Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address on Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was seeking ways to divert blame for a massacre at a concert hall near Moscow on Friday.
He said it was “absolutely predictable” that Putin had remained silent for 24 hours before tying the shooting rampage to Ukraine and that the hundreds of thousands of “terrorists” Putin had sent to fight and be killed in the war in Ukraine would “definitely be enough” to stop terrorists at home.
He accused Putin of seeking to “shift the blame” onto Kyiv for the attack that killed at least 133 people, according to Russian authorities, with hundreds more wounded.
Kyiv has strongly denied any involvement in Friday’s assault on the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk, and the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate claimed responsibility.
“What happened yesterday in Moscow is obvious: Putin and the other scum are just trying to blame it on someone else,” Zelensky announced, after Putin said the suspects had been fleeing towards Ukraine.
“They always have the same methods,” Zelensky added.
In a televised address earlier Saturday, President Putin claimed the four gunmen arrested for the deadly attack were “travelling towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border”.
Kyiv has angrily dismissed the claims by the Russian leader, which come more than two years after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
“That low-life Putin, instead of dealing with his Russian citizens, addressing them, was silent for a day, thinking about how to bring it to Ukraine,” Zelensky said.
“Everything is absolutely predictable.”
The attack was the deadliest in Russia for almost two decades and the deadliest in Europe to have been claimed by IS.
Putin made no reference to the group’s claims of responsibility in his address.
The Russian president said authorities detained a total of 11 people in the attack, which left the venue on Moscow’s western rim a smoldering ruin. He called it “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four suspected gunmen as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.
Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant to an Islamic preacher via a messaging app and paid to take part in the raid.
Russian news reports identified the gunmen as citizens of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that is predominantly Muslim and borders Afghanistan. Up to 1.5 million Tajiks have worked in Russia and many have Russian citizenship.
US intelligence officials have confirmed the claim by the IS affiliate that it was responsible for the attack, a US official told The Associated Press.
US intelligence agencies gathered information in recent weeks that the IS branch was planning an attack in Moscow, and US officials privately shared the intelligence with Russian officials earlier this month, the US official said. The official was briefed on the matter but was not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence information and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Many Russian hard-liners called for a crackdown on Tajik migrants, but Putin appeared to reject the idea, saying “no force will be able to sow the poisonous seeds of discord, panic or disunity in our multi-ethnic society.”
He declared Sunday a day of mourning and said additional security measures were imposed throughout Russia.
The attack is a major embarrassment for the Russian leader and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.
Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the US warnings.
The assault came two weeks after the US Embassy in Moscow issued a notice urging Americans to avoid crowded places in view of “imminent” plans by extremists to target large Moscow gatherings, including concerts. Several other Western embassies repeated the warning. Earlier this week, Putin denounced the warning as an attempt to intimidate Russians.