Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday accused his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of seeking to “shift the blame” onto Ukraine after the deadly attack on a concert hall in Moscow, which was claimed by the Islamic State organization.
“What happened yesterday in Moscow is obvious: Putin and the other bastards are just trying to shift the blame to someone else,” he said in his daily message, after Russian officials put forward the hypothesis of a Ukrainian track.
“They come to Ukraine, burn our cities and try to blame Ukraine.
They torture and rape our people - and they blame them.
They have brought hundreds of thousands of their own terrorists here, to Ukrainian lands (…) and they do not care about what is happening in their own country,” he lamented.
An attack claimed by IS
The attack on the Crocus City Hall concert hall, in a close suburb of the capital, is the deadliest in Russia in twenty years, as well as the bloodiest to have been claimed by ISIS in Europe.
However, during a television speech, Vladimir Putin made no mention of the involvement of the jihadist group.
The president claimed that "all four perpetrators" of the attack were arrested while "they were heading towards Ukraine where, according to preliminary data (from investigators), a
window
had been prepared for them to cross the border ".
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As of Friday, kyiv assured that it had “absolutely nothing to do” with this “terrorist act”.