He can lie as much as he likes, point the finger at Ukraine and make his sidekicks accuse Ukraine for it, but the man has failed. Busy invading Ukraine and imprisoning and murdering their opponents, Vladimir Putin and his regime were unable to see coming the slaughter that the Islamic State was preparing in Moscow.
In many other countries, it will be said, many other security apparatuses have let themselves be taken by surprise by other equally appalling massacres. Yes, that is true, but it turns out that the United States had warned the Russian authorities that something was up, that the American embassy had warned its citizens against taking part in mass events, and that Vladimir Putin saw it only as a “provocation” by a country guilty of defending the Ukrainians.
That makes already two appalling mistakes, but that is not all, because this President, who is so good at getting himself re-elected with 87% of the votes, had he at least increased protection for shows, museums and public transport? Had he ensured that, American “provocation” or not, precautionary measures were taken?
We know the answer, but had the emergency services and hospitals at least been put on alert, just in case? This would only have been a routine measure, the ABCs of security, but the Russians and all those around the world who sat transfixed in front of their screens that evening saw how long it took the fire brigade, ambulances and special forces to arrive at the scene of the tragedy where so many unfortunate people were waiting for help.
In any normal country, heads of senior officials and ministers would already have rolled. The President himself would have felt obliged to apologise to his people and promise the necessary changes, but no! To Russia’s misfortune, his president is called Vladimir Putin, and what has he done?
He has rained down so many bombs on Ukraine that Polish airspace was violated by Russian missiles on Saturday morning. To murder and kleptocracy, this regime has now added the most absolute incompetence, but that is not all and it is not even the worst of it, because why did the Islamic State attack Russia on Friday?
There are, of course, the disputes linked to the wars in Chechnya and Vladimir Putin’s support for Bashar al-Assad over the past decade. There is the near past, but above all there is the present, because with this massacre, the Daesh has just made itself the avenger of the poorest territories of the Russian Federation, the Muslim republics and regions where the Kremlin recruits by force or by buying the soldiers it does not dare to mobilise in Russia itself.
Like all the empires of the past, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has its colonial troops, but despite the cheques that families are supposed to receive when one of their children falls in Ukraine, anger is beginning to rise on the eastern periphery of the Federation. It is this anger that the Daesh wanted to stir up by striking at the heart of Russia. It is a declaration of war that this organisation has just made on Russia, knowing of course – as we have just seen – that the Kremlin can hardly fight a war in the East while trying, in the West, to swallow up Ukraine.
What the jihadists are playing for is the break-up of the Russian Federation in the hope of recovering whole sections of it and thus recreating territorial bases for themselves. What we saw in the blood of the victims at Crocus City Hall was that Vladimir Putin is not content with devastating Ukraine, he is dismantling Russia and could well lead it into an interminable civil war on the borders of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This man is an absolute danger.
