Russia: Lashing out and cracking down
“In the police state of Russia” there is no likelihood of “a real investigation” into last week’s Crocus City Hall attack, said Florian Niederndorfer in Der Standard (Austria). Even as the ISIS-Khorasan terrorist group took responsibility for the attack that killed 144 and injured hundreds, Russian President Vladimir Putin already knew that he wanted to blame Ukraine. Last week he admitted “radical Islamists” had stormed the Moscow music venue, but claimed they’d been sent by the “neoNazi Kyiv regime.” In reality, “the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had warned the Russian authorities of an attack more than two weeks ago.” So did Moscow’s ally Iran, which had gotten wind of the plot while interrogating members of ISIS-K, an Islamic State affiliate based in Afghanistan. None of the 10 Central Asians arrested in connection with the crime so far has fingered Kyiv, despite being “badly beaten” during interrogation; one was forced to eat his own sliced-off ear in a gruesome video. Police are also arresting ordinary Russians on charges of “justifying terrorism,” said Novaya Gazeta (Russia, in exile). Those include a Russian-Tajik singer and former Eurovision contestant who “condemned the alleged torture of the suspects in the Crocus City Hall attack.”
“At this point, nothing is firmly established,” said Dmitry Trenin in Russia Today (Russia, state-owned). Washington declared “within minutes” of the attack that Ukraine had no involvement. Moscow won’t blindly accept that story. If the evidence points to Kyiv, you can expect that Putin will lift the informal “guarantee” that Russia “would not target Zelensky personally.”
That “cynical” and absurd story is exactly how you’d expect Putin to “spin the tragedy to his own benefit,” said Denis Leven in Politico.eu (Belgium). Russia has suffered 15 major terror attacks since he first took power in 1998, and Putin’s exploited each to “consolidate or boost his authority.” After the deadly Moscow high-rise bombings in 1999, then–Prime Minister Putin blamed Chechen rebels and launched a popular, bloody war against the breakaway region. When suicide bombers targeted the Moscow subway in 2010, Putin said the police needed more surveillance capacity, and cameras with facial recognition went in across the subway system, then nationwide. Today, Russia uses its roughly 500,000 CCTV cameras “to track and detain opposition activists.”
“Senior officials inside the Kremlin” know that all the claims about Ukraine are “nonsense,” said The Economist (U.K.). However, Putin can’t accept Western explanations without undermining his entire “paranoid and conspiratorial worldview.” Meanwhile, directing his ire at Russia’s sworn enemies—the Ukrainians, the West—conveniently justifies more war and repression. Putin’s fixation on Ukraine is what left Russia vulnerable to attack, with its intelligence and military resources laser-focused abroad, said Steve Brown in Kyiv Post (Ukraine). Now, in his “hatred for all things Ukrainian,” Putin seems to “dismiss the notion that Islamic fundamentalism poses a real and present danger.” As the English proverb says, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”