According to its own account, the Russian secret service FSB has foiled attacks on two journalists, including the editor-in-chief of the RT broadcaster. The perpetrators are said to have acted on behalf of Ukraine. Kyiv disagrees.
Ukraine has rejected Russian allegations of a planned assassination attempt on two prominent media figures in Moscow. For Ukraine, the editor-in-chief of the state television channel RT, Margarita Simonyan, and the presenter Ksenia Sobchak played no role, said the adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office, Mykhailo Podoliak, on Unified Television in Kiev. “They have no influence on anything. They play no role in what is happening today – not in the context of the war as a whole and not in the context of Russia having lost its position in the global context.”
FSB claims thwarting of assassination attempts
According to its own statements, Russia’s domestic secret service FSB prevented an assassination attempt on Simonyan and Sobchak and arrested seven suspects, including several minors. According to this, Russian “neo-Nazis” wanted to kill Simonian, who is a supporter of Moscow’s war against Ukraine, on behalf of the Kiev secret service SBU. Sobchak, on the other hand, is critical of the war against Ukraine. The motive for an alleged attack remained unclear to her. Sobchak refused to be put on the same level as the RT propagandist. That’s “shabby”.
The moderator Ksenia Sobchak (archive recording from 2018). According to the FSB, she too is said to be the target of an attack.
RT published a video in which a young man in a T-shirt with the words “Waffen SS” on it claims that he accepted the assassination order from Ukrainians. The 18-year-old man, who gives his name and date of birth, describes the alleged course of events. He was arrested by security forces during the planned handover of weapons, he said.
Several bomb attacks in Russia
The FSB repeatedly reports that assassinations have been prevented and that suspects who are said to have planned attacks on behalf of Ukrainian services have been arrested. This cannot be verified by an independent body. However, two prominent media representatives had already been killed: in August last year Darya Dugina in a car bomb explosion and in early April the military blogger Maxim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarsky, when an explosive device was detonated in a café in St. Petersburg.
In May there was also a car bomb attack on the well-known writer Zakhar Prilepin, who is close to the Kremlin. Its driver died, Prilepin himself was seriously injured. According to the FSB, “members of the neo-Nazi group ‘Paragraf-88’ ” were arrested in Moscow and the Ryazan region for spying out residential and working addresses there. A Kalashnikov assault rifle and, among other things, 90 cartridges, knives, rubber truncheons, computers and Nazi flags and literature were confiscated from the suspects. The clients are said to have promised 1.5 million rubles (equivalent to around 14,800 euros) per murder.