Moscow attackers were helped by Ukraine, claims Putin

The four men behind a deadly attack on a concert hall in Moscow were being helped by Ukraine, Vladimir Putin claimed on Saturday.

Islamist terror group Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the brutal assault on Friday evening, which saw gunmen rampage through Crocus City Hall with automatic weapons and bombs, killing at least 133 people. 

Islamic State released a video of what it claimed was the attack on the concert hall. The one-minute, 31-second video showed a close-up view of one of the gunmen opening fire on several people as he entered what appeared to be the venue.

The United States has also attributed the attack to IS. But Putin ignored these statements and instead likened the attackers to Nazis, Kremlin propaganda code for its Ukrainian enemies.

In a televised speech on Saturday announcing that the alleged perpetrators had been caught, the Russian president sought to tie Kyiv to the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia for years.

“All four perpetrators were found and detained. They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, previously, a window had been prepared for them to cross the border,” Putin said in a five-minute video address.

“We are faced not just with a cynically planned terrorist attack, but with a prepared mass murder of defenceless people,” he said. “Like the Nazis once did, they planned to stage a show execution.”

“We will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists,” he added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday in his nightly video address that Putin was seeking ways to divert blame for a massacre at a concert hall near Moscow on Friday.

“It’s obvious that Putin and other thugs are just trying to blame someone else,” Mr Zelensky said. “Their methods are always the same. We’ve seen it all before, destroyed buildings and shootings and explosions. And they always find someone else to blame.”

He added: “They have brought hundreds of thousands of their own terrorists here, on Ukrainian land, to fight against us, and they don’t care about what is happening inside their own country,” he said.

“Yesterday, as all this happened, instead of dealing with his fellow Russian citizens, addressing them, the wimp Putin was silent for a full 24 hours, thinking about how to tie this to Ukraine. It’s all absolutely predictable.”

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Mr Zelensky was “the only head of state crazy enough to blame Russia for the terrorist attack”.

Ukraine and its Western allies were quick to deny any links to the attack on Friday, but the fear in Kyiv is that Russia will use the attack to escalate its aggression against Ukraine and to recruit more soldiers for its depleted army.

The US said “Ukraine had absolutely nothing to do with these events”, while Kyiv went further and accused Russian special forces of staging the attack as a provocation.

“The Russian regime has a long history of bloody provocations by its special services,” the Ukrainian foreign ministry said in a statement. “There are no red lines for Putin’s dictatorship. It is ready to kill its own citizens for political purposes.”

Monday has been declared a day of mourning in Moscow and officials appealed for people to give blood for the dozens of badly injured survivors of the attack, aimed at a concert by the Soviet-era rock group Picnic.

Electronic billboards around Russia showed a flickering candle against a black background telling people to mourn.

But in Moscow’s corridors of power, the wheels of Russia’s propaganda machine were busily turning.

Margarita Simonyan, the boss of one of the Kremlin’s biggest TV stations, accused Western intelligence agencies of spreading disinformation to deflect attention from Kyiv’s involvement.

“This is not Islamic State. This is khokhol,” she said, using a derogatory Russian slur for Ukrainians. “Even before the arrests, even before the names of the perpetrators, Western intelligence services began to try to convince the population that it was Islamic State.”

The head of the Russian parliament’s defence committee described Ukraine as the attack’s main “stakeholder”, while the Federal Security Service (FSB) said earlier that the assailants had “contacts” in Ukraine, without providing further details.

Other officials pledged fierce retaliation if a link between Ukraine and the terrorist attack could be proved.

Konstantin Malofeev, the Russian billionaire owner of a pro-war media group linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, said a nuclear strike should be launched against Ukraine.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s National Security Council, said: “Terrorists understand only retaliatory terror.”

Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, accused Ukraine and its Western allies of sponsoring attacks in Russia.

“Now we know in which country these bloody bastards planned to hide from persecution, Ukraine, the same country which for 10 years has been turned via Western liberal regimes into a centre of terrorism,” she said.

The Kommersant newspaper also quoted FSB sources as saying that they were looking for fighters linked to the pro-Ukraine Russian Volunteer Corps who they accused of dressing up – possibly with fake beards – to mount the attack.

The Russian Volunteer Corps has attacked southern Russia from Ukraine regularly over the past year.

Photos and footage that appeared online on Saturday about the alleged attackers did not carry any direct evidence that Ukraine was involved, however.

Telegram channels linked to the Russian security services released videos of four suspects captured by police after a car chase reportedly ended in a shootout at a checkpoint south-west of Moscow in Bryansk. The city is close to Ukraine’s north-eastern border and Belarus.

In one of the videos, one of the captives shivers as he is held in a stress position and surrounded by Russian security agents.

‘Attacker paid by a preacher’

Speaking in poor Russian, he confesses to attacking the concert hall because he had been paid “by a preacher”.

“Money. I did it for money,” he said, gasping for breath. “I’ve only received half of it.”

Russian media reported that the suspects were from Tajikistan, a Muslim Central Asian country – formerly part of the Soviet Union – that borders Afghanistan, where IS is active.

In another video, a second suspect is shown speaking via a Tajik translator.

Passports from Tajikistan were also reportedly found in the getaway car, according to a Russian lawmaker.

Kremlin deflecting security failings

The interior ministry said all four of the alleged gunmen were “foreign nationals” but did not specify from where. Russia’s security services have said that they have arrested 11 suspects in total over the attack.

Western analysts said the attack was likely to have been a genuine Islamic terrorist attack and that the Kremlin was now trying to score propaganda points by deflecting from its security failings.

“The attack in Moscow was an act of terrorism, full stop,” said Samuel Greene, a professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London. “Having failed to prevent it, the Kremlin will likely look for a way to use it, which may well mean blaming Ukraine.”

Other analysts said that the attack had undermined one of the Kremlin’s consistent core messages that ordinary Russians can depend on it for their security, embarrassing Putin who now wanted to shift the blame onto his most sophisticated enemies – Ukraine and its Western allies.

Hanna Notte, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic Studies think tank in Washington, said that Kremlin propaganda already portrays IS as a US-backed project and that conflating it with Ukrainian security operations was straightforward.

“Russia has claimed for two years that the US is sending Islamic State fighters from Syria to join Ukraine’s army,” she said. “With Islamic State claiming the attack, Russian attempts to establish some Ukraine connection might not end.”