24-3-2024 (KYIV) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in his nightly video address on Saturday (Mar 23), asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin was attempting to shift responsibility for a deadly shooting at a concert hall near Moscow on Friday.
“It’s obvious that Putin and other thugs are just trying to blame someone else,” Zelenskyy stated. “Their methods are always the same. We’ve seen it all before, destroyed buildings and shootings and explosions. And they always find someone else to blame.”
Chechen rebels accused Russian secret services of orchestrating apartment bombings in Moscow, Buynkask, and Volgodonsk, blamed on Chechens, which claimed over 200 lives in Russia in 1999, prompting Putin, who was then prime minister, to send troops back to Chechnya.
A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman dismissed Zelenskyy’s accusation, stating he was “the only head of state crazy enough to blame Russia for the terrorist attack.” Earlier, Putin mentioned that 11 individuals had been detained following the attack, including the four gunmen. “They tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, according to preliminary data, a window was prepared for them on the Ukrainian side to cross the state border,” Putin disclosed.
Zelenskyy urged Putin to focus on combating terrorism within Russia instead of invading Ukraine. “They have brought hundreds of thousands of their own terrorists here, on Ukrainian land, to fight against us, and they don’t care about what is happening inside their own country,” he remarked.
“Yesterday, as all this happened, instead of dealing with his fellow Russian citizens, addressing them, the wimp Putin was silent for a full 24 hours, thinking about how to tie this to Ukraine. It’s all absolutely predictable,” Zelenskyy concluded.
