NEWSLINE PAPER,-Kyiv would be held accountable, Ukrainians understood as soon as word of the attack on Moscow's performance arena broke on Friday. They got ready for more missile and drone attacks.
There were accusations flying in almost immediately. They were only subliminal clues at first, but shortly President Vladimir Putin publicly claimed that the attackers who struck Moscow had tried to flee to Ukraine with help from local connections.
On Sunday, just before morning, explosions sounded in Kiev. As Putin spoke to the Russian people on Saturday, the Islamic State (IS) has already claimed responsibility for the incident.
Earlier in the month, the US had acknowledged having shared intelligence regarding a possible danger. Now, IS has released a gruesome bodycamera video of the atrocity in which the perpetrators yell "God is Greatest."
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky showed obvious rage at his nation's involvement in a statement made on Saturday night. For linking the attack to Kyiv, he called Putin and other Moscow officials "scum".
Zelensky said that an apparently "miserable" Russian president seems more concerned with blaming Kyiv for the attack than with comforting his own people. He next charged that since the full-scale invasion started in February 2022, Moscow had sent “hundreds of thousands of [its own] terrorists” to Ukraine.
Rather of protecting Russia from the actual menace of extremism, he said, these forces were now frightening Ukraine. They rape and torture people, they burn our cities, he continued.
Since February 2022, Ukrainian authorities have opened thousands of criminal complaints against Russian soldiers. One instance we looked at was the shooting of two defenseless bystanders in the back.
The military intelligence agency in Kiev had earlier on Saturday discounted as "absurd" the particular Russian assertion that the shooters were captured while attempting to flee across the Ukrainian border. There are Russian military and security services swarming this active front line.
Andriy Yusov said that it would be either "suicidal" or "stupid" for someone to try to travel there after executing a significant attack on Moscow. The suspects were apprehended in the Bryansk region on their way west to Ukraine, said Russian authorities. If, as we cannot verify, that is where their car was seized, they might have been traveling toward Belarus, which is a lot simpler way out of Russia than over a minefield to get to Ukraine.
Social internet videos depict the suspected assailants' custody and some of their questioning. On one video, a Russian spy is shown trying to make a man eat a piece of his own amputated ear. Spits it out he does.
His face is smeared with blood and his head is bandaged in an other video. After such abuse, confessions obtained could not be trusted. Though they come after an attack that the same security services were unable to stop or foresee, these video footage were probably disseminated to show a robust reaction.
Zelensky so recommended in his speech that Russians should examine their own intelligence services rather than placing the blame on Ukraine. Inquiring as to whether US information was ignored would be part of this.
But since political opposition and independent media have been exterminated from Putin's Russia, there is no one left to really hold the authorities responsible. The president of Ukraine also alluded to a dark notion that had been put out by his military intelligence service, which held that the Russian government was involved in the Moscow attack.