Opinion: Watch carefully what Putin does next

Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

From the moment Vladimir Putin started topping their headlines some 25 years ago, Russians were told that their new leader was tough, that they could trust him to keep them safe.

That’s why one might expect that a massive security failure on his watch — Friday’s catastrophic attack at the Crocus City Hall, in which a handful of terrorists massacred at least 139 people in a concert venue just outside Moscow — would erode the president’s image and weaken his hold on power.

History, however, tells us that will not happen. In fact, history has much to tell us about what comes next. That’s because Putin’s unlikely rise to power and to autocratic rule can almost be told as a tale of terrorist atrocities exploited to carry out political and military maneuvers aimed at strengthening his grip.

When a declining President Boris Yeltsin plucked Putin from near-obscurity in 1999, in a time of turbulence and insecurity, setting him on course to become Russia’s president and, as we now know, the seemingly-permanent 21st century czar, Putin very deliberately set out to flex his muscles before the cameras, displaying his judo skills or donning boxing gloves. Literally and figuratively, Putin was telling Russians — who would soon vote in a presidential election — that he was the man to protect them.

One can make a credible case, as some have, that without terrorism Putin would not have become president in the first place. Once in office, attack after attack gave him the pretext to dismantle democracy brick by brick. Now, all power flows from him, not from the people, and no alternative or counterbalance to his one-man rule is allowed to survive.

That’s why even though ISIS has already claimed responsibility for the Crocus slaughter, releasing videos as evidence, there is every reason to expect it is Ukraine that will end up paying the price, along with the Russian people, whose freedoms are systematically restricted more with every successful terrorist attack.

Terrorism, to put it bluntly, has paid off for Putin. So much that people with inside knowledge have accused his security apparatus of orchestrating some of the attacks. Putin denies any involvement.

As Russians grieve the latest, horrific loss of life, you’d expect it to take a significant toll on Putin’s standing, given that the US embassy in Moscow had publicly warned of extremists with “imminent plans to target large gatherings,” including “concerts.”

The US has a commendable practice of publicizing alerts about terrorist attacks even when they target its adversaries. Amid tense relations with Washington, Putin rejected the warning, blasting the US for seeking to “intimidate and destabilize our society.” Had he listened, perhaps scores of Russian civilians killed by the attackers would be alive today. The slow response by security services makes the negligence even more shocking.

When the images of flames shooting into the sky first emerged on Friday, followed by videos of gunmen shooting into the crowd, social media exploded with conspiracy theories. That’s routine these days, but in Russia’s case it has a unique track record.

Consider the earliest days of Putin’s rule.

When Yeltsin named him prime minister in August 1999, Russian television showed Putin slamming opponents on the judo mat and vowing to smash the Muslim separatists wreaking havoc in Chechnya and elsewhere.

One month later, apartment blocks started blowing up, killing hundreds. Russians were terrified. But Putin, who had served as head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor, before becoming prime minister, vowed he would end the carnage.

The government immediately blamed Chechens, and Putin vowed to go after the terrorists, ordering thousands of troops into Chechnya. In a now-famous line, he vowed, “We’ll capture them in the toilet. We will waste them in the outhouse.”

In 2000 Putin won a landslide presidential election.

Two days after that crude statement, police had arrested a group of men carrying bags into an apartment block in the western Russian city of Ryazan. The bags, tested, contained high explosives and a detonator. The men were FSB agents. The government promptly dismissed the shocking news that security agents had apparently been caught in the process of blowing up a residential building.

The FSB head, Nikolai Patrushev, claimed the bags were full of sugar and the men were conducting an exercise. Patrushev, incidentally, now heads the national security council, and as I recently wrote, is a possible successor to Putin.

Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB spy, blamed Putin for the apartment bombings before he was killed by a dose of radioactive polonium, an assassination that the European Court for Human Rights pinned on the Russian government and which a UK government inquiry concluded had “probably” been directed by the FSB. Many others have made the same accusation about the bombings, claiming Putin would not have won the presidency without them and that Putin’s FSB carries out terrorist acts rather than solving them. The Kremlin dismisses the accusations.

Terrorist attacks continued, and each time — despite the evidence that Putin was failing to protect the Russian people — he managed to emerge stronger.

The entire world held its breath in 2002 when Chechen radicals seized Moscow’s Dubrovka theater with 850 people inside. On the fourth day, security forces pumped a gas into the building, leading to the death of at least 130 hostages, and stormed the building and killed the terrorists. Afterwards, Russia enacted anti-terrorism laws that sharply restricted media freedoms, helping Putin more effectively control the information Russians receive.

The most wrenching of all terrorist attacks came two years later in Beslan, near Chechnya, when Chechen terrorists seized a school full of children and parents, more than 1,000 people. It was an excruciating scene that gripped an anguished world. It’s unclear what or who ultimately caused the explosions that ended the siege killing more than 330 civilians, most of them children.

In the aftermath, Putin introduced reforms that ended local elections of regional governors, claiming it would help fight terror. What it did was make the regional governments beholden to Putin, not to their citizens.

There’s little surprise that after Friday’s Crocus massacre Putin tried to link the disaster to Ukraine, or that when the four detained suspects appeared in court they were muscled in by masked men, the suspects’ faces bruised and swollen, one of them in a wheelchair, following videos that appear to show the torture of the suspects.

Speaking to the Russian people, without mentioning ISIS, Putin claimed without evidence that the suspects were planning to escape to Ukraine where “a window was prepared for them.”

Ukraine angrily rejected the accusation, maintaining it had nothing to do with the attack. The US reiterated that “ISIS bears sole responsibility,” and the UK warned that Russia was “creating a smokescreen of propaganda” and using the attack to defend its “utterly evil invasion of Ukraine.”

Three days after the disaster, Putin finally declared that “radical Islamists” carried out the attack, but he still implicated Ukraine without evidence.

What likely comes next is Putin’s leveraging of the tragedy for his benefit. We can expect a continuing, draconian crackdown on internal dissent, tougher controls on the media and private speech, and an intensifying campaign against Ukraine; perhaps a new national mobilization.

The terrorist attack was a glaring failure by the president and his regime. It reveals his weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and many Russians know that. But at least in the short term, it is likely to make him stronger by spurring even more repression and intensifying the country’s war footing.

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