Three facts stand out as clear after Russia’s arrest of the alleged perpetrators of Friday’s appalling terrorist attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall concert venue — and all three shine a light on dangers inherent in the new multipolar world we live in.
The first is that Russian President Vladimir Putin had dismissed the United States' earlier warning that the attack was coming, both in public and to his top security officers. He labelled American intelligence that Islamists were planning an assault on a large Russian venue as blackmail, aimed at destabilizing his country — a vague notion that he did not explain.
There was a time not so long ago when Putin understood that Washington considered Islamist radicalism as a shared threat, one taken so seriously that it was ring-fenced from other disputes. The Russian president would have heeded the warning, even if he could not prevent the attack.