Until very recently, Russia's president Vladimir Putin will have been looking forward to the new year with considerable anticipation. Not only is his country due to host the Winter Olympics in February at Sochi, but Russia is about to assume the presidency of the G8 group of industrialized nations, where Putin can, to some considerable degree, set the agenda. The two suicide bombings in Volgograd will have dampened his mood in the run up to the prestigious Olympics. Meanwhile, Russia's own stuttering economic performance, may undermine Putin's desire to shine during his year-long G8 presidency. Though the Russian authorities are busy playing down the likelihood of further attacks, it is very likely that the suicide bombings in Volgograd's central railway station and on a crowded commuter bus, 24 hours later, are the opening moves in a deadly terrorist campaign aimed at the Sochi Winter games. Commentators have noted that Volgograd is only 700 kilometers from the Black Sea resort of Sochi, as if distance came in to it. Bombing by militants protesting Russian oppression in the Caucasus, particularly Chechnya and Dagestan, have taken place throughout the country, not least in Moscow. There, therefore, seems little reason to doubt that there will be some attempt to disrupt the Winter Olympics, if only because Putin has made no secret of how important he regards the Games in terms of his personal prestige. There is also every reason to believe that the Russian police and security forces are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that there will be a total clampdown in and around Sochi. Yet even the toughest security measures are not always proof against determined terrorists. And indeed the men behind this campaign may well have decided that they do not need to strike at Sochi itself, but rather to focus on targets in southern Russia, which may be less well-guarded because security personnel have been pulled in to Sochi to boost the protection there. To the dangers of violence must be added the risk of international protest. Putin may have imagined that he had cleared the political decks, by a series of significant prisoner releases. Greenpeace activists who had attempted to board an Arctic drilling rig, two members of the punk pop group Pussy Riot and former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky were all given presidential pardons. Yet it is now clear that a number of world leaders, including the French and German presidents, are intent on boycotting the Sochi Games, in protest at what they say is increasing repression by the Putin government. Dissent is ever less tolerated, controversial journalists have been murdered and newspapers and broadcasters have been told to toe the party line. Even the government's own Novosti Press agency, once highly regarded for its objective reporting, has effectively been shut down and restructured to resemble the fawning peddler of the party line that it used to be in the days of Soviet communism. No doubt anxious to equal, if not outdo, the Chinese in the splendor of their Beijing Olympics, Putin has poured huge amounts of money that the state treasury can arguably ill afford into making the Sochi Winter Olympics one of the crowning achievements of his political career. Unfortunately for him, it seems that a combination of terror attacks and international boycotts could very well cause heavy rain to fall on Putin's parade.
