People close to Russian President Vladimir Putin believe there is no evidence of Ukraine's involvement in the terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall concert hall, Bloomberg reported, citing four sources connected to the Kremlin. .
According to one of the interlocutors of the agency, Putin attended meetings where officials agreed that there was no terrorist connection with Ukraine. However, the Russian president still “intends to use the tragedy to try to unite Russians in the war with Ukraine”, writes Bloomberg.
Agency sources claim that Kremlin officials were "shocked" from the failure of Russian intelligence services to prevent the attack, which reportedly killed 139 people and injured another 182. Just days before the attack, the US warned Russia that there was a threat of a terrorist attack.
Almost none of the Russian political and business elite believe that Ukraine is behind the attack, according to the agency's interlocutors. An "Islamic State" cell called "Wilayat Khorasan" claimed responsibility for the Crocus attack. The authenticity of the terrorists' statements was confirmed by US officials.
Vladimir Putin, however, has already twice publicly tried to connect the terrorist attack with Ukraine. In his first speech, made 19 hours after the attack on "Crocus City Hall", he said that the perpetrators of the terrorist attack were detained on their way to Ukraine, where the Ukrainian side allegedly prepared a "window" for them. to cross the border. Belarusian President Lukashenko also disputed this claim, saying that the terrorists initially went to Belarus, not Ukraine.
Putin then said that it is necessary to answer the question “why did the terrorists try to go to Ukraine after committing a crime, who was waiting for them there”. According to Putin, despite the fact that the terrorist attack was carried out “by the hands of radical Islamists“, the US and Ukraine are involved. Russia has so far not provided any evidence of a Ukrainian trace in the attack. Kiev denies Putin's ridiculous claims.
The head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSS), Alexander Bortnikov, announced earlier today that in addition to the eleven people detained, suspected of directly carrying out and complicity in the attack in the Moscow region on March 22, there are others involved, whose number will continue to grow. "We think this is so," the director of the FSS, quoted by TASS, replied to a journalist's question whether the USA, Great Britain and Ukraine were behind the attack in Krasnogorsk.