Concert hall attack exposes cracks, vulnerabilities in Putin’s regime

being used to identify others recovered from the burned site.

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 “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.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “Those hundreds of thousands of Russians who are now killing on Ukrainian land would surely be enough to stop any terrorists. And if the Russians are ready to silently die in ‘Crocus Halls’ and not ask any questions to their security and intelligence agencies, then Putin will try to turn such a situation to his personal advantage again.”

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.”