When Russia’s nuclear submarine the Kursk sank above the Arctic Circle in August 2000 during President Vladimir Putin’s first year in office, it took four days for the new Russian leader to make a public statement on a tragedy that killed 118 sailors.
Two decades later and fresh off a stage-managed reelection to his fifth presidential term, Putin continues to show a reticent public approach to national crises.
It took Putin more than 18 hours after a March 22 terrorist attack on a Moscow-region concert hall that killed scores to make a public statement.
When he finally spoke about the attack, Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in years, on March 23, Putin appeared to suggest Ukrainian involvement but provided no evidence to back up the claim, saying in a recorded address that four suspected gunmen who were detained had “tried to hide and were moving toward Ukraine.”
The Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack, and Ukrainian officials denied any involvement even before Putin’s statement.
Putin’s initial public silence echoes his earlier vanishing acts in the immediate aftermath of major terrorist attacks during his nearly 24 years in power.
When a packed Moscow theater was attacked by terrorists in October 2002, Putin made his first public comment on the siege only the following day.
After terrorists seized a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan on September 1, 2004, Putin made his first public statement only a day later during a meeting in Moscow with Jordan's King Abdullah.
People look for their relatives among dead bodies following the bloody Beslan hostage siege in Russia's North Ossetia region in 2004.
On the day that standoff at the school came to a violent end that left more than 300 dead, more than half of them children, Putin did not make a public statement. Putin finally made an early morning visit to Beslan and visited victims in the hospital the day after the tragedy, and made a televised address later that day.
Silence Is 'Putin's Style'
“Silence is generally Putin’s style,” Kirill Martynov, editor in chief of the independent Russian-language news outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe, said in a March 23 interview with Current Time.
“He tends to shift responsibility to local authorities and then declare that he took care of everything. But it seems to me the main reason is ideological,” Martynov said. “This terrorist attack, in fact, refutes the entire picture of propaganda that they have been trying to feed Russians over the past years.”
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Martynov added that in the nearly 24 hours before Putin finally addressed the attack publicly, even his supporters might have been asking themselves: “Where is our president who just won an election with 87 percent of the votes? What, he has nothing to say about what happened, he can’t find any words?”
The independent Russian-language news site The Insider cited multiple unidentified sources in Russian state television as saying that government networks in the immediate hours after the attack had prepared several times to air a statement from Putin but never received it.
Following the March 22 attack, Putin’s government initially left it to Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova to relay publicly that Putin wished a quick recovery to the injured victims and expressed gratitude to medical responders.