The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed on Wednesday that the Islamic State’s claim to having orchestrated last week’s Crocus City concert hall massacre in Moscow was “extremely hard to believe.”
Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who published a column this weekend linking the United States and Ukraine to the terrorist attack without evidence, described claims that the Sunni jihadist terror group, often referred to by the acronym ISIS, executed the attack as an attempt by Washington and the “collective West” to “pull an ace out of their sleeve” and protect Ukraine.
“In order to ward off suspicions from the collective West, they urgently needed to come up with something, so they resorted to ISIS, pulled an ace out of their sleeve, and literally a few hours after the terrorist attack, the Anglo-Saxon media began disseminating precisely these versions,” Zakharova told reporters, according to Reuters.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova (YURI KADOBNOV/AFP via Getty Images)
The Russian news agency Tass, translating Zakharova’s remarks at the same press briefing, said the diplomat directly accused the United States and Great Britain of being “behind all those ISIS-type structures.”
“I think they’ve boxed themselves into a corner, because as soon as they started screaming that it was ISIS, all those people who work in international relations, who are political scientists and experts, recalled and reminded everyone else what ISIS really is,” Zakharova asserted. “You are behind all those ISIS-type structures, you – the United States, Great Britain – yourselves brought them into being.”
On Friday night local time, gunmen stormed the Crocus City complex in the suburbs of Moscow, which includes a concert hall in addition to a mall and other attractions. The terrorists opened fire inside the concert hall, where fans were streaming in for a concert by the Piknik rock band, and targeted those attempting to run out into hallways and hiding in bathrooms. At least one of the attackers also reportedly detonated some form of explosive device, causing a massive fire responsible for a significant percentage of the known casualties. At press time, Russian authorities have confirmed 140 dead in the attack and another 360 injured, many seriously. Dozens remain missing or unidentified among the corpses.
A view shows the burnt-out Crocus City Hall concert venue in Krasnogorsk, outside Moscow, on March 26, 2024 (NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP).
The Islamic State has a history of attacking concerts in Europe, most prominently, the massacre of 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in 2015 and the killing of 22 people, including children, at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, Britain.
The Russian government has announced 11 arrests since the attack, four of them accused of directly participating in the attack. An account on the Telegram messaging application believed to belong to leaders of the Islamic State took responsibility for the massacre shortly after it occurred. The “Amaq news agency” has published multiple messages claiming the attack. The messages included photos of the attackers and video allegedly filmed by the terrorists during the slaughter.
“The attack in the Moscow region has been claimed by the Islamic State’s central leadership and its official propaganda apparatus,” Lucas Webber, cofounder of Militant.Wire.com, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in a report published on Wednesday. “The attack was almost certainly conducted by the Islamic State and the brutal and indiscriminate nature of the attack fits with the MO [modus operandi] of the Islamic State’s international terrorists and operations.”
American officials corroborated the claim, stating that they had intelligence also indicating that ISIS – and in particular, its Afghan wing, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) – was responsible.
Russian strongman Vladimir Putin confirmed that Moscow believes “radical Islamists” attacked the concert venue on Monday, but he implied that the government of Ukraine had supported them. On Saturday, Putin claimed that the gunmen had attempted to flee out of Russia into Ukraine, alleging that Ukrainian authorities had given them a “window” of time in which they could cross the border and receive safe haven. In his remarks on Monday, Putin claimed that Washington, through statements in support of the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility, was “trying to convince its satellites and other countries of the world that, according to their intelligence data, there is supposedly no Kiev trace in the Moscow terrorist attack.”
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Putin did not, however, definitively declare that a “Kiev trace” in the attack existed or that he had any evidence to think it did, outside of the initial allegation the gunmen were fleeing towards the Ukrainian border.
Unlike Putin, the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, directly blamed Ukraine for the attack, alongside the United States and Britain. Bortnikov claimed it was “true,” based on “factual information we have,” that the three countries worked together to attack Crocus City.
“The West and Ukraine are out to cause greater harm to our country,” the FSB chief claimed. He did not provide any public evidence for these claims, according to reports in Russian media on Tuesday.
The Russian ambassador to America, Anatoly Antonov, similarly claimed on Tuesday that the American government claiming to have information implicating the Islamic State was “extremely suspicious.”
“A simple question that any person, any Russian citizen could ask: why did these people, these bandits, attempt to escape from Moscow towards the Ukrainian border?” Antonov asked, referring to Putin’s claims.
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