A senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said late on March 22 that Kyiv was not involved in the attack on a Moscow-area concert hall the same evening that left dozens dead and many more injured after gunmen stormed in and fired at concertgoers.
Mykhaylo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskiy’s presidential office, said that Ukraine had “never used terrorist methods” as it continues to fight a 2-year-old full-scale invasion.
“Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with the shooting/explosions in the Crocus City Hall (Moscow Region, Russia),” Podolyak said via X, formerly Twitter. “It makes no sense whatsoever.”
Ukrainian forces are thought to have launched attacks on military and fuel infrastructure inside Russian territory over the course of the war, but generally avoid claims of responsibility.
There was no immediate indication of who was behind the deadly attack in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow.
Kyiv has recently defended its attacks on oil and other facilities with some reports suggesting the United States has urged it to avoid hitting oil infrastructure in part to avoid escalatory responses from Russia.
Podolyak said “everything in this war will be decided only on the battlefield. Only by the quantity of weapons and qualitative military decisions. Terrorist attacks do not solve any problems…”
He pointed to the recent public warning by U.S. officials.
The U.S. Embassy said on March 7 that it was “monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.”
Podolyak also hinted that the event would “contribute to a sharp increase in military propaganda, accelerated militarization, expanded mobilization, and, ultimately, the scaling up of the war. And also to justify manifest genocidal strikes against the civilian population of Ukraine…”
The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine quickly alleged — without providing any evidence — that Russia’s own special services had orchestrated it as “a deliberate provocation of the Putin regime” that foreign governments had warned about.
It alleged that the aim was to “further escalate and expand the war.”
