Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB, formerly the KGB) said on Monday it had dismantled a network of Ukrainian agents in Crimea involved in assassinations of pro-Russian officials, Reuters and Agerpres reported.
The FSB specified that among the persons targeted by the network were Serhii Aksyonov, appointed by Moscow as the governor of Crimea, as well as former pro-Russian deputy of the Ukrainian parliament Oleg Tsarev. Tsarev survived despite being shot twice in the October attack in Crimea, a peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
A source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told Reuters at the time that the attack was a SBU operation.
The FSB said that the Ukrainian network also fired at the railway and energy infrastructure of the peninsula. The Federal Security Service of Russia discovered caches of weapons and explosives and detained 18 “agents and accomplices of the Ukrainian special services.”
The announcement, made Monday by the Federal Security Service in Moscow, comes after it announced last Thursday the arrest of a Belarusian national it accuses of carrying out two operations in late November in cooperation with Ukrainian intelligence services, including one that led to train explosion in Russia’s longest tunnel.
FSB reports arrests after sabotage that sparked riots in Moscow
The first attack was carried out on the night of November 29-30 in the Bessolovsky tunnel in the Republic of Buryatia, where four explosive devices were detonated during the passage of a fuel train, then a second sabotage was carried out in another train, which was heading on an alternative railway, on which traffic was diverted after the first sabotage, a Ukrainian source reported on Sunday.
The purpose of the operation was to decommission the specified railway line, which connects China and Mongolia and passes through the Baikal-Amur tunnel in Buretia province, a tunnel with a length of 15.3 kilometers, the same source explained.
The suspect “confessed” to installing “eight explosive devices” in the tank cars of two trains and that he acted on the orders of the “Security Service of Ukraine,” according to a press release by the FSB last Thursday, which announced the man’s arrest.
Kyiv has claimed several attacks on Russian territory since the start of the war, which Russia launched in February 2022, but this act of sabotage marked the first time that Ukrainian special services have carried out such operations thousands of kilometers from the front line.
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Source: Hot News
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