Putin calls Brussels attack a “barbaric crime,” but hits western support for terrorists

Expressing his deepest condolences to the Belgian people, Russian President Vladimir Putin “has strongly condemned these barbaric crimes” while assuring “the Belgian people of the Russians’ absolute solidarity with the Belgian people in these difficult hours,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said today, Sputnik reported. “President Putin has already sent condolences to King Philippe of Belgium in connection with the death of civilians in a series of explosions in Brussels,” Peskov told reporters.

“As more and more time and lives are lost, people are beginning to understand that this policy of double standards in evaluating terrorist activities is a dead-end policy,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said soon after reports trickled in of the attacks in Brussels, The BRICS Post reported. “They can’t support support terrorists in one part of the globe and not expect them to appear in others.”

Pointing at NATO for neglecting defense of its own backyard and taking a swipe at NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the head of Russia’s parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, Alexey Pushkov, tweeted that the NATO chief has allowed “people to blow themselves up from right under his nose” while “NATO was combating the imaginary Russian threat,” Newsweek reported.