were also evident when Yevgeniy Prigozhin led his Wagner mercenaries in a brief mutiny aiming to oust top defense officials in June.
“The regime shows its weakness in such critical situations, just as it did during the mutiny by Prigozhin,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Though Prigozhin abandoned the uprising, the damage was clear. Then, as during this weekend’s events, Putin did not appear for hours before finally addressing the emergency. “In difficult moments, Putin always disappears,” Kolesnikov said.
Just three days before the Crocus City assault, Putin dismissed the U.S. warning about a potential imminent terrorist attack as “open blackmail” and as “an attempt to frighten and destabilize our society.”
But with his authoritarian grip on power and virtually no one willing to challenge him, the Russian leader is unlikely to face any criticism or consequences for failing to take the warning more seriously.
When Russia was hit by terrorist attacks in the past, Putin often accused the West of stoking them, most notably after the Beslan school siege of 2004, which left over 330 hostages dead. Then, he claimed the assault had been engineered by those who wanted to weaken Russia and aimed for its “disintegration.”
Analysts said the Russian leader would almost certainly seek to do so this time, as well. A lead Kremlin propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, the head of state broadcaster RT, was already claiming on Saturday that the Americans’ warning ahead of the attack indicated they were participants in preparing it.
The former U.S. officials and analysts said rhetoric blaming Ukraine and the collective West was likely to continue and could lead to further crackdowns as Putin seeks to galvanize his nation for a protracted war.
Others said the bloodshed raised eerie echoes of an era Putin thought was long behind him — during his first two terms as president in the 2000s, when Russia was wracked by deadly terrorist attacks that he later used to justify harsh responses by the military and security services and to strengthen his rule.
They pointed to the apparent lack of adequate security at Crocus City, a huge entertainment and shopping venue on the outskirts of Moscow, despite the warning from the U.S. government.
“Crocus City is a gigantic place with many concert halls,” said one Moscow businessman, noting that the Moscow regional government’s offices are close by. “There should have been serious security, and there should have been a lot of police.”
“There is a lack of responsibility for security at large public events,” the businessman said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Almost the same thing happened 20 years ago during the Nord Ost theater siege, and nothing has changed since then,” he said, referring to the 2002 hostage crisis that left more than 115 dead after Chechen…
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