DISINFO: Western officials prohibit media from reporting truth about Crocus City Hall attack
SUMMARY
Mere hours after the horrifying events at Crocus City Hall in Russia, Western officials launched a large-scale PR campaign designed to downplay the involvement of Ukrainian security service in the terror attack.
Without waiting for the official investigation to finish, leading Western media outlets were instructed to amplify the narrative of ISIS involvement in the attack, deny ISIS links to the Ukrainian state, discredit the results of the Russian investigation, and advance various conspiracy theories implicating the Russian security services in the terror act.
RESPONSE
Pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative depicting Ukraine as a terrorist regime and painting Western media outlets as subservient to their governments.
The Islamic State have claimed responsibility for and shared video footage from the attacks, corroborating their claims of responsibility.
Kyiv strongly denied any involvement in the assault on the Crocus City Hall music venue in Krasnogorsk.
US officials have intelligence that the Islamic State group's Afghan affiliate IS-Khorasan is responsible for the Moscow attack. “ISIS bears sole responsibility for this attack. There was no Ukrainian involvement whatsoever,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
The US was legally obliged to warn Moscow in March 2024 of a possible attack in Russia aimed at large gatherings before issuing a public advisory to citizens in the country. As explained by ABC news:
"The United States shared those advance intelligence indications under a tenet of the U.S. intelligence community called the “duty to warn," which obliges U.S. intelligence officials to lean toward sharing knowledge of a dire threat if conditions allow. That holds whether the targets are allies, adversaries or somewhere in between".
The alert was dismissed as "provocative", "blackmail" and an "attempt to intimidate, destabilise our country" by Putin. He said: “I’ll remind you of recent, let’s say directly, provocative statements of certain official Western structures about potential terror attacks in Russia. All of this looks like obvious blackmail and an attempt to intimidate, destabilise our country”.
It was subsequently revealed that also Iran had warned Moscow of an imminent attack by ISIS several days in advance, based on information obtained from ISIS members arrested in Iran.
See similar disinformation cases claiming that ISIS claiming responsibility for Moscow attack looks like a fake, that Anti-Russian actors using neo-Nazis in Kyiv may be involved in Crocus attack, that Ukrainian official admitted Ukraine’s involvement in the terrorist attack in Crocus City, Kyiv may be involved in the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, that Ukraine is resorting to terrorism by attacking nuclear sites in Russia, that Foreigners from terrorist organisations are fighting for Ukraine, that Kyiv uses the same methods as ISIS to recruit children, that Ukraine is a terrorist state and the West is to blame for guiding Kyiv, or that The Kyiv regime is a global terrorist threat.