President Vladimir Putin on Monday, March 25, acknowledged for the first time that "radical Islamists" were behind last week's attack on a concert hall outside Moscow, but suggested they were linked to Ukraine somehow, in a possible bid to limit the responsibility of the Russian security services.
In his latest comments on the attack on Monday, Putin acknowledged that Islamists had carried out the attack: "We know that the crime was committed by the hands of radical Islamists, whose ideology the Islamic world itself has been fighting for centuries," Putin said in a televised meeting.
But the Russian leader said "many questions" remained unanswered, including why the attackers tried to flee to Ukraine – a claim that Kyiv has rejected. "Of course, it is necessary to answer the question, why after committing the crime the terrorists tried to go to Ukraine? Who was waiting for them there?" Putin asked.
"The US [...] is trying to convince its satellites that there is not a Kyiv trace in the act of terror and that members of ISIS carried out the attack," Putin earlier told a security meeting. "This atrocity may be just a link in a whole series of attempts by those who have been at war with our country since 2014," he said, referring to Ukraine and its allies.
IS claimed the attack Friday evening on the Crocus City Hall concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow that left at least 139 people dead, with Western governments also saying the extremist group appeared to be responsible.
"We know who carried out the attack. We want to know who the mastermind was," said Putin, repeating the allegation that the perpetrators tried to flee to Ukraine after the attack.
Ukraine has already vehemently denied any involvement in the attack, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying Putin was always seeking to blame "someone else."
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday warned Moscow against any "exploitation" of the attack, saying it would be "cynical and counterproductive for Russia to use this context to try and turn it against Ukraine." He said it was a branch of Islamic State that "planned the attack and carried it out," adding this outfit had also plotted attacks in France.
In early March the US had warned Russia of a risk of an attack, a message Moscow appears to have batted away.
Many commentators on pro-Kremlin media, however, were in no doubt where to lay the blame. "We are not talking about ISIS here. It was the khokhly," said the editor-in-chief of the RT channel Margarita Simonyan, using a term used pejoratively in Russia to denote Ukrainians.
Mass-circulation newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda even quoted one commentator as blaming the "British special services and the Americans and Ukrainians" for the attack.