Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for a day of mourning on Sunday, March 24, in the wake of the horrific and bloody attack on the Moscow concert hall where at least 130 people lost their lives.
ISIS-K has already taken responsibility for the attack. Their media arm, the Aamaq news agency, posted bodycam footage from some of the attackers.
It doesn't matter that ISIS-K has taken responsibility for the terrorist attack. Both Russia and Ukraine are milking the attack for all that it's worth, seeking to blame the other.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who has threatened to nuke Ukraine, threatened dire consequences if it was discovered Ukraine was behind the attack.
“If it is established that these are terrorists of the Kyiv regime, all of them must be found and ruthlessly destroyed as terrorists,” Medvedev wrote. “Official representatives of the state” wouldn’t be immune, he added.
Meanwhile, Ukraine fired back, alleging that "Putin's Special Services" had a hand in the attack.
“The public execution of people in Moscow should be understood as Putin’s threat of an even greater escalation and expansion of the war,” Ukraine's HUR military intelligence agency warned. “Putin has extensive experience in organizing such terrorist attacks to strengthen his own power,” the agency added.
The Russian federal police force, the FSB, was first out of the block claiming that the shooters had a "link" to Ukraine and that the gunmen were headed for the Ukrainian border when they were apprehended.
In a televised address, Putin said the 11 people detained in connection with the attack were heading for Ukraine.
"They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border," he said.
Neither Putin nor the FSB publicly presented any proof of a link with Ukraine, with which Russia has been waging war since Moscow invaded 25 months ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said it was typical of Putin and "other thugs" to seek to divert blame.
Ukrainian military intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Reuters: "Ukraine was of course not involved in this terror attack. Ukraine is defending its sovereignty from Russian invaders, liberating its own territory and is fighting with the occupiers’ army and military targets, not civilians."
Islamic State has a strong motivation to strike Russia, which intervened against it in Syria's civil war in 2015, and security analysts said the IS claim seemed plausible as it fit the pattern of past attacks.
Later in his speech, he fingered "international terrorism" as the culprit.
"All the perpetrators, organizers, and those who ordered this crime will be justly and inevitably punished. Whoever they are, whoever is guiding them," Putin said. "We will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this strike against Russia, against our people."
But Russian propagandists are still fanning the flames against Ukraine.
“It was not Isis. It was the Ukrainians,” Margarita Simonyan, the propagandist editor of state media channel Russia Today, wrote. “The perpetrators were chosen in such a way that they would convince the dumb global public that it was Isis.”
That's very dumb of ISIS-K to post bodycam footage of their fighters murdering Russians.
Ukraine gave back as good as they were getting
“Miserable Putin, instead of attending to his own citizens of Russia, addressing them, remained silent for a day thinking about how to link this with Ukraine”, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his Saturday night address.
He also suggested Russia could have stopped the attack had its security forces not been waging war against Ukraine. “Those hundreds of thousands of Russians who are now killing on Ukrainian land would surely be enough to stop any terrorists,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the US National Security Council said Isis bore “sole responsibility for this attack”. “There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” Adrienne Watson said.
It's entirely possible that ISIS-K had help from nationalist Ukraine militias of which there are several without the knowledge or support of the Kyiv government. It's also possible that Ukraine turned a blind eye to the ISIS-K threat that Russia was too busy smashing and killing Ukraine to pay much attention to.
But when it comes to terrorism, sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one.
