Russian President Vladimir Putin has embarked on a strategy after the worst attack in two decades. He wants revenge, but also to find a person responsible for you of the terrorist attack on Friday at a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow, which has already claimed the lives of 137 people. Experts agree: Putin wants to profit from the attack because such a serious attack “leaves him in a bad place“just a few days after his re-election as president of Russia.

Putin, in his appearance this Saturday, has ignored that the attack was claimed, a few hours after its execution, by a branch of the jihadist group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). Likewise, it was learned that both the United States and the United Kingdom, among other Western countries, They had warned of an imminent attack on the capital weeks before the attack.

However, the Kremlin ignored the warnings and accused them of wanting to “destabilize and intimidate”, knowing the suspicion which awakens Daesh’s participation in the Sahel and the war in Syria. From Moscow, they did not take long to point to a possible relationship with Ukraine and even threatened retaliations on the battlefield, and this was fulfilled this Sunday.

Putin does not want to listen to Kyiv, which has distanced itself from the beginning from any type of involvement in the terrorist action. In fact, this Sunday the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelensky has denied any involvementensuring that “what happened on Friday in Moscow is obvious: Putin and the other bastards try to blame others“.

Along with Ukraine’s explanations, the United States has also been forceful in pointing out the Islamists. But Daesh itself has also published this Sunday, when Russia is in national mourning, a very crude video that confirms its responsibility for the attack. Meanwhile, thousands of Muscovites have come to the concert hall to show their respect, laying flowers in memory of the victims of this cruel attack.

A security error

The professor of international relations, Pedro Rodríguez, has pointed out in laSexta Xplica that an “attack of this magnitude leaves him in a bad place and the recurring narrative is: ‘This is Ukraine’s fault'”. The truth is that the self-proclaimed Islamic State has claimed or been responsible for at least 15 attacks in Russia between 2015 and 2019, the last year in which a Daesh action was recorded until this Friday in Moscow. And this time he modus operandi is the same.

In this case it has been bloody a security mistake that Putin does not want to admit because it shows Russia’s internal problems. Ruth Ferrero, professor of Political Science at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), points out that internal conflicts are accumulating in Russia: “First, it was the uprising of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the failure to stop this advance towards Moscow. And in that moment, “The security systems were already in evidence.” “That was the first, which was less than a year ago. And the second is this,” he added.

For his part, Ignacio Cembrero, a journalist and writer with a long career that oscillated between Europe and the Islamic world, points out that “the way in which it has been made, the claim, what counts in its claim, the propaganda system that usually uses…”. However, doubts arise in the face of the rapid and high-profile arrest of the terrorists. “They are people who have the vocation of martyrs. They are not going to let themselves be caught by those who try to stop them.. Maybe these images of arrests are propaganda,” explains Cembrero.