Putin points to links to Ukraine of perpetrators of the Moscow attack | Russia

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The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, made the first public statements about the attack that caused at least 115 deaths on Friday at the Crocus City Hall concert hall in Moscow. “The Russian Federation will identify and punish all those who prepared the terrorist attack,” he assured.

The perpetrators of the attack, Putin said, “tried to hide and were heading towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary information, the Ukrainian side had prepared a window for them to cross the border.”

The journalist from Wall Street Journal Yaroslav Trofimov commented on Putin’s statement, recalling that “Russia’s border with government-controlled parts of Ukraine is by far one of the most difficult to cross, with minefields on one side and on the other, FSB agents [Serviço Federal de Segurança] looking for infiltrators, drones and other surveillance mechanisms everywhere”, in other words, “the worst place for fugitives”, he wrote on the social network X.

Academic Timothy Snyder also questioned, on the same network, why, “among the 20 thousand kilometers of borders that Russia has, [os fugitivos] would they go to the only place where the Russian Army and security forces are most concentrated?” Furthermore, Snyder says that if it is true, as Putin claimed, that the suspects were stopped in Bryansk, that would point to yet another direction: Belarus.

Trofimov added that the Belarusian ambassador to Moscow was initially cited by average Russian state officials said Belarus had helped Russian security services prevent the attackers from fleeing across the border between the two countries.

The idea that the four attackers would try to flee to Ukraine “is not a very convincing allegation”, he also commented. the journalist from Economist Oliver Carrollwhich covers Russian issues. Still, Carroll noted that Putin has not, at least yet, directly blamed Ukraine.

German magazine journalist Der Spiegel Christian Esch also emphasizes that Putin made a careful statement, not blaming anyone for the attack itself, and, when he referred to the alleged escape to Ukraine, he said that it was a “preliminary” information. However, Esch considered it a bad omen that, so many hours after a credible Daesh claim, Putin did not refer to jihadist terrorism.

Death toll expected to rise, says governor

The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, warned however that the death toll is expected to increase “significantly”, and that rescuers will still have “several days” of work ahead of them in the rubble of the building, where the attackers caused a fire, in addition of having shot many people.

The death toll from the attack, claimed by Daesh through its official channels, was 133, but this morning the teams “entered the place where the most terrible things happened”, Andrei Vorobyov told journalists, according to the broadcaster Al Jazeera.

On Telegram, Vorobyov had already warned that work at the site would “continue for at least a few more days”.

There will still be 121 people hospitalized, with around 60, including children, in serious or very serious condition, according to the British daily The Guardian.

Images from surveillance cameras show moments of the attack, and some people who survived told what they saw: “They were walking and shooting at everyone, mechanically, in silence”, Anastasia Rodionova told the BBC. Another spectator said that the attackers “threw some Molotov cocktails, and everything started to burn”.

The Associated Press reported how many people brought flowers and teddy bears to the site of the attack, making impromptu memorials.

Some dared to ask questions. “There are cameras everywhere to see which opposition people are going to a demonstration, and they also stop them on the subway”, declared Ekaterina, without giving her surname, to the agency’s correspondent in Moscow. “But there is no basic security at a public event.”

Like the Reichstag fire?

On Friday night, Carroll wrote that who was responsible is not the central question, but rather how the event will be used, remembering the Reichstag fire, taken advantage of by Hitler’s Nazis to blame the communists and gain emergency powers.

Indications that Russia was following this path appeared even before Putin’s statement. “All four terrorists” were arrested while on their way to the border with Ukraine, according to the FSB, adding that they had contacts in the country, according to Reuters.

“Now we know in which country these damned bandits planned to hide – in Ukraine”, declared the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Maria Zakharova, on Telegram, cited by the British agency.

Deputy Andrei Kartapolov said that in the event of Ukrainian involvement, Russia should respond in a “clear and concrete” way.

Also on Iran after the suicide bombing that hit a ceremony marking the anniversary of the death of General Qassem Soleimani.

“Originally, Tehran claimed that Israel was behind the attack, but in the following days, it revealed that the individuals/network they detained were from ISKP [Daesh-K] and they were linked to Afghanistan.”

Ukraine has vehemently denied having any involvement in the attack, and Russia has previously been the scene of terrorist attacks by Daesh – against which it fought when it became involved in the civil war in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad in 2015.

And a previous US warning of potential extremist attacks in Moscow also pointed to an Islamist attack. A few days ago, Putin himself spoke of this warning, considering it a “provocation”: “This all seems like blackmail and the intention to intimidate and destabilize our society”, he declared then.

The RIA Novosti agency this Saturday quoted a security source as saying that the US warning about potential attacks was “nothing specific”.

The US says the group responsible for the attack was Daesh-Khorasan, or Daesh-K, a branch of the self-proclaimed Islamic State created by Pakistani fighters who, months after announcing the creation of the Daesh-dominated “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq in 2014, they left for Afghanistan.

Daesh-K had already been considered by Islamist terrorism expert Peter R. Neumann as probably the only branch of Daesh “that would currently have the capacity to carry out a large and coordinated attack in the West”.

In December 2023, four members of the group were arrested in Austria, accused of planning attacks on churches at Christmas time, with warnings also in Germany, where Cologne Cathedral was evacuated.

Daesh communications specialist Pawel Wokjcik said, quoted by the British daily The Guardianthat Daesh-K had recently adopted “a strong anti-Russian narrative in its propaganda production”.