Commentary: Putin’s pact with the Russians has a crack. Brutality is supposed to be the glue

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Videos with burning candles on a mournful black background have been appearing on screens in the streets of Moscow for several days. One can only hope that no one of judgment in our part of the world will succumb to this. And it doesn’t occur to him that one should somehow sympathize with the Russians in the sense of: “Aren’t we in the same boat with them when it comes to terrorism?”

Such solidarity was certainly appropriate in past decades, during the attacks on the school in Beslan or on the Dubrovka theater in Moscow. But now things are different. Since then, Islamist terrorists have not changed an iota, they just commit the same evil under a different name. However, it is different that Russia itself has definitely become a terrorist state. It brutally attacks civilians across Ukraine and continues its bloody, nihilistic destruction there. Russia murders, rapes, destroys. He is motivated by a different ideology than the Islamists, but he actually wants nothing more than to create his “caliphate” in Ukraine.

This is not to say that we should perhaps wish Friday’s massacre to the concertgoers on the outskirts of Moscow. No way. Let’s just emphatically avoid the feeling of belonging, that is, the idea that in the face of such hideous terror, everything should fall by the wayside. No, it shouldn’t.

The Kremlin regime should, above all, pour ashes on its own head after Friday. In Russia, you will be locked up within minutes if you go outside with an anti-war banner. But all of a sudden, the terrorists could murder and set fire to a large building for an hour. And then leave the place.

The disastrous failure of the Russian state was rather transparently and predictably tried to be disguised by Vladimir Putin in his televised address the day after the massacre. “The attackers then headed towards Ukraine, where, according to the information obtained, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side so that they could cross the border.” He did not explain where that window was and how the terrorists could get through the Russian trenches and roadblocks.

By the way, it is a moment over which, for example, Kremlin critic and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov is also shaking his head. In his article for The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, he asked why someone who can prepare and cover up a major terrorist attack on a concert hall full of people would then act like a sleazy amateur and head for a militarized border line. Kasparov summarizes that the Kremlin will simply lie as always. At most, it is laced with some half-truth.

But back to the point. Russian society today is chauvinistically radicalized, similar to German society in the 1930s or Serbia in the 1990s. Until now, we might have thought that Putin had a deal with the Russians that went something like this: “You will willingly join my war effort and keep your mouth shut no matter the odds, and in return I will guarantee your security and give you the intoxicating feeling that the whole world is afraid of us again.’

Now suddenly there are candles on screens in the streets, just days after the farce of the presidential election. But the country also sees how sadistic Putin can be. One of the alleged perpetrators apparently had his ear cut off during interrogation. According to a video circulating on Russian networks, they then stuffed it into his mouth. As the man was brought into the courtroom, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of Russia’s state broadcaster RT, commented on his destitute state, saying: “I feel pleasure.”

Security could not be guaranteed. The terrorists committed a monstrous assassination in which many innocent people lost their lives. Putin’s pact with the Russians got a crack. But he immediately took on new, more false, more brutal, more pathological features. It looks like you’re the ones supposed to glue it and hold it together.