MOSCOW – Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on March 27 that it was “extremely hard to believe” that terror group ISIS would have had the capacity to launch the attack on a Moscow concert hall on March 22 that killed at least 143 people.
Ms Zakharova repeated Moscow’s assertions, for which it has not yet provided evidence, that Ukraine was behind the Crocus City Hall attack, the deadliest Russia has suffered in 20 years.
Russia’s Emergencies Ministry published a list of names showing that 143 people had died in the mass shooting. Earlier official tallies had put the death toll at 139.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the massacre and US officials say they have intelligence showing it was carried out by the network’s Afghan branch, ISIS-Khorasan. Ukraine has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack.
But Ms Zakharova said the West had rushed to pin responsibility on ISIS as a way of deflecting blame from Ukraine and the Western governments that support Kyiv.
“To ward off suspicions from the collective West, they urgently needed to come up with something, so they resorted to ISIS, pulled an ace out of their sleeve, and literally a few hours after the terrorist attack, the Anglo-Saxon media began disseminating precisely these versions,” she said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Islamist militants carried out the attack, but suggested it was to Ukraine’s benefit and that Kyiv may have played a role.
He has said that someone on the Ukrainian side had prepared a “window” for the gunmen to escape across the border before they were captured in western Russia on March 22.
On March 25, however, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said the gunmen had initially sought to cross into his country before turning away and heading towards Ukraine once they realised that crossings into Belarus had been sealed.
The director of Russia’s Federal Security Service said on March 25 that he believed Ukraine, along with the United States and Britain, was involved in the Moscow attack.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron responded on social media platform X, saying: “Russia’s claims about the West and Ukraine on the Crocus City Hall attack are utter nonsense.”
The head of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate, Mr Kyrylo Budanov, told a security conference in Kyiv that he believed the Russian authorities had known about preparations for a major attack since at least mid-February.
Mr Budanov, whose comments were reported in Ukrainian media, said the authorities chose to say nothing either because they underestimated the scale of the attack, or to pin the blame on Ukraine and proceed with the dismissal of officials.
After the shooting, a US official said Washington had warned Moscow in recent weeks of the possibility of an attack. REUTERS
