Vladimir Putin escapes from Moscow and the nearby Crocus concert hall where the terrorist act took place last Friday which left at least 140 people dead, a toll destined to rise given the high number of missing. Put in difficulty by the attack that his services were unable to anticipatethe Russian president did not want to visit the site of the massacre claimed by ISIS but attributed, with varying degrees of uncertainty, to a Ukrainian lead not supported by anything and denied even by his ally Aleksandr Lukashenko, who specified how the attackers were fleeing were headed towards Belarus and not towards Ukraine.
Putin then chose Torzhokcapital of gold thread embroidery that served the tsars, the nomenklaura flags in the Soviet era and now the Orthodox Church, in the Tver region, in the north-west of the country, between Moscow and St. Petersburg, for a crowd of a hundred 'novotory' (as the inhabitants of the city that was once called Novy Torg are called), men, women and children gathered behind barriers waiting for the President's motorcade.
The choreography prepared by the Kremlin has seen Putin gets out of his limousine and welcomes the warm applause of those present “who have been waiting for hours”, as local news site Perviy Tverskoy wrote. The president then signed the book with a photo of himself on the cover of an elderly woman and kissed a ten-year-old boy, surrounded by bodyguards. “I've been waiting for her for 20 years,” one woman was heard saying.
Putin then visited the town's museum where he received a gift and spoke in favor of “true patriotism”, assuring that his visit, planned for some time, was postponed due to the Crocus attack. Preparations for the visit had begun the day before, with work on the streets and temporary roofing of the decrepit buildings in the center.
A few kilometers away, at the Torzhok air base, Putin once again took on the role of commander in chief, dismissing as “total absurdity” the possibility that Russia would invade Europe, an idea that arises, he added, “from an economic falling and deteriorating living standards”.
The Russian President added that Moscow's forces will consider the F-16s as “legitimate targets” “if they take off from air bases in third countries”, namely Ukraine, and if they are used against Russian forces. And this applies wherever the warplanes that the West is supplying to Ukraine are located, he said. Training of Ukrainian pilots for F-16s has already begun in Denmark.
The idea of a possible Russian invasion of Europe is therefore, for Putin, “a total absurdity which aims only to intimidate people into paying more money”. “It's not about propaganda, it's about what's really happening. They have to justify themselves, so they intimidate people with a potential Russian threat as they try to expand their dictatorship to the whole world.”
In the meantime, Pyongyang made the announcement todayvia the official KCNA news agency, che director of the Russian foreign intelligence services (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin was in North Korea earlier this week to meet with North Korean State Security Minister Ri Chang Dae, with whom he discussed “strengthening cooperation to address rising espionage activities and plots by hostile forces.”
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