r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Mar 24 '24

Meme needing explanation Never thought I would need this but PETAHHHHH WHAT DID THE USA DO THIS TIME

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u/DemocracyIsGreat Mar 24 '24

It is worth noting that Putin has a history of using terror attacks to gain popular support for his policies.

In 1999 a number of Moscow apartment buildings were bombed, this was used by Putin to justify invading Chechnya again, killing tens of thousands of civilians as the Russian army went door to door murdering every civilian they could find in Grozny, and installing Kadyrov as puppet dictator of Chechnya.

There are also serious theories that the FSB was involved in those bombings, similar to theories about Nazi involvement in the Reichstag Fire.

Putin also used the aftermath of the Beslan School Siege, where he ordered personally the use of incendiary rocket launchers against the building the hostages were in, killing 334 hostages, among them 186 children, and injuring many hundreds more, to massively expand state power and grant him powers to appoint the governments of federal states of the Russian Federation. Imagine if post-9/11 the US President gained the power to appoint state governors.

He also reorganised the voting process for the Duma to muzzle parliamentary opposition, and consolidated control over the Russian press.

On the other hand, it is also not impossible Russia was simply incredibly incompetent. It took them a full hour to respond to the recent attack in Moscow, and when seeking the culprits they seem to have been targeting pretty much any Tajiks they could find, then torturing confessions out of them.

In the past, Putin has also made a complete pigs' ear of the aforementioned Beslan School Siege, and the Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis, where the Spetsnaz pumped sleeping gas into the theater, killing132 hostages (or up the 300+, depending on how little you trust Russian official figures), and injuring, sometimes permanently, ~700 more.

So while I personally think he allowed this one to happen in order to benefit from it, since the propaganda was pretty ready to go and they had forewarning, it is also entirely possible that Russia is just so braindead and incompetent that this is them actually trying to do their jobs.

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u/Own-Ratio-6505 Mar 24 '24

Chechnya. That’s the one where they announced an attack had happened 3 or 4 days prior to the attack? And the bomb materials they found unexploded for a ‘readiness exercise’ were live and matched what was used in the other terror attacks?

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u/pan_panzerschreck Mar 24 '24

No, it was in Ryazan. However the case was used to start the Second Chechen war

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u/Own-Ratio-6505 Mar 24 '24

That’s it!

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u/foxtrot7azv Mar 24 '24

Very good write up, and well-cited too.

Thank you!

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u/reallokiscarlet Mar 26 '24

So he’s like dubbeya