Regarding the Terrorist Attack at the Crocus City Hall

The terrible tragedy at Crocus City Hall on March 22, 2024, has shocked Russia and the international community. It has also put the issue of large-scale public terror back on the agenda, terror that is aimed at putting pressure on society, sowing panic and undermining the given country’s stability in the face of global challenges and threats.

The majority of countries worldwide demonstrated a natural human reaction to the tragedy, sending words of support and condolences to Russia and the Russian people.

At the same time, several hours after the tragedy, before the preliminary results of the investigation were made public and disregarding the unequivocal international condemnation of the attack, the Western media and US, UK and EU officials launched an information campaign to deny the Ukrainian security services’ involvement in that crime.

The editorial offices of the mainstream Western media were instructed to promote the version of the ISIS involvement in organising the attack in Krasnogorsk, to deny the possible connection between the Islamists and the Ukrainian government or Western security services, to discredit the results of investigation, and to advance various conspiracy theories about the alleged involvement of the Russian security services in the tragedy.

They were cautioned against showing sympathy and a humane attitude to the Russian people. An especially cynical part of the Western attempts to divert public attention from the real organisers and beneficiaries of the crime was the categorical instruction not to mention the real scale of the tragedy, that is, the number of victims, including children, and not to write about the attitude of ordinary people to it.

The resources of Russian-language media outlets and foreign agents abroad were used for this purpose. The media platforms controlled by fugitive oligarchs and members of the opposition hastily adjusted their editorial policy to give priority to biased speculations about the causes and consequences of the tragedy in Krasnogorsk. Their arguments are based on false assumptions from the book by Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within. Acting in the same spirit, the staff of the Anti-Corruption Foundation and MBK Media launched pseudo-investigations aimed at discrediting our law enforcement agencies and security services. But their main goal is to smear the Russian authorities and to create a pretext for destabilising Russian society.

Acting hand in glove with the Western media, the Kiev regime accused the Kremlin of involvement in the terrorist attack. The government-controlled Ukrainian media took up the narrative, shifting public attention to ISIS and keeping silent about the initial results of the investigation.

The online Ukrainian media with millions of subscribers hurried to provide a cannibalistic and Russophobic coverage of the consequences of the attack in Krasnogorsk.

Almost simultaneously with the terrorist attack, the Ukrainian units of information and psychological operations launched an aggressive online propaganda and recruitment campaign, encouraging people, mostly young people and teenagers, to carry out similar crimes for money. They sent mass emails with false news about other terrorist attacks in the adjacent districts of Krasnogorsk and Moscow and created fake social media accounts of alleged terrorists. In short, they took advantage of the natural public response to the tragedy to incite fear and a feeling of helplessness.