From “Big Serge” on X. This guy always makes a lot of sense.
Several photos and videos of the Crocus terrorists being brutalized have been leaked. I’ll try to explain why this is being done (in my opinion).
Firstly, it is simply part of the social contract of the Putin era that terrorists are outside of the law. “We’ll kill them wherever we find them, if it’s in the outhouse, we’ll whack them in the outhouse” is one of the most famous expressions ever uttered by Putin, in reference to Islamist terrorists.
The modern Russian approach to the problem of terrorism is a tightly controlled State of Exception, in which none of the bureaucracy and legalism that are so characteristic of modern Russia are applied. They simply get killed. The ones who don’t get killed are either irrelevant or have information that needs to be extracted from them - again, without the application of any laws or rules. The terrorist has placed himself outside of civilized society, so he doesn’t get to enjoy its protections. You can agree or disagree or think that it’s barbaric, but this is simply the framework under which the Russian Federation handles the problem of terrorism.
Secondly, the minute it became known that the perpetrators were Tajiks, a circus kicked off among Russian media and politics to repeat the tired phrase that “terrorism has no ethnicity”, etc. Westerners are intimately familiar with this; “what about the backlash”, and so on. While causing interethnic strife is, indeed, an objective of the enemy, this REALLY PISSES PEOPLE OFF. These terrorists *do* have an ethnicity and none of them should have been in the country in the first place.
Thus, publicly brutalizing these animals is a gesture towards ordinary Russians, promising that while everyone keeps talking about how Tajiks are the nicest people ever & how some Muslim teenager saved hundreds of lives during the attack & whatnot, this display of “tolerance” and “multiculturalism” that has been deemed necessary to keep ethnic strife at bay, will NOT be applied to the perpetrators. One ear posted on the internet may have saved a thousand ears in real life.
Again, I’m not approving or disapproving here, I’m just describing the mechanisms as I understand them.
Big Serge has it about right.