Russia’s president points the finger at Ukraine. Matthew Partridge reports
A terrorist attack in Moscow last week ended in the deaths of more than a hundred concertgoers. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the atrocity. In a televised address, Russian president Vladimir Putin did not mention the terrorist group, however, and claimed that Ukraine had been involved, even if he stopped short of directly attributing responsibility to Kyiv. That may reflect a worry that the US government is sitting on intelligence that would undermine such a claim, says The Economist. And it may be embarrassment at his security agencies’ failure to act on American warnings on 7 March of an imminent attack. “Such a hubristic blunder would have consequences in a country where power can be held to account. Russia is not such a country.”
Russia deserves better
Putin claimed that Kyiv had opened a border “window” to allow the gunmen to escape to Ukraine, but this “strains credulity”, says The Times. There “is a long history of appalling atrocities” inflicted on Russia by ISIS or similar fanatics, including the Beslan siege in 2004, which resulted in the deaths of more than 330 people, through to a bomb on a plane from Egypt in 2015 that killed everyone on board. “Islamists have been inflamed” by Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, its backing for Syrian government and by “Kremlin operations against Muslims going back to Afghanistan”. But Russia’s response was to launch a revenge attack on Ukraine, with an overnight bombardment of Kyiv and the largest aerial attack on Ukraine’s energy system in two years of war. “To use a dreadful terrorist atrocity as an excuse for escalation of the war in Ukraine is cynical political deception. Russia’s grieving population deserves a more honest re
