Russia knew about preparation for terrorist attack at least a month in advance – Ukraine

Russia knew about the preparation of a terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall shopping center near Moscow for at least a month. But despite this, the Kremlin decided to allow the shooting of its citizens, according to the statement of the head of the Defense Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Kyrylo Budanov.
"At least as of February 15, 2024, Russia knew about the preparation. I'll tell you more, this information passed through the intelligence group in Syria. That's where it went to Moscow. It's strange how everything materialized," said Budanov.
He clarified that the Russians knew where the combat groups would come from and through which countries they would move to Russia.
According to Budanov, there are several versions of why the Kremlin allowed the terrorist attack.
"The first is, as they usually do, “towers” fighting in Kremlin to now remove several officials. Another option is that they actually underestimated the scale of what would happen. They thought it would be more localized and wanted to blame Ukraine for everything," the head of the Defense Intelligence believes.
He reminded that the Russian authorities have already changed the version of what happened near Moscow three times, in attempts to blame Ukraine for everything. In particular, there was a version from the head of the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov, who blamed Budanov himself.
"It's nonsense. By the way, if we touch on this painful issue, even though he's an enemy, I don't approve of terrorist acts against civilians in principle," he added.
As Budanov emphasized, Russia sowed chaos itself, hoping to control it.
"There is such a persistent expression, even truth. It always works among special services: everyone tries to create controlled chaos. Quite all more or less serious organizations tried to do this at different times. And the axiom is that none of them could make it controlled. The same thing happened here," he noted.