Russia’s blame game for terrorist attack

Watching the footage of the four suspects arrested in connection with the terror attack in Moscow last week, it’s difficult not to wonder if they’ll even survive long enough to get to their trial, due some time in May.

Looking at the bruises, the manhandling by their guards — and one of them brought to court in a wheelchair — will it come as a shock if any of them slip from a piece of soap while washing on the ninth floor (apologies to Chris van Wyk)?

With the attack coming just days after Vladimir Putin’s landslide re-election, this doesn’t look good for the Russian president or, indeed, anyone supposed to have a grip on the country’s domestic security.

And so Ukraine, for 763 days’ worth of obvious reasons, remains the preferred bogeyman, instead of a terrorist cell of Tajik gunmen fighting for a terrorist group supposed to have been destroyed long ago in Syria — with Russian help.

It’s also difficult to see how pointing fingers at Kyiv will help the Russian cause in Ukraine — unless distaste at home for the “special military operation” is more widespread than those in power care to admit.

It’s not as if blaming Ukraine for Friday night’s atrocity will dramatically alter Russia’s progress on a battlefield that looks more like the Somme in 1916 and much less like the decisive, fast-paced fury of, say, El Alamein in late 1942.

Unless, of course, Moscow’s looking for an excuse, any excuse, for going — in a word — ballistic on its stubborn southern neighbour.

Our bitter, battered world looks increasingly like a badly written apocalypse thriller.

Except, folks, 137 people are dead and hundreds injured … and more hate is boiling away on the hob while the lunatics torch the asylum and burn it to the ground.