Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt and retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Newsmax on Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “winning the war on information” in the aftermath of a gun attack on a concert hall outside of Moscow that killed 137 people and injured 182 more.

Though the Islamic State terror group has claimed responsibility, and the United States has publicly said it believes the claim, Russia has cast doubt on the Middle Eastern terror group’s involvement and suggested Ukraine was behind the attack.

“It’s all an information war at this point in time, but the thing I want to stress, the most important thing, no matter who it ends up being — you can take all the ISIS reports at their retail value, you could say it’s Chechnya, you could say it’s Ukraine — what’s important now is whatever Putin says is going to happen from the Russian perspective is the Russian conclusion as they choose it to be,” Holt said during an appearance on “American Agenda.”

“He’s already saying who he’s blamed — he’s blaming Ukraine for this,” he said. “We are already seeing intensification on the front lines; the hypersonic missiles that they took last night in Ukraine were just absolutely brutal. What I’m concerned about is that their air defenses have broken down. We are going to see more of this as this offensive goes from defense to offense in Ukraine. There’s a lot of diplomacy that has to be conducted now based on what has occurred with this terror thing in Moscow. My advice for the D.C. folks would be you’ve got to get ahead of this. You’ve got to get proactive. Our president hasn’t been on the phone with Vladimir Putin in two years. Now might be a really, really good time because we should all remember that we’re dealing with a nuclear power that has the world’s most nuclear weapons.”

Regardless of what the West says about who’s behind the Moscow attack, Putin “is winning the war on information,” Shaffer said.

“Putin is not a dumb man,” he said. “I’m surprised he’s not blaming us since [then Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs] Victoria Nuland stood in Kyiv and said that there’s going to be ‘surprises against him.’ She threatened him directly. So, I think the Russians at this point, at least, are not doing that. But I wouldn’t put it past Putin to do anything at this point. Putin is winning. Putin is winning the war on information. He’s already changed the dialogue in Russia to focus specifically on Ukraine, no matter what we say in the West.”

Shaffer added that the Biden administration might have some culpability in the concert hall attack.

“One of the reasons the United States people I advised and worked with in the Trump administration wanted to keep 2,500 to 5,000 people in Afghanistan is to stop ISIS K from being able to do this sort of thing,” he said. “I’m not disputing that ISIS had a role in this. … But part of the story here that we should be focused on is the fact that the United States and Russia share ISIS as an enemy, and we allowed this to metastasize more readily in Afghanistan. So, I don’t want to blame Joe Biden, but I kind of am by the fact that we had been fighting a war on terror, we took our foot off the accelerator, let it happen, and in some order of magnitude here we have to trace back and go after ISIS as vigorously as we ever did before.”

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