March 23, 2024
Blame game: Kyiv denies involvement in Moscow terrorist attack
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has insisted that Kyiv had nothing to do with the deadly terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall on Friday night.
“Let’s be straight about this: Ukraine had absolutely nothing to do with these events,” Podolyak said in a video message posted on Telegram. “We have a full-scale, all-out war with the regular Russian army and with the Russian Federation as a country. Everything will be decided on the battlefield.”
The Islamic State affiliate ISIS-K has officially claimed responsibility for the attack which left at least 100 concert-goers dead, a claim which the United States has said it deems credible.
Nevertheless, voices in Moscow have already begun to point the finger at Kyiv.
According to the Russian news agency Interfax, the Russian security service FSB has claimed that four suspected perpetrators apprehended on Saturday morning were heading towards the Ukrainian border, where they were said to have “contacts.”
The Russian RIA news agency quoted Russian lawmaker and former general Andrei Kartapolov as saying that, if Ukraine is found to be behind the attack, there should be “a clear answer on the battlefield.”
Ukrainian intelligence spokesman Andriy Yusov dismissed the suggestions as “absurd,” telling the BBC that it “would suggest they were stupid or suicidal” since the Ukraine-Russia border is an active frontline “full of military and special services personnel.”
On Friday night, Ukrainian military intelligence had suggested that Moscow itself was behind the attack which it described as “a planned and deliberate provocation by the Russian special services on [Vladimir] Putin’s orders” in order to “further escalate and expand the war” with Ukraine.
While there is no indication as yet that this is true either, the Kremlin does have form for such “false flag” operations. In September 1999, over 350 people were killed in a series of appartment bombings, including in Moscow, which then prime minister Putin blamed without evidence on Chechen militants as a pretext to launch the Second Chechen War.
