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Tag: Putin
Putin says ‘radical Islamists’ carried out Moscow terror attack
Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed on Monday that a terrorist attack outside Moscow that left almost 140 people dead “was committed by radical Islamists.”
Putin had previously suggested that Ukraine might have some connection with the bloody terrorist attack, without providing any evidence. Ukrainian officials have vehemently denied any connection to the attack.
In a review of the attack, Putin again on Monday claimed the suspected attackers were captured while trying to flee toward Ukraine. He claimed that it now must be clarified why the terrorists wanted to escape to Ukraine after the bloody deed – “and who was expecting them there.”
An offshoot of the Islamic State terrorist group, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) which is based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the brutal attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue on Friday night, and published videos of the mass shooting to bolster its claim.
Putin on Monday said investigators still needed to answer several questions.
“How do radical Islamists who claim to be devout Muslims and profess so-called pure Islam come to commit serious atrocities and crimes during the holy month of Ramadan, which is sacred to all Muslims?” he asked.
It also remains to be seen “whether radical and terrorist Islamic organizations are really interested in attacking Russia, which today stands for a just solution to the escalating Middle East conflict,” he added.
Meanwhile, the confirmed death toll from the attack has risen to 139, according to Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova on Monday evening. She said that the bodies of 75 of the dead have been identified so far.
Golikova said that 93 people, including five children, are still being treated in hospital for injuries in the attack.
Putin blames Ukraine for deadly Moscow attack
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Putin to meet with security officials on extra measures post attack
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday plans to discuss additional measures with his security officials following the terrorist attack near Moscow that left 137 dead, the Interfax agency reported, citing Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The meeting will also address the question of how victims and their families can be supported, Peskov said.
The Kremlin spokesman refused to comment on the numerous reports about the alleged torture of four detained suspects by Russian security forces.
In response to a journalist who pointed to the men’s clearly visible injuries in the courtroom and to videos of torture, Peskov merely said: “I will leave this question unanswered.”
He did not address the background to the attack on the Crocus City Hall concert hall on Friday, but referred to information from the Russian law enforcement authorities.
The Islamic State terrorist militia has claimed responsibility several times for the attack, a claim Western security authorities and experts consider credible.
Putin and other Russian representatives stated without providing any evidence that Ukraine was allegedly involved in the crime. The Ukrainian leadership has adamantly denied any responsibility for the attack.
4 accused in Russia concert hall attack appear in court, apparently badly beaten
Moscow — Four men accused of staging the Russia concert hall attack that killed more than 130 people appeared before a Moscow court Sunday showing signs of severe beatings as they faced formal terrorism charges. One appeared to be barely conscious during the hearing.
A court statement said two of the suspects accepted their guilt in the assault after being charged in the preliminary hearing, though the men’s condition raised questions about whether they were speaking freely. There had been earlier conflicting reports in Russian media outlets that said three or all four men admitted culpability.
Moscow’s Basmanny District Court formally charged Dalerdzhon Mirzoyev, 32; Saidakrami Rachabalizoda, 30; Shamsidin Fariduni, 25; and Mukhammadsobir Faizov, 19, with committing a group terrorist attack resulting in the death of others. The offense carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The court ordered that the men, all of whom are citizens of Tajikistan, be held in pre-trial custody until May 22.
Russian media had reported that the men were tortured during interrogation by the security services, and Mirzoyev, Rachabalizoda and Fariduni showed signs of heavy bruising, including swollen faces,
Rachabalizoda also had a heavily bandaged ear. Russian media said Saturday that one of the suspects had his ear cut off during interrogation. The Associated Press couldn’t verify the report or the videos purporting to show this.
The fourth suspect, Faizov, was brought to court from a hospital in a wheelchair and sat with his eyes closed throughout the proceedings. He was attended by medics while in court, where he wore a hospital gown and trousers and was seen with multiple cuts.
Court officials said Mirzoyev and Rachabalizoda admitted guilt for the attack after being charged.
The hearing came as Russia observed a national day of mourning of the attack Friday on the suburban Crocus City Hall concert venue that killed at least 137 people.
Rescuers continued to search the damaged building and the death toll rose as more bodies were found as family and friends of some of those still missing waited for news. Moscow’s Department of Health said Sunday it had begun identifying the bodies of those killed via DNA testing, adding the process would take at least two weeks.
The attack, which has been claimed by an ISIS affiliate, is the deadliest on Russian soil in years.
Finger pointing in full force
Russian authorities arrested the four suspected attackers Saturday, with seven more detained on suspicion of involvement in the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an address to the nation Saturday night.
Putin appears to be trying to tie Ukraine to the attack, something its government firmly denies.
He called the attack “a bloody, barbaric terrorist act” and said Russian authorities captured the four as they were trying to escape to Ukraine through a “window” prepared for them on the Ukrainian side of the border.
A United States intelligence official told CBS News the U.S. has intelligence confirming that ISIS was responsible and U.S. intelligence has no reason to doubt those claims.
The U.S. Embassy in Russia had also previously advised Americans to stay away from concert venues because of the potential of a terrorist attack. The U.S. intelligence official confirmed to CBS News that the U.S. provided intelligence to Russia regarding the potential for an attack, under the intelligence community’s Duty to Warn requirement.
“ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
Russian media broadcast videos that apparently showed the detention and interrogation of the suspects, including one who told the cameras he was approached by an unidentified assistant of an Islamic preacher and paid to take part in the raid.
Putin didn’t mention ISIS in his speech, and Kyiv accused him and other Russian politicians of falsely linking Ukraine to the assault to stoke fervor for Russia’s war in Ukraine, which recently entered its third year.
The raid was a major embarrassment for Putin and happened just days after he cemented his grip on the country for another six years in a vote that followed the harshest crackdown on dissent since the Soviet times.
Some commentators on Russian social media questioned how authorities, who have relentlessly suppressed any opposition activities and muzzled independent media, failed to prevent the attack despite the U.S. warnings.
ISIS, which fought against Russia during its intervention in the Syrian civil war, has long targeted Russia. In a statement posted by the group’s Aamaq news agency, the ISIS Afghanistan affiliate said it had attacked a large gathering of “Christians” in Krasnogorsk.
The group issued a new statement Saturday on Aamaq, saying the attack was carried out by four men who used automatic rifles, a pistol, knives and firebombs. It said the assailants fired at the crowd and used knives to kill some concertgoers, casting the raid as part of ISIS’ ongoing war with countries it says are fighting against Islam.
In October 2015, a bomb planted by ISIS downed a Russian passenger plane over Sinai, killing all 224 people on board, most of them Russian vacationers returning from Egypt.
The group, which operates mainly in Syria and Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Africa, also has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Russia’s volatile Caucasus and other regions in past years. It recruited fighters from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.
As Russia mourns, frantic families of the missing seek answers
Events at cultural institutions were canceled Sunday, flags were lowered to half staff and television entertainment and advertising were suspended, according to state news agency RIA Novosti. A steady stream of people added to a makeshift memorial near the burned-out concert hall, creating a huge mound of flowers.
“People came to a concert, some people came to relax with their families, and any one of us could have been in that situation. And I want to express my condolences to all the families that were affected here and I want to pay tribute to these people,” Andrey Kondakov, one of the mourners who came to lay flowers at the memorial, told the AP.
“It is a tragedy that has affected our entire country,” kindergarten employee Marina Korshunova said. “It just doesn’t even make sense that small children were affected by this event.” Three children were among the dead.
Igor Pogadaev was desperately seeking any details about his wife, Yana Pogadaeva, who went to the concert. The last he heard from her was when she sent him two photos from the Crocus City Hall music venue.
After Pogadaev saw the reports of gunmen opening fire on concertgoers, he rushed to the site, but couldn’t find her in the numerous ambulances or among the hundreds of people who had made their way out of the venue.
“I went around, searched, I asked everyone, I showed photographs. No one saw anything, no one could say anything,” Pogadaev told the AP in a video message.
He watched flames bursting out of the building as he made frantic calls to a hotline for relatives of the victims, but received no information.
As the death toll mounted Saturday, Pogodaev scoured hospitals in the Russian capital and the Moscow region, looking for information on newly admitted patients.
His wife wasn’t among the 182 reported injured, nor on the list of 60 victims authorities had already identified, he said.
The Moscow Region’s Emergency Situations Ministry posted a video Sunday showing equipment dismantling the damaged music venue to give rescuers access.
Will Putin try to use the Moscow massacre for his war in Ukraine?
As emergency workers waded through the rubble of Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on Sunday, also being picked over was the extent to which the attack might damage Russian President Vladimir Putin — or be used as a pretext to bolster his war in Ukraine.
The terror group ISIS has claimed responsibility after camouflaged men stormed the concert hall Friday night and killed at least 137 people with guns, knives and bombs.
For Putin, who has sold his seemingly lifelong leadership on maintaining order, the massacre will be at least deeply embarrassing. It could even weaken his ironclad rule, particularly after he dismissed American warnings that such an attack might be imminent, some experts say.
“It certainly doesn’t strengthen him,” said John Lough, an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, a London think tank. “Within the elite itself, there are going to be questions about where the focus has been: Why has there been all this rhetoric about the war in Ukraine, when in actual fact there are other dangers much closer to home?”
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian former oil tycoon turned arch Putin critic, called security lapses that allowed the attack to proceed “a complete failure of a police state” in a post on X.
It has also not gone unnoticed that Putin waited some 20 hours after the attack to address his country.
When he did give a five-minute speech Saturday, Putin did not mention ISIS, whose Afghan affiliate, ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for the assault, or refer to the likely failure of intelligence services to prevent the assault or the security services to thwart it.
Instead he suggested that Ukraine had aided the attackers by helping plan their failed escape.
“They tried to hide and moved toward Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border,” he said.
Though not acknowledged by the Russian president, ISIS has long targeted Russia, partly because of Moscow’s role in Syria’s civil war where it supported President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces were fighting rebels that included ISIS, according to Mark Galeotti, head of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence and an honorary professor at University College London.
“ISIS-K has long actually regarded Russia as being one of the main enemies,” Galeotti said in a snap edition of his podcast, “In Moscow’s Shadows,” on Sunday. “From their point of view, Russia is a lesser Satan, if America is the great Satan.”
On a surprise visit to Syria in 2017, Putin declared “total victory” over ISIS.
Keir Giles, a consulting fellow also at Chatham House, dismissed Putin’s attempt to link the attack to Ukraine and his references to a “window” on the front line, saying that it would require Russian forces to let them through on their side of a heavily fortified and mined war zone.
“It’s a fairy story,” said Giles, who is the author of 2022’s “Russia’s War on Everybody: And What It Means for You.”
Washington agrees. National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said that “ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever.”
Russian news reports identified the four alleged gunmen detained as citizens of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that is predominantly Muslim and borders Afghanistan. Up to 1.5 million Tajiks have worked in Russia and many have Russian citizenship.
It was not yet clear whether Putin’s oblique comments were merely an attempt to bolster domestic support for his war in Ukraine, or if he seeks to use the terror attack as a pretext for some other action related to the conflict.
Giles believes it could be used to support another round of mobilization.
Putin announced a “partial mobilization” of reservists in September 2022, which resulted in 300,000 more soldiers being drafted, but military analysts believe another round may be necessary because of the war’s unknown but certainly colossal death toll on both sides.
“This gives an excuse for stepping up conscription mobilization, rounding up the manpower that they need,” Giles said, adding that it allows the Kremlin to enact policies “that would not otherwise be popular.”
Hours after the Moscow attack, Russia launched a wave of strikes on Ukraine, with one long-range missile briefly entering Polish airspace, the country’s military said. But most experts — including Lough, who is currently in Kyiv — said this was likely not a direct retaliation.
“I arrived here on Thursday morning and there was a pretty heavy barrage that night,” he said. “It’s the ongoing effort to try and weaken the will of Ukrainians,” he added. “There’s a lot of psychological warfare here.”
Putin speaks of ‘Ukrainian trail’ in attack near Moscow
Russian President Vladimir Putin has spoken of alleged Ukrainian involvement in the Moscow concert hall attack on Friday evening that killed more than 100 people.
Referring to four of the eleven men arrested in connection with the concert hall attack, Putin said in an address to the nation broadcast on Russian state television on Saturday afternoon that there was a clear “Ukrainian trail.”
“They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where a window had been prepared for them to cross the border,” Putin said.
Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence service had previously reported arrests in the southern Bryansk region, which borders on Ukraine.
More than two years into its defence against a full-scale Russian invasion, Ukraine emphatically rejected rumours of its involvement in the attack on the outskirts of Moscow.
The Islamic State terrorist militia also issued a message claiming responsibility for the attack, which some experts consider to be genuine.
Russian propagandists were quick to claim that Ukraine was behind the bloodshed, but did not provide any proof of this.
According to the authorities, more than 100 people were killed in the assault with small arms and explosives on Friday evening at the Crocus City Hall concert and event venue.
Putin putting blame on Ukraine for Moscow attack is ‘nonsense’
Former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos said that Russian President Vladimir Putin casting blame for the Moscow concert hall shooting on Ukraine is “nonsense.”
Polymeropoulos dismissed Putin’s attempt to link the gunmen that killed at least 133 people Friday at the Crocus City complex near Moscow to Ukraine, the country his military is currently invading.
“So we heard today, Vladimir Putin in about a five-minute address, he mentioned Ukraine, he’s claiming that the terrorists were actually trying to get across the border into Ukraine,” he told MSNBC’s Alex Witt on Saturday. “There’s absolutely no evidence for this. And then you also see on Russian TV networks over the last hour or two, even some deep fakes that have been generated, which seem to implicate Ukrainian security officials. And of course, this is all nonsense.”
The day following the attack on the venue, when 11 people related to the incident were detained, including four people directly involved, allegations of Ukraine’s involvement started coming out in Russia. Putin partially echoed some of it during his public address on Saturday.
“All four direct perpetrators of the terrorist attack, all those who shot and killed people, were found and detained,” Putin said. “They tried to hide and were moving towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a passage was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border.”
Polymeropoulos said Putin made those claims for multiple reasons. He used his speech to deflect from the “incompetence” of the Russian security service, intensify the crackdown on dissent and create an opportunity to mobilize more people for the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
“One, of course, to deflect kind of the incompetence of Russian security services,” he said. “But there are some things that I think Putin can take advantage of with this unfortunately. Additional crackdown on dissent inside Russia, but also the possibility of mobilization. Alex don’t forget almost 400,000 casualties from the war in Ukraine. That’s that’s Russian soldiers killed and injured. They need mobilization. Perhaps something in the days ahead, we would see is Vladimir Putin calling for more people to be called up so he’s going to try to take advantage of it.”
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Zelensky says Russia always blames others after Putin points finger
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky categorically rejected attempts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to blame Kiev for a terrorist attack near Moscow on Friday.
“After what happened yesterday in Moscow, Putin and the other bastards are of course just trying to put the blame on someone else,” Zelensky said in his daily video address on Saturday evening. Moscow always uses the same methods, he said. “And they always blame others.”
After the attack on the concert hall near Moscow, “this absolute nobody Putin” stayed silent for a day instead of looking after his Russian citizens, Zelensky said.
Instead, Putin thought about “how he could bring this to Ukraine.”
His comments came after Putin said earlier that there was a “Ukrainian trail” after the attack, though did not add further details.
At least 133 people died in the attack on the Crocus City Hall concert venue on Friday evening. The Islamic State terrorist militia claimed responsibility for the attack.
Zelensky accused Russia of spreading terror itself, saying Russians were coming to Ukraine to burn down cities “and trying to blame it on Ukraine.”
They tortured and raped people – and blamed the victims, Zelensky said. “They have brought hundreds of thousands of their own terrorists here, on Ukrainian soil, to fight against us, and they don’t care what happens in their country.”
Russian elections are ‘costly bureaucracy’ that ‘don’t have to be held,’ Putin spokesman says
A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin claims the unified coalition around the leader makes democratic elections unnecessary and irrelevant.
Press secretary Dmitry Peskov remarked to Russian media that democratic elections have become a “costly bureaucracy” that serves no purpose due to the supposed widespread support for Putin.
“Elections are what a democracy demands and Putin himself decided to hold them, but theoretically, they don’t even have to be held,” Peskov told state media outlet RBK.
RUSSIAN OPPOSITION LEADER ALEXEI NAVALNY SENTENCED TO 19 YEARS IN PRISON
He added, “Because it’s clear that Putin will be elected. That’s completely my personal opinion.”
Peskov told RBK he was seeking to clarify his statement to The New York Times earlier this week that he claims was misquoted.
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“Our presidential election is not really democracy, it is costly bureaucracy,” Peskov told the New York Times in an article published Aug. 6. “Mr. Putin will be re-elected next year with more than 90 percent of the vote.”
RETIRED FBI COUNTERINTEL AGENT REPORTEDLY INVOLVED IN TRUMP-RUSSIA PROBE ARRESTED FOR TIES TO RUSSIA
The press secretary’s comments on Russian democracy follow the conviction of political opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was found guilty of extremism by a Russian court on Friday.
Navalny, already serving a nine-year sentence on separate political charges, was sentenced to an additional 19 years.
“I understand perfectly that, as many political prisoners, I’m serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime,” Navalny told his supporters via social media.
Navalny has long been Putin’s most outspoken critic, leading anti-corruption watchdog organizations and protesting Kremlin policy.
In 2020, he sought medical attention in Germany after being poisoned with a nerve agent. He was arrested after returning to Moscow in January 2021.