‘This Really Looks Bad for Vladimir Putin’: Dougherty on Moscow’s Concert Hall Attack

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
BURNETT: “And jill, to the point where Matthew saying right, that Putin prides himself and maintains his power by maintaining security and now you have in the context of a war, mass mobilizations and many dead. One of the deadliest terror attacks in Russia in decades. Can you put that into perspective?”
DOUGHERTY: “Yeah, I think it‘s kind of complicated, Erin, because immediately people who know Russia are going to think of previous incidents, terrorist attacks that were used exploited by President Putin to take action could be cracking down on society more mobilization, whatever it is, and they go back and I covered all of them. 1999 back to 2002, 2004 et cetera. So that‘s one side of it, but the other side of it is this really looks bad for Vladimir Putin because it is a major attack and if this is happening on his watch when he is supposedly the protector of Russia, it just pales in comparison. So I think the most important thing now is that we have to watch is who are they going to blame for this? That‘s number one. And then blaming somebody, what would they do with that? How will they exploit and use that blame?”