As with anything that happens inside Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the March 22 massacre at Crocus City Hall will forever be regarded with more than a little suspicion. That’s even more true in the context of a grinding, horrific war the nature of which is now such that Ukraine likely takes the old “all’s fair” adage quite literally.

At the (not entirely trivial) risk of stumbling into naivety, it seems exceedingly unlikely that Volodymyr Zelensky would involve Ukraine directly in the heinous, up-close murder of civilians. That’s not to say Ukraine’s averse to the idea of gunshots shattering the false sense of normalcy Putin’s worked so hard to engineer and preserve for everyday Russians amid the war. It’s just to say an ISIS-style mass shooting in a crowded concert hall feels more like… well, like ISIS, which squares neatly both with US intelligence gathered prior to the attacks (and shared with the Kremlin, by the way) and the group’s claim of responsibility.

“Too neatly,” you might suggest. It squares too neatly. While I’m sympathetic to the implied conspiracy theory, recall that the same skeptical eye was cast at the group’s claims when they took credit for bombing a memorial event for Qassem Soleimani in January. The Iranian government nevertheless alluded to Israeli involvement. On Saturday, Putin found a way to blame Ukraine, or at least to suggest Kyiv might’ve been an accessory-after-the-fact.

“According to preliminary data, the Ukrainian side prepared a window for them to cross the state border,” Putin alleged. “Them” was a reference to the suspects — 11 of them in all, including the four gunmen — who were quickly apprehended by the FSB. If you didn’t know any better, you might dare to suggest the FSB knew exactly who they were and exactly where to find them.

Reluctant as I am to implicitly blame the victim state (or, more accurately, the regime which governs the victim state), I’m compelled to note that ISIS operatives aren’t exactly famous for being apprehended following an attack, unless by “apprehended” you mean authorities picking up their loose hands and legs. Sunni extremists tend to die during their missions. On purpose. Abdelhamid Abaaoud was an exception, but even he blew himself up eventually. The idea that all four ISIS gunmen would flee the scene of an attack alive, then allow themselves to be captured something other than dead, is incongruous with the group’s modus operandi.

It’s not that I doubt ISIS’s involvement. This is ISIS-K, you’re reminded. They targeted the Russian embassy in Kabul a couple of years ago and they regularly traffic in antagonistic rhetoric vis-à-vis Moscow for what I assume are obvious reasons. (The Russian military killed scores of ISIS fighters in Syria while working to restore Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s a staunch ally of the regime in Tehran and ISIS views the Taliban’s diplomatic engagement with the Kremlin as a historical contradiction too glaring to happily countenance.) I just wonder about the circumstances — the timing, how quickly the perpetrators were detained, the fact that the US alerted the Kremlin to the attacks weeks ago and so on.

In a morbidly hilarious assessment considering the source, the Taliban derided the Moscow concert hall massacre as “a blatant violation of all human standards.” They’d know. When the Taliban says you’re a despicable example of humanity, you’re really going places in the world as a Sunni jihadist.

The death toll in Friday’s concert attack stood at 133 on Saturday, with more to come as Russian officials sifted through the partially-charred husk of the auditorium complex, where local authorities said a 140,000-square foot blaze burned in the aftermath of the gruesome fracas.

After asserting, without initially detailing the evidence, that the ISIS team planned to escape to Ukraine, Putin pledged to punish “all perpetrators, organizers and sponsors… whoever they are or whoever directs them.”

In case there were any questions as to whether that might include Ukraine, he compared Friday’s events not to other ISIS attacks, but rather to Hitler’s Germany, an apparent effort to connect the Crocus City Hall shooting to what the Kremlin still occasionally describes as a “de-Nazification” campaign in Ukraine.

“The criminals acted in cold blood,” Putin told Russians, during a televised address. “Going to kill and shoot at point-blank range our citizens and our children, just as the Nazis did.”