"Don't Excite the People"
Vladimir Putin and the Tragedies of Russia
In the early hours after the news broke of the attack on the concert hall just outside Moscow, I posted the following on Twitter(X):
The attack in Moscow was an act of terrorism, full stop.
Having failed to prevent it, the Kremlin will likely look for a way to use it, which may well mean blaming Ukraine.
The fact that the Kremlin will use the attack for political purposes does not mean it was a false flag.
A day later, I stand by that admittedly superficial analysis. I won’t go deeper, because I don’t have the factual basis on which to go deeper. But I will note that, while not yet denying the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility, the Kremlin is quite clearly trying to establish a link to Ukraine.
In fact, I would be extremely surprised if the Kremlin doesn’t look to turn this to its advantage. To put this proposition in context, I thought it might be useful to share an excerpt from Putin vs the People.
The analysis, then, is this: In Putin’s view of the world, the genuine danger posed by a tragedy—whether the attack on Crocus City Hall, or on Nord Ost, or on Beslan—is the threat it poses to the state’s credibility. It is this credibility he will seek to maintain at all costs, and in his experience, that credibility rests on two things:
The state’s ability to mount a demonstrative, forceful response; and
The state’s capacity to learn “organizational lessons”—организационные выводы—about the cause of the tragedy, which unsurprisingly redound to the need for the state to be more fully in control.
The direction of the forceful response is likely clear, although the regime’s capacity to escalate the war in Ukraine is perhaps questionable. The only real question for me, however, is exactly which screws the Kremlin will decide to tighten at home.
Vladimir Putin seems to have sunk deeper into his own disinformation bubble. On March 7, the U.S., and specifically, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, warned publicly that terror groups were planning a major attack, and specifically advised Americans to avoid concert venues. Putin pooh-poohed the warning, and said that the situation was normal (probably relying on his FSB sources -- the same people who said the Ukraine war would be a walkover). https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-dismissed-us-warnings-days-before-moscow-concert-hall-attack-2024-3
Then, when terrorists, probably ISIS-K, attacked a concert hall in the Crocus Center outside Moscow, killing over a hundred people and wounding even more, Putin's talking heads immediately pivoted to say that Ukraine was behind the attack, and even accused the U.S. of being a party to the attack. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/03/22/7447754/
This morning, and despite the fact that ISIS-K had already claimed responsibility, Putin went on TV steadfastly maintaining that Ukraine was connected somehow, since the terrorists were arrested while trying to make their way to Ukraine (there is no evidence for this, and it sounds like a desperate FSB fabrication). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/world/europe/moscow-attack-putin.html
All these developments are very worrying. That Putin and his security services could get things so wrong is no surprise. That the first impulse of Putin and those seeking to deflect attention for Russian security failures was to blame Ukraine for everything is also not surprising.
The worrying thing is that, at a time when Putin and his minions are trying to fake up even more excuses for Russia's own terror attacks on Ukraine, the U.S. is paralyzed, unable to send Ukraine the military aid it desperately needs. This has to change, and change fast.
And absolutely valid point on Kremlin’s obsession with the omnipotent status of the state.