The terrorist attack in the Moscow concert hall has been a humiliating blow to Russia's narrative of efficiency and omnipotence. Washington identified the threat as coming from Afghanistan's ISIS-K, a successor or affiliates of the previous ultra-Islamic criminal gang that operated in Syria and Iraq.
Putin contemptuously dismissed the American warning that now leaves his country's intelligence services in a place of thunderous ineffectiveness. The Russian tsar acts in this way by targeting Kiev to try to keep alive the story of the Russian fortress surprised at a rock festival.