A week after Russia's last presidential election in 2018, a fire at a crowded shopping center in Siberia killed more than 60 people, including children.
Five days after voting closed in this year's presidential election, gunmen in camouflage uniforms opened fire at a concert hall in Moscow, killing more than 130 people in an attack claimed by the Islamic State militant group.
The Kremlin portrays President Vladimir Putin as a savior, a strong leader who brought stability and security after the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the editorial office writes. Radio Free Europe (RSE) in English.
The high-casualty events that have punctuated Putin's nearly 25 years as president or prime minister, and the recurring images of explosions, flames and helpless victims desperately fleeing, seriously undermine that image. Instead, analysts say, they tell the story of a leader whose focus on extending his own power came at the expense of his people's security.
Putin's critics say that more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains a country where the state puts its own interests far above those of its citizens.
The biggest example of this is the war against Ukraine: before launching the invasion in February 2022, when Russia was massing tens of thousands of troops on the border and the United States warned that an attack could begin at any moment, many observers predicted that Putin would hold back because the massive the attack threatened the security of Russia, and would not improve it.
Along with the invasion of Ukraine came a dramatic intensification of the crackdown on civil society, dissent and independent voices that had begun a decade earlier, before Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 after serving as prime minister.
The government has labeled a range of peace-fighting groups and even non-existent organizations as "extremists", from late opposition leader Alexei Navalny's banned political and anti-corruption groups to what the state inaccurately describes as an "international LGBT social movement". The Russian state tried critics for treason and sentenced critics of the war in Ukraine to long prison terms.
This has left Russia vulnerable to real extremists, analysts say, as well as deadly disasters where corruption and negligence cause or exacerbate the effects of avoidable accidents like the March 2018 fire at the Zimnaya Voshnya (Winter Cherry) shopping center in the Siberian city of Kemerovo. seven days after Putin was declared the winner of the presidential election.
"Intelligence services are focused on political research and intimidation of citizens. They are not fulfilling their direct responsibility to protect society from real threats," Russian political commentator Dmitry Kolezev wrote on the X platform, formerly Twitter.
"Colossal Mistake"
The March 22 attack on the Krokus concert hall in the suburbs of Moscow "appears to be a colossal failure" by the state, Kolezov wrote. "Huge amounts of money have been spent on 'security', but in reality, no security has been provided."
Under different circumstances, the political opposition and independent journalists would put pressure on the government regarding this problem, making sure that the security forces do their job and that the money is not wasted, Kolezov wrote. "Unfortunately, none of these groups have access to national television, where they could be vocal about it."
Instead of serving as a control for state authorities, in other words, these groups are their targets.
"Russian security personnel are trained to observe specific, politically important 'threats,'" Andras Toth-Czifra, a fellow in the Eurasia program at the US Institute for Foreign Policy Research, wrote on IX, adding that "due to resource/time/manpower constraints this means they have less capacity to observe and prevent real threats."
After an attack or deadly incident occurs, the strategies and tactics employed by the Russian authorities have often exacerbated their effects, prompting victims' families to accuse Putin's government of callousness or negligence.
Putin's slow response to the Kursk submarine disaster during his first year in office is an example, and experts say patchy responses to the 2002 Nord-Ost theater attack in Moscow and the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis in North Ossetia increased the death toll. .
Giving priority to the priorities of the state and its leaders over the interests of citizens is not a new problem: it dates back to the Soviet and tsarist eras, a phenomenon that dissidents, rights activists and opposition politicians say must be reversed if Russia and its people are to they go forward.
But Kremlin critics say this situation has become increasingly dominant during Putin's long rule.
Among other things, they point to the war in Ukraine, which has left hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties even as Putin secured a new six-year term in what opponents and analysts say was a tightly controlled vote with millions of falsified votes, using the election to portray himself as irreplaceable leader of a firmly united country.
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