Russia Says It's Difficult to Believe ISIS Has Capability to Carry Out Attack in Moscow

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova. (Twitter/@mfa_russia)

JAKARTA - Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday it was "very difficult to believe" that ISIS had the capability to launch an attack on a concert hall in Moscow last Friday that killed at least 140 people.

In a news conference with journalists, Zakharova repeated Moscow's assertion, which has not provided evidence, that Ukraine was behind the attack on Crocus City Hall, the deadliest attack Russia has seen in 20 years.

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the massacre. Meanwhile, US officials said they had intelligence data showing that the massacre was carried out by the network's Afghan branch, ISIS Khorasan.

Ukraine itself has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack.

But Zakharova said Western countries immediately blamed ISIS, as a way to shift the blame away from Ukraine and the Western governments that support it.

"To remove suspicion from the Western collective, they urgently needed to find something, so they used ISIS, pulled out the trump card, and just hours after the terrorist attack, the Anglo-Saxon media started spreading these versions," he said, reported by Reuters, March 27.

Earlier, President Vladimir Putin said the attack was carried out by militant groups, but suggested that it benefited Ukraine and that Kyiv may have played a role in the attack.

He said someone on the Ukrainian side had prepared a "window" for the gunmen to escape across the border, before they were captured in western Russia on Friday evening.

But on Tuesday, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said the gunmen initially attempted to cross into his country before turning around and heading towards Ukraine after they realized that the crossing into Belarus had been closed.

Separately, the director of Russia's FSB security agency said on Tuesday he believed Ukraine, along with the United States and Britain, were involved in Moscow's attack.

Responding to that, British Foreign Minister David Cameron in his tweet X wrote: "Russia's claims about the West and Ukraine in the Crocus City Hall attack are complete nonsense."