Lower than every week in the past, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed a fifth time period along with his highest-ever share of the vote, utilizing a stage-managed election to point out the nation and the world that he was firmly in management.
Simply days later got here a searing counterpoint: His vaunted safety equipment failed to forestall Russia’s deadliest terrorist assault in 20 years.
The assault on Friday, which killed a minimum of 133 individuals at a live performance corridor in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a pacesetter for whom nationwide safety is paramount. That’s very true after two years of a battle in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he forged as his prime precedence after the election final Sunday.
“The election demonstrated a seemingly assured victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, mentioned in a cellphone interview from Moscow. “And instantly, towards the backdrop of a assured victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”
Mr. Putin appeared blindsided by the assault. It took him greater than 19 hours to deal with the nation concerning the assault, the deadliest in Russia because the 2004 college siege in Beslan, within the nation’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian chief mentioned nothing concerning the mounting proof {that a} department of the Islamic State dedicated the assault.
As a substitute, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and mentioned the assailants had acted “similar to the Nazis,” who “as soon as carried out massacres within the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.
“Our frequent obligation now — our comrades on the entrance, all residents of the nation — is to be collectively in a single formation,” Mr. Putin mentioned on the finish of a five-minute speech, making an attempt to conflate the struggle towards terrorism along with his invasion of Ukraine.
The query is how a lot of the Russian public will purchase into his argument. They could ask whether or not Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his battle with the West, really has the nation’s safety pursuits at coronary heart — or whether or not he’s woefully forsaking them, as lots of his opponents say he’s.
The truth that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the US a few potential terrorist assault is prone to deepen the skepticism. As a substitute of performing 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 considerations.
Somewhat than holding society protected 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 listing of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the homosexual rights motion final 12 months. Terrorism was additionally among the many many fees prosecutors leveled towards Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition chief who died final month.
“In a rustic by which counterterrorism particular forces chase after on-line commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian army analyst, wrote in a social media submit on Saturday, “terrorists will all the time be at liberty.”
Even because the Islamic State repeatedly claimed duty 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 army 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 stories of Islamic State duty 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 certainly 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 battle towards Ukraine.
Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a automobile bombing close to Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officers mentioned was certainly licensed by elements of the Ukrainian authorities, however with out American involvement.
U.S. officers have mentioned there isn’t a proof of Ukrainian involvement within the live performance corridor assault, and Ukrainian officers ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a consultant of Ukraine’s army 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 latest months, Mr. Putin has appeared extra assured than at another 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 final result — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.
Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, mentioned he believed many Russians had been now in “shock,” as a result of “restoring order has all the time been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”
Mr. Putin’s early years in energy had been marked by terrorist assaults, culminating within the Beslan college siege in 2004; he used these violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Earlier than Friday, the latest mass-casualty terrorist assault within the capital area was a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 individuals.
Nonetheless, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the information media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political penalties of the live performance corridor assault could be restricted, so long as the violence was not repeated.
“To be sincere,” he mentioned, “our society has gotten used to holding quiet about inconvenient subjects.”
Fixed Méheut contributed reporting.
