Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Battleground Ukraine with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Well, a week after the murderous attack by Islamic extremists,

some of the Russian citizens, as it turns out, on a concert hall crowd in Moscow, Russia is still

in shock and in mourning. This was not just a terror attack. The consequences are potentially

very fateful indeed, both for Vladimir Putin and his security state,

for the Russian people, but also for Ukraine. This is starting to look like a hinge moment in the

conflict. We'll be digging into what all that means and where things are going, and to help us,

we have with us our friend Alan Phillips, veteran Russia Russia, watcher and historian, who we'll be

talking to shortly.

Listeners will remember us reporting last week that one of the first things Putin did after

his overwhelming election victory was to address the senior staff of the gigantic FSB state

security organisation. He lauded them as a key guarantor of Russian security and sovereignty.

How utterly hollow that now sounds. The Russian security state is enormous with nearly a million

policemen, 340,000 national guards and 100,000 spies. Yet it failed miserably to carry out its primary duty

to protect Russian citizens. Instead, its energies have been spent on beating up demonstrators,

harassing gays, and murdering Putin's peaceful opponents. Their uselessness was demonstrated

with their delusional claims that Ukrainian resistance would collapse within a matter of days, and then their failure to predict the Brigodian mutiny last summer.

The FSB is the state within a state on which Putin's power ultimately rests. We'll be asking whether their failure to identify and deal with the internal threat

from Islamic terrorists, despite their being alerted to the danger by American intelligence,

may prove to be one betrayal too far of his own people by Putin.

The initial silence from Putin after the events at the Crocus City Hall on the outskirts

of Moscow that

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