Vladimir Putin in an address to the nation made no mention of jihadist involvement in the attack and instead linked it to Ukraine, saying the attackers “tried to escape and were travelling towards Ukraine” and that “a window” had been prepared for them to cross the border.
He presented no evidence to back up the claim. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, strongly denied the allegation. The United States said its intelligence showed IS acted alone.
Several Kremlin-friendly media outlets and commentators sought to promote Putin’s theory on Monday, however, raising fears that the Russian government planned to use the attack as an excuse to further escalate the war with Ukraine.
“We are not talking about Isis here. It was the khokhly,” said Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the RT channel, using a term used pejoratively in Russia to denote Ukrainians.
In an apparent reference to the suspects’ torture, she added that she felt “extremely satisfied” when she saw their condition as they were led into court.
Komsomolskaya Pravda, a widely read tabloid, quoted a commentator blaming the “British special services and the Americans and Ukrainians” for the attack.
On Monday, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, warned Moscow against any “exploitation” of the attack, saying it would be “cynical and counterproductive for Russia to use this context to try and turn it against Ukraine”.
He said it was a branch of IS that “planned the attack and carried it out”, adding this group had also plotted attacks in France.
Russia has suffered repeatedly from Islamist terrorism over the past 30 years, including in the 2004 Beslan school siege that killed 334 people, including 186 children.
On March 7, the FSB, the successor to the KGB, said it had killed members of an IS cell in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow. It said the group had been plotting an attack on a synagogue.
Heightened terror threat
On the same day, the US embassy in Moscow issued a public warning to American citizens warning them to stay away from concerts because of a heightened terror threat.
The four suspects do not appear to have had previous convictions or security alerts attached to their names, which may partly explain why Russian authorities failed to detect the plot.
Human rights group gulagu.net, which documents the horrors of Russia’s prison system, said the open torture of suspects reflected changes in Russian society.
“For more than 10 years, we have been consistently exposing torture and its systemic nature in Russia,” it said.
“It is obvious that sanctions for these tortures, as well as for the torture of Ukrainian prisoners, are given from the very top.”
Dmitry Kolezev, exiled editor of Republic media, said: “Torture is, unfortunately, commonplace.”
“What is unusual here is that the security forces used to bashfully hide this. But now they are proud of it and, apparently, they themselves release photographs of torture to friendly Telegram channels.”
Pavel Krasheninnikov, the chairman of the Duma committee on state building and legislation, told Russian agencies that the debate over the death penalty could be a distraction from the real task of preventing such atrocities from happening again.
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