Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said Friday it had shot and killed a Ukrainian military saboteur who was planning to attack Russian military and energy sites.
“The saboteur planned to commit a series of terrorist acts in Russia on the orders of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s HUR [military intelligence], including against Russia’s Defense Ministry facilities, as well as members of a volunteer battalion and its volunteer center in St. Petersburg,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted the law enforcement agency as saying.
The unidentified agent’s third potential target reportedly included a fuel terminal in the northwestern Leningrad region.
A video released by the FSB showed the alleged Ukrainian agent to be a slender blond man with glasses. One of the images showed a man’s dead body in an open muddy area with a pistol lying next to his hand.
According to the FSB, the alleged agent had arrived from Lithuania in March after undergoing weapons and explosives training in the eastern Lithuanian city of Pabrade.
FSB agents had initially tried to arrest him in the Moscow region, but they failed after he shot back and managed to flee. He was detected again in the Leningrad region and killed while trying to retrieve weapons from a hidden storage site.
It was not immediately possible to verify the reports from the Russian authorities. The FSB did not provide any identifying details about the alleged agent other than his birth year, which was said to be 1976.
The FSB said Russian investigators had charged the man with the illegal possession of explosives and preparations to commit an act of sabotage before he was killed.
In December 2022, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s counterintelligence services to step up their hunt for “traitors, spies and saboteurs.”
In the years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has cast itself as a “besieged fortress” in a geopolitical standoff with the West.
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