President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi blame the Russian president Vladimir Putin “and other scoundrels” for the attempt to shift responsibility for the terrorist attack in Moscow onto the shoulders of Ukraine.
“The Russians have brought hundreds of thousands of their own terrorists to Ukraine to fight against us, and they don’t care what happens in their own country,” Zelenskyi said in a late-night video speech on Saturday.
According to Zelensky, Russian soldiers could have prevented any terrorist attack if they were fighting in Russia and not in Ukraine.
– When the attack happened, the coward Putin did not speak to his citizens but was silent for 24 hours, thinking about how to connect this with Ukraine, Zelenskyi said.
In fact, it took Putin a little less, 19 hours, to publicly comment on the attack. In his speech, he did not mention a single word that the extremist Islamist terrorist organization Isis was probably behind the attack, points out The New York Times.
Instead, Putin hinted that the captured attackers have connections to Ukraine and tried to escape there. Putin also described the attackers as having acted “like Nazis”, which he has also regularly accused the Ukrainian leadership of.
The Russian media accused Ukraine even more directly of organizing the attack, news site Meduzan according to information from the Kremlin’s instructions.
Ukraine denies the accusations, and according to the United States, among others, Ukraine had nothing to do with the attack.
Researchers: The attack was a humiliation and an opportunity for Putin
Military Intelligence Service of Ukraine Instead, HUR blamed The Russian administration that Russia itself had organized an attack against its own citizens in order to justify more drastic military measures in Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry described the claim as “crazy”.
Similar claims have been made over the years about the explosions of apartment buildings in Russia in 1999, which triggered the second Chechen war at the beginning of Putin’s reign.
Investigator Sam Greene The Center of European Policy Analysis think tank writes in the message service X that Russia is trying to use Friday’s attack for its political purposes in Ukraine, but that does not mean that the attack was staged.
Program director of the Foreign Policy Institute Arkady Moshes stated on Saturday in an interview with that by blaming Ukraine, the Kremlin is trying to divert attention from the fact that the Russian security service failed to prevent the attack.
The same analysis has been carried out on a larger scale. The terrorist attack that shocked the Russians is a politically sensitive issue for Putin, who last week nominated himself for a new presidential term and has profiled himself as a guarantor of stability and security.
– The elections showed a seemingly confident victory. Then suddenly it was followed by a spectacular humiliation, says a Russian political scientist interviewed by The New York Times Alexander Kynev.
In his speech on Tuesday, Putin ignored warnings from the United States that, according to its intelligence, a terrorist attack was being planned in Moscow. At the same time, the security services’ grip on dissidents has tightened even more.
– In a country where anti-terrorist special forces chase internet commentators, terrorists are allowed to operate freely, wrote a military expert living in exile Ruslan Leviev in X.
Just a few hours before Friday’s attack on the concert hall, the Russian authorities added the rainbow movement, which defends the rights of sexual and gender minorities, to their list of terrorists and extremists.
BBC: Isis released a video of the attack
On the night before Sunday, a video clip of a terrorist attack in a concert hall in Krasnogorsk near Moscow was published on the ISIS Telegram account. More specifically, Isis-K, the Afghan branch of the terrorist organization, is suspected of being responsible for the attack.
British Broadcasting Corporation BBC says that he verified the authenticity of the video, but did not publish the video containing raw violence according to it.
According to the BBC, the video lasts one and a half minutes, and the people appearing in it have been blurred and their voices have been changed to make identification difficult.
ISIS’s social media account has also published a photo of four masked men who are presented as the perpetrators of the attack.
At least 133 people died in the concert hall attack. The rescuers continued the clearing work in the ruins of the burnt and partially collapsed building on Sunday.
At the same time, the Russian armed forces continued airstrikes in different parts of Ukraine.
Sources: STT, Reuters, AFP