Less than a week ago, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth term with the highest percentage of the vote ever, using an electoral process to show the nation and the world that he was firmly in control.
A few days later came a terrible setback: his vaunted security apparatus failed to prevent Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in 20 years.
The attack on Friday, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, was a blow to Mr Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That’s especially true after two years of war in Ukraine, which he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he made his top priority after last Sunday’s election.
“The election showed a seemingly certain victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, said in a telephone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the backdrop of a certain victory, there is this evidential humiliation.”
Mr Putin appeared blindsided by the attack. It took him more than 19 hours to address the nation about the attack, the deadliest in Russia since the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in the country’s south, which killed 334. When he did, the Russian leader said nothing about growing evidence that an Islamic State affiliate carried out the attack.
Instead, Mr Putin suggested that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the perpetrators had acted “just like the Nazis”, who “once committed massacres in the occupied territories” — referring to his frequent, false description of today’s Ukraine as run by neo-Nazis.
“Our common task now – our comrades at the front, all the citizens of the country – is to be together in one formation,” Mr Putin said at the end of his five-minute speech, trying to conflate the fight against terrorism with invasion of Ukraine.
The question is how much of the Russian public will buy his argument. They might ask whether Mr. Putin, with his invasion and conflict with the West, really has the country’s security interests at heart — or if he is sadly abandoning them, as many of his opponents say.
The fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a possible terrorist attack is likely to deepen skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and beefing up security measures, he dismissed them as “provocative statements”.
“All this looks like clear blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence service, referring to Western warnings. After Friday’s attack, some of his exiled critics cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s real security concerns.
Instead of keeping society safe from real, violent terrorists, these critics say, Mr. Putin has led his vast security services to hunt down dissidents, journalists and anyone seen as a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”
A case in point: Hours before the attack, state media reported that Russian authorities had added “the LGBT movement” to an official list of “terrorists and extremists.” Russia already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors brought against Alexei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader who died last month.
“In a country where special anti-terrorist forces hunt down online commentators,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, he wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”
Although Islamic State has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine has denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s emissaries have pushed into overdrive to try to convince the Russian public that this was just a ruse.
Olga Skabeyeva, a presenter on state television, wrote on Telegram that the Ukrainian military service found attackers “who would look like ISIS. But this is not ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state television network RT, wrote that reports of Islamic State responsibility amounted to a “fundamental misunderstanding” by the US media.
On a TV talk show on state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, said the Ukrainian leadership and “their puppets in Western intelligence” had definitely organized the attack.
It was an attempt to “undermine trust in the president”, Mr Dugin said, and showed ordinary Russians they had no choice but to rally behind Mr Putin’s war against Ukraine.
Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a car bomb attack near Moscow in 2022 that US officials said was indeed authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government, but without US involvement.
US officials said there was no evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the concert hall attack, and Ukrainian officials scoffed at the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said Mr Putin’s claim that the attackers fled to Ukraine and intended to cross into it, with the help of Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.
In recent months, Mr Putin has appeared more confident than at any point since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have regained the initiative on the front lines as Ukraine struggles amid intense western support and lack of troops.
Inside Russia, the election — and its preordained outcome — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance of the nation’s politics.
Mr Kynev, the political scientist, said he believed many Russians were now in “shock” because “restoring order has always been Vladimir Putin’s calling card”.
Mr Putin’s early years in power were marked by terrorist attacks, culminating in the Beslan school siege in 2004. He used these violent incidents to justify rolling back his civil liberties. Before Friday, the most recent mass-casualty terror attack in the capital region was a 2011 suicide bombing at a Moscow airport that killed 37 people.
But given the Kremlin’s effectiveness in suppressing dissent and the media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political fallout from the attack on the concert hall would be limited as long as the violence was not repeated.
“To be honest,” he said, “our society is used to keeping quiet about uncomfortable issues.”
Constant Méheut contributed to the report.
