Russia-Ukraine war: Russian foreign ministry claims it’s ‘extremely hard to believe’ Islamic State could launch Moscow attack – as it happened

• Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that it’s “extremely hard to believe” that Islamic State would have had the capacity to launch the attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed at least 140 people last Friday. Russian officials have repeatedly cast doubt on western intelligence assertions that IS was responsible for the attack and have instead suggested that Ukraine and western countries played a role in it, without providing any evidence.

• In another move that showed Russia was not ready to accept that IS carried our the attack, state investigators said they will study a request from parliament to investigate what they called the “organisation, financing, and conduct of terrorist acts” against Russia by the United States and other Western countries. This comes despite IS claiming responsibility for the attack and repeated denials by Ukraine that it had any involvement.

• Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko said the Moscow attackers attempted to flee to Belarus. His comments further undermine Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine was involved in the attack and the terrorists tried to flee there.

• Russian strikes killed three and injured dozens more across three regions of Ukraine– Kherson, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk. “This is another act of bloody terror against Ukrainians,” Kharkiv mayor Ihor Terekhov said.

• Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba renewed his calls for urgent deliveries of air defence systems. in the wake of the strikes. “The peculiarity of the current Russian attacks is the intensive use of ballistic missiles that can reach targets at extremely high speeds, leaving little time for people to take cover and causing significant destruction,” Kuleba told a briefing.

• Ukraine’s air force chief said that Russia launched 13 Shahed drones at Ukraine overnight. It said 10 of them were downed in the Kharkiv, Sumy and Kyiv regions.

• Ukraine has staged further air attacks on Belgorod, just over the border inside Russia. The regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported damage on the ground and claimed air defence engaged 18 incoming targets.

• Ukraine’s SBU security service detained two agents of Russia’s intelligence agency accused of passing the location of sensitive military targets to enemy forces. “As a result of a special operation, two FSB agents were detained in Kyiv and Odesa,” the SBU said in a statement.

Latvia is open to various funding options to boost the European Union’s military capabilities in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Evika Silina said at a news conference in the German capital with Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“Latvia will definitely will be open to many different opportunities how we can finance it. Either it will be European budget or it will be some bonds or some guarantees, but we really have to do it now,” Reuters reports the prime minister saying.

A Russian court has sentenced Lucy Shtein, a member of feminist group Pussy Riot and a former municipal deputy in Moscow, to six years in prison in absentia for anti-war social media posts, Reuters reports the court’s press service as saying on Wednesday.

Shtein, 27, was found guilty of spreading “war fakes” in connection with a March 2022 post on X, in which she accused Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine of “bombing foreign cities and killing people”.

At least 19,855 people have been detained in Russia for expressing anti-war views since President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors crackdowns on dissent.

Weeks after the invasion of Ukraine began, Shtein fled house arrest in Moscow with her girlfriend and fellow Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina. They eventually settled in Iceland, which granted them citizenship in May 2023, according to local media there.

Prosecutors had requested an eight-and-a-half year sentence for Shtein, who on Wednesday joked in a post on X that her mother had “bet” they would ask for nine years.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has called for urgent deliveries of air defence systems, as Russian strikes killed three people in different areas of the country.

“The peculiarity of the current Russian attacks is the intensive use of ballistic missiles that can reach targets at extremely high speeds, leaving little time for people to take cover and causing significant destruction,” Kuleba told a briefing, AFP reports.

“Patriot and other similar systems are defensive by definition. They are designed to protect lives, not take them,” he said.

Ukraine has been forced onto the defensive in the past few months as it struggles with ammunition shortages and delays to a $60 billion aid package from Washington. It has also been forced to concede ground to Russia on the eastern front, warning earlier this week of “difficult” battles around the eastern city of Chasiv Yar.

A 55-year-old man was killed by artillery fire in Ukraine’s southeastern city of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region head Sergiy Lysak said.

In addition, private houses, a farm building and a power line were damaged, Lysak said in a post on Telegram.

Russian state investigators said they had received 143 reports about missing people following last Friday’s mass shooting in Moscow, Reuters reports.

The Investigative Committee, which deals with major crimes, said in a statement that 84 bodies had so far been identified, including the bodies of five children aged nine to 16.

It said tests were being carried out to establish the identities of the remaining victims.

The official death toll in the attack currently stands at 140 people.

Russian air strikes on Ukraine’s Kharkiv killed at least one person and injured another twelve this afternoon, the city’s mayor said.

“Five-story houses were severely damaged. The institute of emergency surgery was also damaged,” Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on the Telegram messenger app.

“This is another act of bloody terror against Ukrainians,” he said.

Samsung has said it will stop supporting a Russian payment card on its mobile payment service from 3 April, AFP reports.

The Mir card has become one of the only card systems available to Russians after Visa and Mastercard pulled out of the country in 2022.

“Starting April 3, 2024, adding and using Mir cards in Samsung Pay will no longer be available,” Samsung said in a statement on its website.

It did not say why it took the decision and Samsung did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment. Samsung is the third tech giant to pull Mir from its digital wallet service, after Apple and Google cut ties in 2022.

The move comes a month after the US treasury announced sanctions on Russia’s national payment card system, the central bank-owned entity that operates Mir.

A European Parliament group has invited Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his party’s politicians to take part in a summit as a token of friendship and a way to involve Ukraine in EU processes ahead of its accession talks, Reuters reports.

Ukraine, which has received strong support from most European nations since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its territory two years ago, is a candidate to join the 27-member European Union, but the process will take years.

The Renew group said it was inviting Zelenskiy to join its leaders’ summits and inviting lawmakers from the Ukrainian leader’s Servant of the People party to take part in Renew’s parliamentary meetings.

Renew, the third largest group in the European parliament, includes heads of government and ruling party lawmakers from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Estonia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. Its leaders summits typically include French president Emmanuel Macron and his counterparts from the other countries.

Reuters provides some more detail of Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s press briefing. Earlier today she said that it was “extremely hard to believe” that Islamic State would have had the capacity to launch the terror attack on Moscow last Friday that killed 140 people.

Zakharova said the west had rushed to pin responsibility on Islamic State as a way of deflecting blame from Ukraine and the western governments that support it.

“In order to ward off suspicions from the collective west, they urgently needed to come up with something, so they resorted to ISIS, pulled an ace out of their sleeve, and literally a few hours after the terrorist attack, the Anglo-Saxon media began disseminating precisely these versions,” she said.

Russia has provided no evidence of Ukraine or the west’s involvement. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the massacre and US officials say they have intelligence showing it was carried out by the network’s Afghan branch, Islamic State Khorasan. Ukraine has repeatedly denied it had anything to do with the attack.

The Ministry of Defence’s latest intelligence update covers the formation of a new Russian flotilla in Kherson.

It says Russian defence minister Sergey Shoigu formed the Dnipro River Flotilla to secure the waterways that separate Russia and Ukrainian controlled Kherson, which has been the scene of intense fighting. Russia and Ukraine have both lost large numbers of personnel and equipment in clashes on the Dnipro.

The update added that the flotilla is likely to be susceptible to attacks by Ukraine’s uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) – which operate in a similar way to unmanned aerial drones, but on the water. Ukraine has had success in sinking Russian ships in the Black Sea using USVs.

Poland’s agriculture minister said talks with Ukraine on food imports have been difficult, ahead of a key meeting, Reuters reports.

Farmers in Poland and elsewhere in the EU have been protesting to demand the re-imposition of customs duties on agricultural imports from Ukraine that were waived after Russia’s invasion in 2022. They say Ukraine’s farmers are flooding Europe with cheap imports that leave them unable to compete.

Polish Agriculture Minister Czeslaw Siekierski will meet his Ukrainian counterpart Mykola Solsky later today in Warsaw.

“Many bilateral talks have been held with Ukraine – they have been difficult talks,” Siekierski was quoted as saying by Polish news agency PAP. He said that talks were ongoing about a system of licensing exports, but that there were differences over the range of products that would be covered.

The EU reached a provisional agreement this month to grant Ukrainian food producers tariff-free access to its markets until June 2025, albeit with new limits on imports of grains.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in her weekly press briefing that it’s “extremely hard to believe” that Islamic State would have had the capacity to launch the attack on a Moscow concert hall last Friday that killed at least 140 people.

Russian officials have repeatedly cast doubt on Western intelligence assertions that IS was responsible for the attack, despite the group’s own claim of responsibility. They have instead suggested that Ukraine and western countries including the US and UK played a role in it, without providing any evidence.

Ukraine has denied Russian accusations of involvement in the attack. The US and France have said they have intelligence confirming IS was behind the attack. Yesterday, UK foreign secretary David Cameron called Russia’s claims of Ukraine and western involvement “utter nonsense”.

AP reports that the death toll from last week’s Moscow concert hall attack has risen to 140, after another victim died in a hospital.

Russian officials say 80 people injured in the attack remain hospitalised, while 205 others have sought outpatient medical assistance.

A woman was killed in Russian attacks on Kherson, officials have said.

The governor of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, which is partially occupied by Russia, said one woman had been killed in a drone attack on the village of Mykhailivka.

“A 61-year-old local resident was fatally wounded in her own home,” the official, Oleksandr Prokudin, wrote on social media.

As reported earlier, four people were also injured in attacks on Kharkiv, in the east of the country.

Ukraine’s foreign minister visit India on Thursday to discuss “global issues”.

Ukraine’s Dmytro Kuleba will meet his counterpart S Jaishankar in Delhi and also hold talks with India’s deputy national security advisor. Kuleba will discuss “cooperation on regional and global issues of mutual interest”, India’s foreign ministry said.

India has shied away from explicit condemnation of Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, even as it has pursued greater security ties with the United States. Delhi and Moscow have ties dating back to the Cold War and Russia remains by far the biggest arms supplier to the world’s most populous country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has faced criticism for purchasing hundreds of millions of barrels of Russian crude oil since the invasion of Ukraine, thereby bolstering President Vladimir Putin’s war-chest.

Modi this month congratulated Putin on his re-election, and said that he was looking forward to boosting ties to develop their “special” relationship.

Members of an extremist cell have been detained in Rostov-on-Don, Reuters reported citing Tass.

Russian authorities detained members of Allya Ayat, a new age religious group originating in Kazakhstan and banned as “extremist” under Russian law.

Russian authorities are on high alert following the Crocus City Hall terror attack in Moscow last Friday.

Ukraine’s SBU security service has detained two agents of Russia’s intelligence agency accused of passing the location of sensitive military targets to enemy forces.

Kyiv has waged an intense crackdown on those suspected of having collaborated with Moscow since its invasion in February 2022, opening thousands of criminal cases.

“As a result of a special operation, two FSB agents were detained in Kyiv and Odesa,” the SBU said in a statement, referring to the Kremlin’s FSB security service.

“The criminals tried to identify the locations of Ukrainian troops, and then send the occupiers the relevant coordinates to adjust air attacks,” it said.

“At the final stage of the special operation, both criminals were detained red-handed while spying on potential targets for the occupiers,” it added.

One of the suspects photographed a thermal power station, ostensibly to help Russia with its bombardment of Ukrainian energy infrastructure, it said.

Both were charged with collaboration and face life in prison.

The United Nations said last year Ukraine had opened more than 6,600 criminal cases “against individuals for collaboration and other conflict-related crimes” since the war began.