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Russian President Vladimir Putin had just begun his second term in office when Chechen Islamist separatists seized a school in Beslan on September 1, 2004, and captured about 1,200 schoolchildren and their parents. The hostages spent three days without food or water in a small school gym before Russian security forces entered the building. More than 300 people died on the spot in the chaotic firefight.
The Russian president was on vacation in Sochi at the time and commented on the situation for the first time only a day later. Putin went to the school where the tragedy happened for the first time only last week. Despite the fact that the families called for a more extensive investigation and a deeper examination of the chaotic actions of the Russian security forces, the Russian authorities are still silent about the situation.
According to the European Court of Human Rights couldn’t Russia should protect the hostages well and prevent the attack despite the warning signals. In the end, only one of the terrorists was held responsible for the massacre in court, the others either disappeared or died on the spot.
Although 20 years have passed since the tragedy, the attitudes of the Russian president towards crisis situations have not changed in any way. Putin has a similar attitude to the current events in Western Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian troops entered almost without resistance at the beginning of August.
The president did not make his first military statement until a day and a half after the attack. He called calling the invasion a “large-scale provocation,” he accused Ukraine of indiscriminately shooting civilians and calling them terrorists. Then he deftly moved on to routine government matters, including how to improve workers’ conditions.
Massacre in Beslan
The next day, the kidnappers let the mothers and babies go. They forced even those who didn’t want to. They threatened to shoot someone if they didn’t obey. Many had to leave their older children at school. And many of those children died. Beslan, September 3, 2004.
The media controlled by the regime also avoided reporting on the Ukrainian invasion of troops, and information about the fighting appeared in the news only under euphemisms such as “situation”. It took another five days and the loss of nearly 30 settlements before Putin promised a military response to the Ukrainian strikes.
Until now, however, the president has not visited the stricken region to meet with the tens of thousands of evacuees. Nor did he outline any specific steps the government or the military were going to take.
Instead, he went to Azerbaijan and Chechnya, neither of which was related to the current Ukrainian offensive. Next week, specifically on September 3, i.e. on the anniversary of the operation against terrorists in Beslan, he will go to Mongolia.
“I see echoes of the past in Putin’s present. When Putin faced crises, he often tried to respond decisively and quickly to the needs of the Russian people. Since August 9, 1999, when President Boris Yeltsin appointed a then-unknown apparatchik as prime minister, Putin has seemed more concerned with the myth of the savior than with actually saving lives.” she described in her analysis for The Conservation server, political scientist Lena Surzhko Harned dealing with the Russian regime.
Disruption of the image of a strong leader
After all, the Russian president demonstrated his failure to act in crisis situations already in the first months of this year, when memories of the Beslan massacre were stirred up by a terrorist attack on the outskirts of Moscow. Putin did not issue a public statement until 18 hours after the tragedy at the concert hall, during which dozens of people were killed.
However, he used the deadliest terrorist attack in recent years for his usual agenda and attributed it to Ukraine without providing any evidence. At the same time, the terrorist organization Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and Russia had allegedly received a warning about this threat from the United States.
Even in this case, Putin never visited the site of the attack or the survivors in the hospital.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
“Silence is generally Putin’s style. He tends to shift responsibility to local authorities and then claim to have taken care of everything. But it seems to me that the main reason is ideological. This terrorist attack actually refutes the entire image of the propaganda that the Russians have been trying to feed in recent years,” he noted in an interview with the Current Time station, Kirill Martynov, editor-in-chief of the independent Russian-language news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe.
All these situations undermine Putin’s image of a strong leader promising stability and security, on which the Russian president partly bases his steadfast position. After all, he also frames the war in Ukraine as an effort to protect Russians living on Ukrainian territory.
Nevertheless, during the last two years, the opposite has been shown – some Russian cities have been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian forces, and the troops of Wagner’s group marched on Moscow last year without any major problems.
