President Putin Acknowledges Concert Attack Was Islamist Terror, But Still Claims Ukraine Was Involved

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - MARCH 20 (RUSSIA OUT) Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures during hi
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Oliver JJ Lane

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed Friday’s deadly terrorist attack at a rock concert that killed at least 137, saying for the first time it was the work of “radical Islamists”.

The Crocus concert attack in a suburb of Moscow on Friday that killed 137, injured over 180, and caused massive fire damage to the city hall where terrorists opened fire with rifles and threw fire-bombs was the work of Islamists, the Russian government has conceded. The United States, which appears to have had some foreknowledge of the terror plot asserted quickly after Friday’s attack that it was work of radical Islamists, and an Islamic State cadet-branch claimed responsibility.

But until now, Russia has resisted accepting the classification, and has emphasised its belief that pointing the finger at religious extremists was actually an attempt by the U.S. to “bail out” the true culprit, Ukraine.

While Russia continues with that position, President Vladimir Putin has now said his government has discovered the alleged perpetrators are Islamists. Distinguishing such radicals from the mainstream of Islam — there is a large Muslim minority in Russia in regions like Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan — Putin said on Monday evening: “We know that the crime was committed by the hands of radical Islamists, whose ideology the Islamic world itself has been fighting for centuries”.

While Russia has battled Islamist terror for decades, Putin questioned whether Muslims would want to attack Russia anyway, claiming Russia “stands for a fair solution to the escalating Middle East conflict”. The claim is a bold one: Russia has been involved in the bloody conflict in Syria for almost ten years and can’t claim to have made no enemies in doing so. Besides, Putin Said, real Muslims wouldn’t “commit grave atrocities and crimes during the holy month of Ramadan”.

The United States has been active in trying to cover up the true motivating force behind the attack, the Russian President asserted, claiming the Islamist terrorists were really working in conjunction with the Ukrainians. He said, per Russian state media: “We also see that the United States, through various channels, is 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, that the bloody terrorist attack was carried out by followers of Islam, members of the ISIS organization banned in Russia.”

Those remarks follow others by one of Russia’s top diplomats today, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Maria Zakharova, who said the Islamic State was being used as a “scarecrow” to “bail out” Ukraine by the United States.

Russia’s former President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also made such claims, and said if the Kremlin’s assertions that Kyiv was secretly arming Islamist terrorists to attack Russia could be proven, then President Zelensky and his colleagues “must be tracked down and ruthlessly eliminated as terrorists.” The rhetoric from Medvedev is typical, and even comparatively mild compared to some of his recent threats against Western nations, which generally involve nuclear weapons on foreign capitals in revenge for their sending aid to Kyiv.

This story is developing, more follows

 

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