Britain's foreign secretary, David Cameron, called the accusation "utter nonsense," while State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the claim was "simply not true." U.S. officials reiterated the contention that the Islamic State offshoot was solely responsible.

William Courtney, a former U.S. ambassador to the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Georgia, said the whole scenario amounted to a major blunder on the part of the 71-year-old Russian leader.

"I think this is a huge propaganda misstep, to somehow lay it off on Ukraine," said Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow with the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan think tank.

Putin, he said, "may have calculated that the embarrassment of not having prevented the attack is lessened because it is cast as a big Western effort, not just from tiny Tajikistan." But Courtney called it "a lie that was just too bold."

Even overt fabulism, though, is sometimes carefully calibrated. Courtney and others also noted a hallmark of Stalinist-style strongmen: to turn a particularly audacious falsehood — the so-called Big Lie — into a blunt-force assertion of power, daring anyone to question what their own eyes and ears tell them.

A key element of Putin's political brand over nearly a quarter-century in power has been his perceived ability to keep Russia safe, and the concert hall attack undercuts that notion.

The florid accusations against Ukraine and the West — combined with authorities' public flaunting of ferocious retaliation such as cutting off part of one suspect's ear — are probably calculated to divert attention from intelligence lapses that led to the attack, longtime Russia watchers said.

"On the whole, Russia's response to terrorism in the Putin years has been almost performatively brutal," analyst and journalist Edward Lucas wrote in an online article for the Center for European Policy Analysis. But he added that the seeming ease with which the attackers struck served to "dent the FSB's credibility at all levels."

The Crocus City Hall attack pointed up another uneasy truth: Enormous security resources in Russia are devoted to shutting down all forms of domestic dissent. A muted but determined public outpouring after the death in an Arctic prison last month of Alexei Navalny, Putin's fiercest and most vocal critic, was a reminder of continuing opposition to the Russian leader's rule.

With independent media voices silenced and civil society groups disbanded or driven into exile, any breath of criticism against Putin's government on virtually any subject — advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, for example — is branded as terrorist activity.

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