Was the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack near Moscow planned by Ukraine?

Following the arrest of the perpetrators of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack near Moscow, which left at least 133 people dead and 140 injured, the facts revealed indicate that the attack was probably planned by Ukraine.

On the evening of 22 March 2024, as people packed into one of the concert halls at Crocus City Hall on the outskirts of Moscow to attend a concert by the group Picnic, gunmen burst into the complex and began firing coldly at everyone they saw, before setting fire to the building and fleeing before the fire brigade and police arrived.

The fire quickly spread. For a long time, the police and fire brigade did not know whether the terrorists who had launched the attack were still in Crocus City Hall or not, but the decision was soon taken to launch an assault. When the special forces of the Russian Guard and the FSB emerged from the building because of the smoke, it was now clear that the terrorists had fled.

Russian law enforcement agencies launched a massive manhunt after identifying the car the terrorists had used to leave Crocus City Hall: a white Renault Symbol. The car was spotted in the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine. When the driver refused to stop as ordered by the police, the latter fired at the car, which then rolled over. One of the terrorists was wounded and left in the car by the others, who tried to flee into the forest.

However, the Russian law enforcement agencies quickly tracked them down, and it was soon announced that four terrorists and 11 people (seven potential accomplices) had been arrested.

Meanwhile at Crocus City Hall, firefighters battled for long hours with the blaze which, despite the intervention of helicopters to drop large quantities of water, had time to completely ravage the roof of the concert hall, which eventually collapsed on the people who had been unable to evacuate the building.

Very quickly, people who had been in Crocus City Hall published videos of what had happened. These blood-curdling videos clearly show that the death toll from this terrorist attack will be terrible. At the time of writing, the official death toll is at least 133, with 140 injured, 107 of whom are in hospital (16 of whom, including a child, are in an extremely serious condition).

While the terrorists had not yet been arrested, two leads seemed the most plausible for the Crocus City Hall attack: an attack sponsored by an Islamist terrorist group, or an attack sponsored by Ukraine.

Kiev was quick to deny that it was behind the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall, even though its media took less than a minute (after the first mention in the Russian media) to report the attack, and false calls for gunfire, some of which came from Ukraine, quickly began to flood Russian emergency numbers in order to saturate them.

But Ukraine’s denials have long been worthless, since I would remind you that Kiev denied its involvement in the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge, before claiming responsibility for it a few months later, and did the same with the terrorist attack that claimed the life of Daria Dugina. A modus operandi that it has applied to all the terrorist attacks it has organised (the assassinations of Motorola, Guivi, Alexandre Zakhartchenko, Vladlen Tatarski, etc.). In addition to initially denying its involvement, Ukraine almost systematically accuses Russia or the Russian secret services of having carried out these attacks and assassinations.

Very quickly, however, the Western media, including the French, began to make wild accusations against the Russian authorities, while a false claim of responsibility for the terrorist attack by the Islamic State appeared, in order to clear Ukraine’s name. Except that this claim appears nowhere on the organisation’s internet resources, and was made in an old news model dating back several years.

What’s more, there are several things wrong with it. First of all, the terrorists got away. But if they were fanatical Islamic terrorists, they should have stayed put, claimed that their attack was religious and done everything in their power to die as martyrs! But there was none of that. And the rest of the story is pointing more and more towards Ukraine.

As I said earlier, the terrorists were arrested near Bryansk, on the Ukrainian border! This fact alone immediately made me sit up and take notice, and I started to think more and more about the Ukrainian connection. But once they were arrested, these terrorists, of Tajik origin (which could have given credence to the theory that they were Islamic terrorists), revealed that they had massacred more than a hundred people, not for religious reasons, but for money! For 500,000 roubles (around €5,000) to be precise, half of which had been paid to them as a deposit by a contact on Telegram, who had also told them where to find the cache of weapons they used to carry out the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. This contact had also provided them with contacts in Ukraine who were to help them cross the border into the Bryansk region, where they were arrested.

You might retort that it could have been Ukrainian free electrons who decided to carry out this terrorist attack in Russia. I could have agreed with this thesis if I hadn’t already sounded the alarm several times over the last six years about the dangerous links between the Ukrainian authorities and Islamist terrorists. Back in 2018, I warned that Islamist terrorists trained by the Islamic State were fighting for Kiev in the Donbass. A year later, an investigation revealed that terrorists were travelling from Syria to Ukraine (where the SBU provided them with passports) and that Ukrainians were going to fight in Idleb, and this just before the Western media began to open their eyes to the fact that Ukraine had turned into a haven for jihadists! And in 2020, a Rybar investigation revealed that the Ukrainian secret services were helping to develop propaganda for Islamist terrorists in Idleb!

This method, which consists of using people of another nationality to carry out a terrorist attack, is reminiscent of the method used by Ukraine in the same region of Bryansk a year ago, with the help of Russians who were traitors to their homeland and who were fighting for Kiev. There too, Ukraine tried to play the “it’s not us, it’s the Russians fighting among themselves” card. Except that some of these idiots had published their Ukrainian military tickets on the Internet, revealing the truth…

What’s more, the interrogation of the arrested terrorists showed that they were not particularly bright! So it’s clear that they weren’t the ones who drew up the plan, and that they were content to carry it out.

And while we’re on the subject of implementation, on one of the videos taken in the hall during the shoot-out (the one taken from a footbridge), you can clearly see that the terrorists coldly shoot people, without an ounce of hesitation, and handle weapons professionally. So it’s clear that they’ve had intensive training, if not combat experience! Tajiks have been fighting for Ukraine since 2022!

Finally, there’s a very strange fact that has added a huge dose of suspicion towards Ukraine and above all its Western sponsors, whose secret services are never the last to help Kiev organise terrorist attacks.

On 7 March 2024, the American embassy (see screenshot below) and the British embassy in Russia warned their nationals of a risk of attack in Moscow within 48 hours.

Pay attention to what was written: “to include concerts“. You might say “yes, but the attack took place two weeks later and not within 48 hours”. Yes. Except that following this alert, the Russian police and intelligence services increased the level of security at events scheduled for a week before the Russian presidential election, and arrested two terrorist groups!

However, it is clear that the masterminds had studied the building at length and prepared the plan for the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. It was this building that was specifically targeted. And if we look back to 7 March, we discover that on 9, 10 and 11 March 2024, a concert by the famous Russian singer Chaman took place in the same Crocus City Hall complex!

48 hours after the warning from the American embassy in Russia, a concert by an ultra-popular and patriotic Russian singer took place in the Crocus City Hall. Now you can imagine the psychological and emotional impact that a terrorist attack like the one on 22 March would have had if it had hit a Chaman concert, or even if the singer himself had been killed! What better way for Ukraine, which is seeking to terrorise the Russian population, to attack a singer whose songs encourage patriotism in Russia!

When you put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, there really are a lot of elements that point to the Ukrainian lead. All that remains is to wait for the results of the investigation to see if these deductions prove to be correct. Now that the terrorists have been arrested, the Russian investigative committee should soon have enough evidence to identify the masterminds of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack. And if it is the Ukrainian authorities, then we can expect another change in Russia’s approach to the conflict with its neighbour.

Christelle Néant

About the author