Death Toll Rises to 133 in Moscow Concert Hall Attack (2024)

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Russia arrested 4 suspects in the Moscow attack as the death toll climbed to 133.

The Russian leader did take a swipe at Ukraine, saying that the suspects were apprehended while traveling to the Russian border, where he alleged a crossing was being prepared for them from “the Ukrainian side.” Kyiv has denied any involvement in the attack.

Russian state news broadcasts largely ignored or cast doubt on the ISIS attribution, and commentators focused on trying to blame Ukraine. As of Saturday, the authorities had not disclosed the identities of the alleged gunmen.

But state news media did show what it described as footage of interrogations of at least two of the suspects, including one who spoke in Tajik through an interpreter and another who said he carried out the killings for money after being recruited over the messaging app Telegram. Russia’s Interior Ministry said the four suspects were all foreign citizens.

In his video address, Mr. Putin said the four main perpetrators had been apprehended, as well as seven other individuals.

“The main thing now is to prevent those who were behind this bloody massacre from committing new crimes,” he said.

The Russian leader designated Sunday as a national day of mourning and vowed retribution against those who organized the attack.

“All perpetrators, organizers and commissioners of this crime will receive a just and inevitable punishment,” Mr. Putin said. “No matter who they are, no matter who directed them, I repeat, we will identify and punish everyone who stood behind the terrorists.”

By Saturday, the vast concert venue had been reduced to a heap of burned rubble, dust and smoke, after a mammoth fire engulfed the premises in the hours after the attack and pulled down the roof.

As emergency services continued to comb the scene, survivors gave harrowing accounts of their escapes.

“The panic was terrifying,” said Olya Muravyova, 38, who had been standing in line with her husband to buy a beer before the performance by Piknik, a Russian rock band formed in the late 1970s that was about to play at the venue when the attack occurred.

“We were in such a good mood,” she said on Saturday, visiting the scene of the attack in the hopes of picking up her car. Suddenly, five minutes before the performance was set to start, she heard shots ring out.

“I thought maybe the band was making a dramatic entrance,” she said. But her husband told her to run, and then to hide.

The names of some of the victims have also begun to emerge from officials and in local news reports. Most of those identified so far appeared to have been in their 40s, and many had traveled from other parts of the country to attend the concert.

Alexander Baklemishev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing the band, his son told local media, and had traveled from his home city of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, to see them perform.

His son, Maksim, told the Russian news outlet MSK1 that his father had sent a video of the concert hall before the attack and that was the last he heard from him.

“There was no last conversation,” his son said. “All that was left is the video, and nothing more.”

On Saturday night, the governor of the Moscow region announced that rescuers had ended the search for survivors at the suburban Moscow concert venue, according to TASS. The death toll remained at 133, but the search for bodies would continue, the governor said.

Across the country, Russians placed flowers at makeshift memorials. Many lined up in the capital to donate blood. Russian officials gave regular updates about the more than 100 people wounded in the attack, many of them in critical condition. The authorities warned that the death toll was likely to rise, and said three children were among the dead.

United States officials said the atrocity was the work of Islamic State-Khorosan, or ISIS-K, an offshoot of the group that has been active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

“ISIS is a common terrorist enemy that must be defeated everywhere,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Saturday.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States condemns the attack in Moscow and “stands in solidarity with the people of Russia grieving the loss of life after this horrific event.”

The tragedy began on Friday evening, when men in fatigues armed with automatic weapons stormed Crocus City Hall, situated in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk.

First, they began shooting people, many at point-blank range. Then, the attackers used a flammable liquid to set fire to the premises of the large concert hall, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee, which said many of the victims perished after inhaling the toxic fumes.

In interviews with Russian media, some of the concert attendees recalled running out of the venue and trying to escape through a utility area, only to find the doors locked.

The attack represented a significant security failure for the Kremlin, and came just days after Mr. Putin claimed victory in the presidential election.

For years, Mr. Putin has emphasized countering international terrorism as a top priority, but since invading Ukraine two years ago, he has pivoted to casting the West as the biggest foreign threat faced by Russians.

The lapse raised questions about whether Mr. Putin’s security services, which have been concentrating squarely on waging war against Ukraine, overlooked the threat posed by extremist Islamic groups. Russia has long been a target for Sunni extremists, because of its backing of Syria and Iran, and the country for years faced extremist attacks emanating from its own North Caucasus region.

At least 128 people died when Chechen extremists took a Moscow theater hostage in 2002 during a performance of the musical “Nord-Ost.” Two years later, Chechen militants besieged a school in Beslan, a national tragedy that killed more than 330 people, more than half of them children.

More recently, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for shooting down a Russian aircraft taking off from Egypt in 2015. An Al Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for an attack on the St. Petersburg metro in 2017.

In recent weeks, the Russian authorities had been warned about the possibility of a terrorist attack at a concert in Moscow.

On March 7, the American Embassy in Moscow issued a rare, specific public warning calling on people to avoid large gatherings, including concerts, owing to information that extremists had imminent plans to target such events in the Russian capital.

The public warning came after the United States collected intelligence suggesting that ISIS-K was planning an attack in Moscow, U.S. officials told The New York Times. Beyond the Embassy’s public warning, U.S. officials also privately told Russian officials about intelligence suggesting an impending attack, the officials said.

During a March 19 speech to the Federal Security Service, Mr. Putin dismissed the Western warnings as “outright blackmail” and attempts “to intimidate and destabilize our society.”

After Friday’s attack, Russian state propagandists tried to suggest that the advance warning provided by the United States meant that Washington had a hand in the attack. But Mr. Putin, beyond blaming unspecified individuals on the Ukrainian side for preparing a border crossing, stopped short of making any such accusations.

“We know what the threat of terrorism is,” Mr. Putin said. “We are counting here on cooperation with all countries that genuinely share our pain and are ready, in their deeds, to truly unite efforts in the fight against the common enemy of international terrorism.”

The guests on a political talk show on Russia’s flagship Channel One rushed to find ways to blame Ukraine on Saturday evening, suggesting without evidence that Kyiv had to be behind the attack, despite Islamic State’s claims of responsibility.

Leonid Reshetnikov, a former top Russian intelligence officer, accused Ukraine of turning to terrorism because its forces couldn’t win on the battlefield.

“So long as this kind of government, this kind of regime exists, this terror will continue,” Mr. Reshetnikov said on the show, noting that Moscow needed to “end” Ukraine as a government established on Russian land.

Responding to the Kremlin’s accusations, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called Mr. Putin a “nonentity” who sent hundreds of thousands of Russians to fight in Ukraine rather than protect their own country.

“They came to Ukraine and are burning our cities and they try to blame Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video posted to Telegram on Saturday evening.

Crocus City Hall, the concert hall where the attack took place, opened in 2009 as one of the glitziest new venues in the Russian capital. It went on to host top international acts, including Eric Clapton, Sia and Lorde, as well as Donald J. Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

Pictures published by Russian emergency services showed emergency medical workers sawing through the remains of the concert hall, where the seats had been charred down to their metal insides.

Reporting was contributed by Valerie Hopkins from Frankfurt, Anton Troianovski from Dubai, Oleg Matsnev from Berlin, Alina Lobzina from London, Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv, Alan Rappeport from Washington and Victoria Kim from Seoul.

The new statement represented the latest intelligence assessment by the United States, and it signaled American intelligence agencies are confident that Ukraine had nothing to do with the attack.

Piknik, a longtime Russian rock band, is now at the center of a tragedy.

The victims appear to have included some of Piknik’s own team. On Saturday evening, another note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte page to say that the woman who ran the band’s merchandise stalls was missing.

“We are not ready to believe the worst,” the message said.

The attack at Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over four decades.

Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “monsters of rock,” with songs inspired by classic Western rock acts including David Bowie and a range of Russian styles.

Since releasing its debut album, 1982’s “Smoke,” Piknik — led by Edmund Shklyarsky, the band’s singer and guitarist — has grown in popularity despite its music being often gloomy with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage shows.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kukulin said, the band began performing with exciting light displays, special effects and other innovative touches. At one point in the 1990s, the band’s concerts included a “living cello” — a woman with an amplified string stretched across her. Shklyarsky would play a solo on the string.

This month, the band debuted a new song online — “Nothing, Fear Nothing” — with a video that showed the band performing live before huge screens featuring ever-changing animations.

Unlike some of their peers, Piknik was “never a political band,” Kukulin said, although that did not stop it from becoming entwined in politics. In the 1980s, Soviet authorities banned the group — along with many others — from using recording studios, while Soviet newspapers complained of the group’s lyrics, including a song called “Opium Smoke” that authorities saw as encouraging drug use.

In recent years, some of Russia’s most prominent rock stars have left their country, fed up with President Vladimir V. Putin’s curbs on freedom of expression, including regular crackdowns on concerts. Piknik had benefited from that exodus, Kukulin said, because the band had fewer competitors on Russia’s heritage rock circuit.

Unlike some musicians, Shklyarsky had not acted as a booster for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kukulin said. Still, Ukrainian authorities have long banned Piknik from performing in the country because the group has played concerts in occupied Crimea. In a 2016 interview, Shklyarsky said he was not concerned about the ban.

“Politics comes and goes, but life remains,” he said.

Kukulin said that among Piknik’s songs was “To the Memory of Innocent Victims” — a track that could be interpreted as being about those who were politically oppressed under communism. Now, Kukulin said, many fans were hearing the song in a new way, as a tribute to those who lost their lives in Friday’s attack.

Zelensky called the Kremlin’s reaction to the attack “predictable” and warned that if Russians chose to “die silently” rather than ask questions of their security services, Putin would use the situation for his own personal benefit.

A deadly attack shatters Putin’s promise of security to the Russian people.

The assault on Friday, which killed at least 133 people at a concert hall in suburban Moscow, was a blow to Mr. Putin’s aura as a leader for whom national security is paramount. That is especially true after two years of a war in Ukraine that he describes as key to Russia’s survival — and which he cast as his top priority after the election last Sunday.

“The election demonstrated a seemingly confident victory,” Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political scientist, said in a phone interview from Moscow. “And suddenly, against the backdrop of a confident victory, there’s this demonstrative humiliation.”

Mr. Putin seemed blindsided by the assault. It took him more than 19 hours to address the nation about the attack, the deadliest in Russia since the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in the country’s south, which claimed 334 lives. When he did, the Russian leader said nothing about the mounting evidence that a branch of the Islamic State committed the attack.

Instead, Mr. Putin hinted that Ukraine was behind the tragedy and said the assailants had acted “just like the Nazis,” who “once carried out massacres in the occupied territories” — evoking his frequent, false description of present-day Ukraine as being run by neo-Nazis.

“Our common duty now — our comrades at the front, all citizens of the country — is to be together in one formation,” Mr. Putin said at the end of a five-minute speech, trying to conflate the fight against terrorism with his invasion of Ukraine.

The question is how much of the Russian public will buy into his argument. They might ask whether Mr. Putin, with the invasion and his conflict with the West, truly has the country’s security interests at heart — or whether he is woefully forsaking them, as many of his opponents say he is.

The fact that Mr. Putin apparently ignored a warning from the United States about a potential terrorist attack is likely to deepen the skepticism. Instead of acting on the warnings and tightening security, he dismissed them as “provocative statements.”

“All this resembles outright blackmail and an intention to intimidate and destabilize our society,” Mr. Putin said on Tuesday in a speech to the F.S.B., Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, referring to the Western warnings. After the attack on Friday, some of his exiled critics have cited his response as evidence of the president’s detachment from Russia’s true security concerns.

Rather than keeping society safe from actual, violent terrorists, those critics say, Mr. Putin has directed his sprawling security services to pursue dissidents, journalists and anyone deemed a threat to the Kremlin’s definition of “traditional values.”

A case in point: Just hours before the attack, state media reported that the Russian authorities had added “the L.G.B.T. movement” to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”; Russia had already outlawed the gay rights movement last year. Terrorism was also among the many charges prosecutors leveled against Aleksei A. Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader who died last month.

“In a country in which counterterrorism special forces chase after online commenters,” Ruslan Leviev, an exiled Russian military analyst, wrote in a social media post on Saturday, “terrorists will always feel free.”

Even as the Islamic State repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attack and Ukraine denied any involvement, the Kremlin’s messengers pushed into overdrive to try to persuade the Russian public that this was merely a ruse.

Olga Skabeyeva, a state television host, wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian military intelligence had found assailants “who would look like ISIS. But this is no ISIS.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor of the state-run RT television network, wrote that reports of Islamic State responsibility amounted to a “basic sleight of hand” by the American news media.

On a prime-time television talk show on the state-run Channel 1, Russia’s best-known ultraconservative ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, declared that Ukraine’s leadership and “their puppet masters in the Western intelligence services” had surely organized the attack.

It was an effort to “undermine trust in the president,” Mr. Dugin said, and it showed regular Russians that they had no choice but to unite behind Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Mr. Dugin’s daughter was killed in a car bombing near Moscow in 2022 that U.S. officials said was indeed authorized by parts of the Ukrainian government, but without American involvement.

U.S. officials have said there is no evidence of Ukrainian involvement in the concert hall attack, and Ukrainian officials ridiculed the Russian accusations. Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, said Mr. Putin’s claim that the attackers had fled toward Ukraine and intended to cross into it, with the help of the Ukrainian authorities, made no sense.

In recent months, Mr. Putin has appeared more confident than at any other point since he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian forces have retaken the initiative on the front line, while Ukraine is struggling amid flagging Western support and a shortage of troops.

Inside Russia, the election — and its predetermined outcome — underscored Mr. Putin’s dominance over the nation’s politics.

Mr. Kynev, the political scientist, said he believed many Russians were now in “shock,” because “restoring order has always been Vladimir Putin’s calling card.”

Mr. Putin’s early years in power were marked by terrorist attacks, culminating in the Beslan school siege in 2004; he used those violent episodes to justify his rollback of political freedoms. Before Friday, the most recent mass-casualty terrorist attack in the capital region was a suicide bombing at an airport in Moscow in 2011 that killed 37 people.

Still, given the Kremlin’s efficacy in cracking down on dissent and the news media, Mr. Kynev predicted that the political consequences of the concert hall attack would be limited, as long as the violence was not repeated.

“To be honest,” he said, “our society has gotten used to keeping quiet about inconvenient topics.”

Constant Méheut contributed reporting.

There have been other deadly attacks at concerts and music festivals in recent years.

The ISIS branch the U.S. blames for the attack has targeted the Taliban’s links with allies, including Russia.

In 2022, ISIS-K carried out attacks on the Russian and Pakistani embassies in Kabul and a hotel that was home to many Chinese nationals. More recently, it has also threatened attacks against the Chinese, Indian and Iranian embassies in Afghanistan and has released a flood of anti-Russian propaganda.

It has also struck outside Afghanistan. In January, ISIS-K carried out twin bombings in Iran that killed scores and wounded hundreds of others at a memorial service for Iran’s former top general, Qassim Suleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike four years before.

In recent months, the Taliban’s relationship with Russia, as well as China and Iran, has warmed up. While no country has officially recognized the Taliban government, earlier this month Russia accepted a military attaché from the Taliban in Moscow, while China officially accepted a Taliban ambassador to the country. Both moves were seen as confidence-building measures with Taliban authorities.

ISIS-K has both denounced the Kremlin for its interventions in Syria and condemned the Taliban for engaging with Russian authorities decades after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Its propaganda has painted the Taliban as “betraying the history of Afghanistan and betraying their religion by making friends with their former enemies,” said Ricardo Valle, the director of research of the Khorasan Diary, a research platform based in Islamabad.

In the more than two years since they took over in Afghanistan, Taliban security forces have conducted a ruthless campaign to try to eliminate ISIS-K and have successfully prevented the group from seizing territory within Afghanistan. Last year, Taliban security forces killed at least eight ISIS-K leaders, according to American officials, and pushed many other fighters into neighboring Pakistan.

Still, ISIS-K has proved resilient and remained active across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Within Afghanistan, it has targeted Taliban security forces in hit-and-run attacks and — as it came under increasing pressure from Taliban counterterrorism operations — staged headline-grabbing attacks across the country. Just a day before the attack at the concert hall in Moscow, the group carried out a suicide bombing in Kandahar — the birthplace of the Taliban movement — sending a powerful message that even Taliban soldiers in the group’s heartland were not safe.

After the attack in Moscow, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s foreign ministry, said in a statement on social media that the country “condemns in the strongest terms the recent terrorist attack in Moscow” and “considers it a blatant violation of all human standards.”

“Regional countries must take a coordinated, clear and resolute position against such incidents directed at regional de-stabilization,” he added.

‘We were in such a good mood.’ Then shots rang out, a survivor says.

“I thought maybe the band was making a dramatic entrance,” Ms. Muravyova, 38, said on Saturday. But her husband told her to run, and then to hide.

Ms. Muravyova, who had returned to the concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow in hopes of picking up her car on Saturday, described “panic” and terror as the attack unfolded.

“I thought they were shooting from above,” she said. “We ran away from the main doors where they had started to shoot. And everyone started pushing.”

She said it seemed as if the fire exits had been blocked, and people had to search for a way out of the venue.

“My husband was screaming that we need to run away from all the people,” she recalled.

When they made it outside, Ms. Muravyova said, they saw hundreds of people running — many without coats, left behind in the chaos.

Names of the victims are beginning to emerge.

Alexander Baklemyshev, 51, had long dreamed about seeing the band, his son told local media, and had traveled solo from his home city of Satka, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, for the concert.

His son, Maksim, told the Russian news outlet MSK1 that his father had sent him a video of the concert hall before the attack. That was the last he heard from his father.

“There was no last conversation,” his son said. “All that was left is the video, and nothing more.”

Irina Okisheva and her husband, Pavel Okishev, also traveled hundreds of miles to attend the concert — making their way from Kirov, northeast of Moscow. Mr. Okishev had received the tickets as an early birthday present. He was set to turn 35 next week, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported. Both he and his wife died in the attack, the paper reported.

“Very painful and scary,” Ms. Okisheva’s colleagues wrote on a social media page for a photo studio where she worked. “The whole studio team is horrified by what happened.”

Anastasiya Volkova lost both of her parents in the attack. She told 5 TV that she had missed a call from her mother on Friday night at around the time of the attack. When she called back, there was no response, Ms. Volkova said.

“I couldn’t answer the phone. I didn’t hear the call,” Ms. Volkova told the broadcaster, adding that her mother had been “really looking forward to this concert.”

As the death toll climbed to 133 people, the Moscow region’s health care ministry published a preliminary list of victims. It had 41 names; Andrey Rudnitsky was one of them.

A forward in an amateur hockey league, he turned 39 years old last week, according to his page on the league’s website. Mr. Rudnitsky’s teammates told Pro Gorod, a local news website, that he had moved to Moscow last year from Yaroslavl but planned to return home to play there. Mr. Rudnitsky had two children.

Ekaterina Novoselova, 42, was also on the list. Ms. Novoselova won a beauty pageant in 2001 in her home city of Tver, 110 miles northwest of Moscow, one of the pageant organizer’s told the local news outlet TIA. It reported that she had moved to Moscow to work as a lawyer and is survived by her husband and two children.

Some people appeared to have been named by mistake. Yevgeniya Ryumina, 38, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that she had fled the concert hall to safety. But she had lost her ID, Ms. Ryumina said, suggesting that might have led to the confusion.

In his first remarks on the attack, Putin tries to link the assailants to Ukraine.

He did not definitively pin the attack on Ukraine; nor did he refer to the assessment by American officials that a branch of the Islamic State was behind it.

“They were trying to hide and were moving toward Ukraine,” Mr. Putin said, referring to the four men who carried out the attack and who the Kremlin said had been captured in western Russia. “Based on preliminary information, a window for crossing the border was prepared for them by the Ukrainian side.”

Ukrainian officials have repeatedly denied having anything to do with the attack, and American officials have said there is no evidence of Ukrainian involvement. American officials voiced concern on Friday that Mr. Putin could seek to falsely blame Ukraine for the attack, and some analysts and Kremlin critics have said that he could use such an accusation to justify another escalation in Russia’s invasion.

Mr. Putin has in the past blamed the West for stoking terrorist groups to commit violence inside Russia, but he did not refer to the United States or the West in Saturday’s speech. Nor did he mention the March 7 security alert issued by the United States Embassy in Moscow about the risk of attacks on concerts in the Russian capital, which pro-Kremlin figures have used as evidence of possible American complicity.

“We are counting here on cooperation with all countries that genuinely share our pain and are ready, in their deeds, to truly unite our efforts in the fight against the common enemy of international terrorism,” Mr. Putin said.

He declared Monday a national day of mourning and said that security measures were being tightened across Russia.

“The main thing now is to prevent those who were behind this bloody massacre from committing new crimes,” Mr. Putin said.

Russia’s allies and adversaries alike express outrage over the attack.

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, called the attack an act of terrorism that his government “condemns in the strongest terms. “Nothing can ever justify such horrific violence,” he wrote on X, offering Britain’s “deepest sympathy.”

Germany’s Foreign Ministry called it “a horrific attack” that must be “investigated quickly.” The French Foreign Ministry said that “all effort has to be made to determine the causes of these heinous acts.”

Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry, said the country condemned the attack “in the strongest terms” and “considers it a blatant violation of all human standards.”

The foreign minister of Pakistan, Ishaq Dar, offered prayers for the victims and their families. “At this hour of national tragedy, Pakistan stands in solidarity with the people and government of the Russian Federation,” he wrote on X.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India also expressed solidarity with Russia “in this hour of grief.”

Putin appears to be laying the groundwork to blame Ukraine for the attack, claiming that “the Ukrainian side" had “prepared a window” for the attackers to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine. But he did not definitively pin the blame on Ukraine or anyone else in his five-minute address, saying that those responsible would be punished, “whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.”

This is what we know about the attack.

Russian officials and state media have largely ignored ISIS’s claim of responsibility and instead suggested that Ukraine was behind the violence. Ukraine has denied any involvement, and American officials say there is no evidence connecting Kyiv to the attack.

Russian authorities have detained at least 11 people, including four migrant laborers described as Tajik citizens who have been charged with committing a terrorist act, but they have not identified most of the accused assailants or their motives.

Here’s a closer look at the attack.

What happened?

The gunmen entered the Crocus City Hall building, one of the biggest entertainment complexes in the Moscow area, with capacity of more than 6,000, shortly before a sold-out rock concert was scheduled to start. Armed with automatic rifles, they began shooting.

Using explosives and flammable liquids, Russian investigators said, they set the building ablaze, causing chaos as people began to run. The fire quickly engulfed more than a third of the building, spreading smoke and causing parts of the roof to collapse. Russia’s emergency service posted a video and pictures from after the fire showing charred seating and firefighters working to remove debris.

Russian law enforcement said that people had died from gunshot wounds and poisoning from the smoke.

At least three helicopters were dispatched to extinguish the fire or to try to rescue people from the roof. The firefighters were only able to contain the fire early on Saturday; the emergency service said it was mostly extinguished by 5 a.m.

The search for survivors ended on Saturday, as details about the victims began to emerge. Many of the more than 100 people injured in the attack were in critical condition.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a top law-enforcement body, said on Sunday that 137 bodies had been recovered from the charred premises, including those of three children. It said that 62 victims had been identified so far and that genetic testing was underway to identify the rest.

Where are the assailants?

Attackers were able to flee the scene. Early on Saturday, the head of Russia’s top security agency, the F.S.B., said that 11 people had been detained in the connection to the attack, including “all four terrorists directly involved.” The four men were arraigned late Sunday and charged with committing a terrorist act, according to state and independent media outlets, and they face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The press service of the Basmanny District Court said that the first two defendants, Dalerjon B. Mirzoyev and Saidakrami M. Rachalbalizoda, had pleaded guilty to the charges.

It did not specify any plea from the other two — Muhammadsobir Z. Fayzov, a 19-year-old barber and the youngest of the men charged, and Shamsidin Fariduni, 25, a married factory worker with an 8-month-old baby — according to Mediazona, an independent news outlet.

The men looked severely battered and injured as they appeared in court, and videos of them being tortured and beaten while under interrogation circulated widely on Russian social media.

There were signs that Russia would try to pin blame on Ukraine, despite the claim of responsibility by the Islamic State. The F.S.B. said in a statement that the attack had been carefully planned and that the terrorists had tried to flee toward Ukraine.

How are Russians responding?

President Vladimir V. Putin, who claimed victory in a presidential election last weekend, did not publicly address the tragedy until Saturday afternoon. In a five-minute address to the nation, he appeared to be laying the groundwork to blame Ukraine for the attack, claiming that “the Ukrainian side” had “prepared a window” for the attackers to cross the border from Russia into Ukraine.

But he did not definitively assign blame, saying that those responsible would be punished, “whoever they may be, whoever may have sent them.”

The attack has punctured the sense of relative safety for Muscovites over the past decade, bringing back memories of attacks that shadowed life in the Russian capital in the 2000s.

Russia observed a national day of mourning on Sunday as questions lingered about the identities and motives of the perpetrators. Flags were lowered to half-staff at buildings across the country.

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.

Ukraine says Russia’s speculation that it was behind the attack is meant to rally war support.

Russia’s speculations, the foreign ministry said, were an attempt at “discrediting Ukraine in the eyes of the international community.”

Russia is now on the offensive along the entire front line in Ukraine, but its advances have come at a creeping pace and at tremendous cost in dead and wounded soldiers. Military analysts have said that any more significant breakthrough would require a large mobilization of fresh troops.

The Ukrainian ministry issued its statement after Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now the deputy secretary of Russia’s national security council, floated the possibility late Friday that Ukraine had been involved in the attack on the concert hall in a Moscow suburb.

The ministry said that Kyiv “categorically denies” any involvement, and an adviser to Ukraine’s president also denied any role by the country.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack through an affiliated news agency on Friday, and the United States said it believed that a branch of the Islamic State that has been active in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan was to blame.

Mr. Medvedev vowed that Russia would retaliate against those behind the attack. “If it’s determined these are terrorists of the Kyiv regime, it will be impossible to treat them and those who inspire them any differently,” he said, adding that those responsible for the violence would “be found and mercilessly destroyed, like terrorists. This includes official figures of the state committing such an evil act.”

Russia has in the past used violence at home as pivot points in its wars, Ukrainian officials pointed out after Friday’s attack.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry, in its statement, pointed to explosions in apartment buildings in Russia in 1999 that set off the second of the two post-Soviet wars in Chechnya. A Russian security service defector later blamed his agency for orchestrating the attacks to galvanize public support for renewed military action in Chechnya, something that Moscow vehemently denies.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, also referred in their statements to the apartment bombings as examples of the risk of Russia’s blaming Ukraine for the concert attack.

In the days before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Russian officials accused Kyiv of blowing up the car of a leader of one of the Kremlin’s client states in eastern Ukraine, and of firing artillery at a chemical plant. Ukraine denied being involved in either of those episodes.