Dn the speech given on February 29 before the Federal Assembly of Russia, before his reappointment for a fifth presidential term in a parody of an election, Vladimir Putin once again attacked the “so-called West” and to Westerners. “They want to reproduce in Russia what they have done in many other countries, including Ukraine”he assured: “Sowing discord among us and weakening us from within. » International terrorism had only been mentioned once – and then again, in the past tense.
Less than a month later, the master of the Kremlin can count on media at his command to try to cover the devastating attack perpetrated on March 22 in a concert hall in the suburbs of Moscow by the Islamic State organization in Khorasan (EI-K) in the only box provided for threats: the one which necessarily leads to the involvement of Ukraine.
This bloodbath nevertheless constitutes a dramatic reminder of the resilience of an ideology which survived the destruction of the “caliphate” installed in the Middle East in the abandoned spaces of States weakened by civil wars born of their barbarism, in Syria, or the consequences of a foreign invasion, in Iraq. Jihadism is totally indifferent to the new course of history that opened on February 24, 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine decided by Vladimir Putin.
The return of conventional war between States on European soil has set in motion heavy mechanisms of strategic alliances and the remobilization of a European defense industry atrophied by more than three decades of illusion of perpetual peace and sweet trade. , during which armed conflicts were often limited to sending special forces against distant militias. The invasion of Ukraine, as subsequently the war in Gaza, also highlighted the isolation of a Western camp in the face of a group of countries imperfectly summarized by the expression “Global South”, convinced that the principles of first are of variable geometry.
A formidable problem
The attack of March 22 superimposes on these fault lines an analysis grid that has no use for them. A publication of the Islamic State (IS) organization, Al Nabahad summarized Russian aggression in 2022 as “war between crusaders” while another from the franchise that claimed responsibility for the Moscow terrorist attack, Voice of Khurasanreturned back to back “America (…), a furious enemy of Islam in the last century »And ” Russia “Who “did not show that she was different”.
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