Russia believes that it is "extremely hard to believe" that ISIS is behind the wide and fatal attack on the Moscow concert hall, as Russian intelligence and security officials believe Ukraine and allied Western backers are behind it. 

Speaking on March 27, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova cast the ISIS claim into serious doubt.

"In order to ward off suspicions from the collective West, they urgently needed to come up with something, so they resorted to ISIS (Daesh), 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 stressed.

The chief of Russian Internal Intelligence (FSB), Alexander Bortnikov, has also hinted that alongside Ukraine, the United States and Britain could have been behind the terrorist attack. 

The Russian Federal Security Service has also revealed the gunmen were planning on traveling to Ukraine, where they were to be welcomed as "heroes", adding that Western intelligence services supported these attackers. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed that someone on the Ukrainian side had readied a "window" for the gunmen to flee across the border, before they were caught in western Russia on the night of March 22. 

Former CIA analyst suspects Washington knew about Russia terror attack

"We still don’t know how many shooters there were. We don’t know what the weapons were. We don’t know what the firearms were. We don’t know what the explosives were. We don’t know how many were actually killed, how many wounded, but yet the US State Department knows that it was not Ukraine," former CIA and State Department analyst Larry Johnson said on March 23, according to Sputnik.

Johnson further explained that this indicates that the US government has no grounds to declare that there is no Ukrainian connection to the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of innocent Russians in Moscow.

The former analyst then highlighted another significant point stating that the statement "comes on a day that one of the CIA propaganda outlets came out and said that the Biden administration and the intelligence community were very concerned about what they call ‘brazen’, unwarranted attacks by Ukraine."

Johnson suspects that Washington had information regarding the attack, yet withheld this information from Moscow.