Putin shifts blame for attack
Russia’s president points the finger at Ukraine. Matthew Partridge reports
A terrorist attack in Moscow last week ended in the deaths of more than a hundred concertgoers. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the atrocity. In a televised address, Russian president Vladimir Putin did not mention the terrorist group, however, and claimed that Ukraine had been involved, even if he stopped short of directly attributing responsibility to Kyiv. That may reflect a worry that the US government is sitting on intelligence that would undermine such a claim, says The Economist. And it may be embarrassment at his security agencies’ failure to act on American warnings on 7 March of an imminent attack. “Such a hubristic blunder would have consequences in a country where power can be held to account. Russia is not such a country.”
Russia deserves better
Putin claimed that Kyiv had opened a border “window” to allow the gunmen to escape to Ukraine, but this “strains credulity”, says The Times. There “is a long history of appalling atrocities” inflicted on Russia by ISIS or similar fanatics, including the Beslan siege in 2004, which resulted in the deaths of more than 330 people, through to a bomb on a plane from Egypt in 2015 that killed everyone on board. “Islamists have been inflamed” by Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, its backing for Syrian government and by “Kremlin operations against Muslims going back to Afghanistan”. But Russia’s response was to launch a revenge attack on Ukraine, with an overnight bombardment of Kyiv and the largest aerial attack on Ukraine’s energy system in two years of war. “To use a dreadful terrorist atrocity as an excuse for escalation of the war in Ukraine is cynical political deception. Russia’s grieving population deserves a more honest response from the Kremlin.”
Putin’s response to the atrocity may have been “cynical”, but it “was to be expected”, given his record of deceit, says Denis Levin for Politico. This isn’t the first time he has tried to spin a tragedy “to his own benefit” – he has used “almost all” of the 15 terrorist attacks since he became leader of the FSB security agency in 1998 as a pretext “to strengthen his grip on power”. His response to this latest attack is “unlikely to be pretty” and will probably lead to more restrictions at home and aggression abroad.
Yet despite the fact that Putin’s dictatorship has “eviscerated checks and balances within Russian society”, the Russian security services’ “catastrophic failure” to prevent the attack could have serious repercussions for the regime, says Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. The fact that Putin’s “huge security apparatus” was “unable to stop the butchering of defenceless citizens” has “comprehensively demolished” the myth of Putin as an “invincible, indispensable modern-day tsar who bravely protects Mother Russia from her enemies”. Even in a society as tied down as Russia’s, this “lethally negligent failure will not be forgotten or forgiven”.