Anyone who rejoices at the terrorist massacre at Crocus City Hall is nothing other than scum, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.
Peskov was asked to comment on the remarks by Aleksey Arestovich, former top adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who appeared to suggest that Kiev might have been behind the attack and that Russia had it coming, before backtracking.
“As for those who gloat about the terrible tragedy that we have experienced, they are scum,” Peskov said. “We can’t call them otherwise, whether they clarified it later or not.”
Four gunmen attacked the Crocus City Hall concert hall outside Moscow on Friday, randomly shooting people who happened to be there and setting fire to the venue. Over 130 people died and another 200 were injured, many seriously.
Commenting on the massacre in a YouTube video, Arestovich claimed that Russia was trying to win sympathy in the West, but “they kill here in a day as many as we killed – not us, but someone killed – there, in this act of terrorism.”
Many other figures, including Western politicians and Ukraine cheerleaders on social media, have suggested that Russia either had it coming or staged the entire thing as a “false flag” to somehow justify its actions against Kiev.
Peskov noted that the investigation is still ongoing and that the authorities will officially comment only when it is concluded.
“Although I recommend that you very carefully reread President Putin’s statements that he made over the last two days. In this context, they are very important,” he added.
On Monday evening, Putin said that the attack could be the latest in a chain of attempts by “those who have been fighting our country since 2014, using the neo-Nazi Kiev regime as their hand,” implicating not just Ukraine, but its Western backers as well.
A group calling itself Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) has taken responsibility for the Crocus City Hall massacre. The US and the EU have insisted that no one else could be to blame, denying that Ukraine had anything to do with the act of terrorism.
Over the weekend, Russian authorities arrested four suspects in the terrorist attack – all of them nationals of Tajikistan – as they attempted to escape by car into Ukraine.