The truth that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the USA a couple of potential terrorist assault is more likely to deepen the skepticism. As an alternative of appearing on the warnings and tightening safety, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”
“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin mentioned on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s home intelligence company, referring to the Western warnings. After the assault on Friday, a few of his exiled critics have cited his response as proof of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true safety issues.
Moderately than maintaining society secure from precise, violent terrorists, these critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling safety providers to pursue dissidents, journalists and anybody deemed a risk to the Kremlin’s definition of “conventional values.”
A living proof: Simply hours earlier than the assault, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. motion” to an official record of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the homosexual rights motion final yr. Terrorism was additionally among the many many costs prosecutors leveled in opposition to Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition chief who died final month.
“In a rustic through which counterterrorism particular forces chase after on-line commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian navy analyst, wrote in a social media submit on Saturday, “terrorists will at all times be at liberty.”
Even because the Islamic State repeatedly claimed accountability for the assault and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to attempt to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse.
Olga Skabeyeva, a state tv host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian navy intelligence had discovered assailants “who would seem like ISIS. However that is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT tv community, wrote that experiences of Islamic State accountability amounted to a “primary sleight of hand” by the American information media.
On a prime-time tv discuss present on the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s management and “their puppet masters within the Western intelligence providers” had absolutely organized the assault.
It was an effort to “undermine belief within the president,” Mr. Dugin mentioned, and it confirmed common Russians that they’d no selection however to unite behind Mr. Putin’s conflict in opposition to Ukraine.
Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a automobile bombing close to Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officers mentioned was certainly approved by elements of the Ukrainian authorities, however with out American involvement.
U.S. officers have mentioned there isn’t any proof of Ukrainian involvement within the live performance corridor assault, and Ukrainian officers ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a consultant of Ukraine’s navy intelligence company, mentioned Mr. Putin’s declare that the attackers had fled towards Ukraine and supposed to cross into it, with the assistance of the Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.
In current months, Mr. Putin has appeared extra assured than at every other level since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative on the entrance line, whereas Ukraine is struggling amid flagging Western help and a scarcity of troops.
Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined consequence — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.
