Russia-Ukraine war live: Moscow spy chief makes bizarre claim US, UK and Ukraine were behind Moscow attack

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said on Tuesday that the gunmen who attacked Moscow’s Crocus City Hall music venue on Friday tried initially to flee to Belarus, not Ukraine as Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin have insisted.

Putin said Ukraine had prepared a “window” for the attackers to cross the border – currently a war zone.

Ukraine has vehemently denied involvement but two of Putin’s most powerful allies, Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev and FSB state security service head Alexander Bortnikov, on Tuesday both directly blamed Kyiv for the attack, albeit without producing any evidence.

However, Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, told journalists that Belarusian and Russian security services had coordinated their actions as the suspects’ car fled southwest from Moscow to the Bryansk region, bordering both Ukraine and Belarus, where it was apprehended.

He said Belarus had quickly set up checkpoints at the border.

”That’s why they couldn’t enter Belarus. They saw that, so they turned away and went to the area of the Ukrainian-Russian border,” he was quoted as saying by the state news agency BelTA.

“Putin and I didn’t sleep for a day,” he added. “… There was constant interaction.”

Ukraine has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war, the country’s navy spokesman said.

Dmytro Pletenchuk told The Associated Press the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky that was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea.

The ship was part of the Ukrainian navy before Russia captured it while annexing the Black Sea peninsula in 2014.

Mr Pletenchuk has previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship.

He told the AP that the weekend attack, which was launched with Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot.

Russian authorities reported a massive Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol over the weekend but did not acknowledge any damage to the fleet.

The four men suspected of carrying out the deadly terrorist attack in Moscow have appeared in court bearing the marks of torture.

The suspects, identified by Russian authorities as being from Tajikistan, a Central Asian nation bordering Afghanistan, were allegedly picked up in the Bryansk region about 210 miles southwest of Moscow hours after the attack. Without providing any evidence, Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed they were heading for Ukraine.

Both Ukraine and its western allies, including the US, have denied any involvement in the attack.

Ukraine‘s security council secretary Oleksiy Danilov was dismissed and replaced by foreign intelligence service chief Oleksandr Lytvynenko under decrees published on the presidential website on Tuesday.

No reason was given for the change. Danilov had held the post since October 2019, a few months after president Volodymyr Zelensky took office.

Ukraine‘s National Security and Defence Council has a coordinating role on issues of national security and defence under the president. It comprises the country’s top political, security and defence chiefs.

Zelensky has regularly replaced high-ranking security and defence officials since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The dismissal of Ukraine‘s top general in February presaged a wider clear-out of the military’s top brass.

The head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has made the bizarre claim that the US, UK and Ukraine were involved in the terror attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed 139 people – as the Kremlin keeps pushing a false narrative trying to link its invasion of Ukraine to the shooting.

“The USA, Britain and Ukraine are behind the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall,” Alexander Bortnikov, the director of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and staunch ally of Vladimir Putin, was quoted as saying by TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency.

“We believe the action was prepared both by the radical Islamists themselves and, of course, facilitated by Western special services, and Ukraine’s special services themselves have a direct connection to this.”

Mr Bortnikov offered no evidence for his claims, which has called “lies” by officials in Kyiv.

A branch of Isis has claimed the attack in Moscow. And the US, France and a number of other nations say their intelligence services believe Isis were behind the killings.

Russia remanded in custody on Tuesday a Kyrgyzstan-born man suspected of involvement in Friday’s mass shooting at a Moscow concert hall, and sent investigators to Tajikistan to question the families of four men charged with carrying out the attack.

Eight suspects have now been remanded in pre-trial detention since gunmen sprayed concertgoers with bullets in the deadliest attack in Russia in two decades, days after president Vladimir Putin celebrated an election that handed him a fifth term.

Isis has claimed responsibility and released footage from the attack. The United States and France say intelligence suggests the group was indeed behind the attack, in which 139 people were killed and 182 wounded.

Ukraine needs any edge it can get to repel Russia from its territory. One emerging bright spot is its small but fast-growing defense industry, which the government is flooding with money in hopes that a surge of homemade weapons and ammunition can help turn the tide.

The effort ramped up sharply over the past year as the U.S. and Europe strained to deliver weapons and other aid to Ukraine, which is up against a much bigger Russian military backed by a thriving domestic defense industry.