How to pull an image from a private GCR repository with ctr?

Question

I'm trying to pull an image from a private GCR repository using the following command:

ctr images pull -u `base64 -d <<< $AUTH` $image

And it fails with this output:

ctr: failed to resolve reference "\"type\":": object required

This is while I'm able to pull the image with crictl, using the command:

crictl pull --auth $AUTH $image

Any idea what I can fix to successfully pull the image with ctr?

Thanks in advance.

Update: I'm using ctr version v1.6.8 and crictl version v1.25.0.