Western states joined Ukraine in dismissing Kremlin suggestions that it played a role in last Friday’s attack at a concert hall in a Moscow suburb, as the warring neighbours traded missile strikes and Kyiv claimed to have hit two more Russian warships in Crimea.
Russian officials said on Sunday that 137 people had been killed and 180 injured when gunmen opened fire inside the Crocus City Hall before a rock concert on Friday evening. The attackers then set light to the building and part of its roof collapsed, complicating efforts to search for survivors and retrieve the dead from the ruins.
The Islamic State group, also known as Isis, took responsibility for what is its most deadly attack in Europe and the worst atrocity in Russia since the 2004 attack on a school in the southern town of Beslan. Islamic State also released videos filmed inside the concert hall during the massacre, further corroborating its claim to have carried out the atrocity.
Russian officials did not respond to the claim, however, and president Vladimir Putin said four gunmen involved in the attack were caught while “moving towards Ukraine where ... a window was prepared for them from the Ukrainian side to cross the state border.”
Russia’s FSB security service made the same claim, while Margarita Simonyan, a senior figure in Russian state propaganda outlets, said – using a derogatory term for Ukrainians – that they were to blame and not Isis.
“The perpetrators were chosen in such a way as to convince the pretty stupid global public that it was Isis,” she added, without offering any evidence for her claim.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy lambasted “Putin and other scoundrels” for trying to blame his country for the attack, while continuing an invasion that has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers and displaced millions of Ukrainians.
Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said: “Do not let Putin and his henchmen dupe you. Their only goal is to motivate more Russians to die in their senseless and criminal war against Ukraine, as well as to instil even more hatred for other nations, not just Ukrainians, but the entire West.”
US vice-president Kamala Harris said “there is no, whatsoever, any evidence” of Ukrainian involvement, and that Isis was “by all accounts responsible for what happened.”
British chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the UK and other European states should be “vigilant” for terrorist attacks, but dismissed Moscow’s insinuations about Kyiv.
“I think we have very little confidence in anything the Russian government says,” he told Sky News. “We know that they are creating a smokescreen of propaganda to defend an utterly evil invasion of Ukraine.”
Fighting continues in eastern Ukraine, but Kyiv says its forces have stabilised the front line since losing control of the town of Avdiivka in Donetsk region last month.
Ukraine said its missiles hit two Russian large landing ships and a communications centre for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on Sunday in Crimea, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed head of the Crimean port of Sevastopol, said it was “the most massive attack of recent times,” but did not confirm that naval targets had been hit.
Ukraine said it shot down 43 of 57 Russian missiles and drones fired early on Sunday, in the latest attack to inflict damage on country’s power grid.
