Moscow (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Russia’s FSB thwarted Ukrainian assassination plots targeting officials, using bombs disguised as power banks or folders.
Russia’s Federal Security Service stated on 26 Dec 2024 that it had thwarted several plots by Ukrainian intelligence services to eliminate high-ranking Russian officials and their families in Moscow utilising bombs concealed as power banks or paper folders.
A few days earlier Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service assassinated Lieutenant General Kirillov, head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Army, in Moscow outside his flat building by exploding a bomb affixed to an electric scooter. As reported by Reuter, an SBU source verified that the Ukrainian intelligence agency did the execution. The Kremlin stated the killing was a terrorist spell by Ukraine, with which it has been at battle since February 2022, and pledged revenge.
How did the FSB thwart Ukrainian assassination plots?
“The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation has thwarted a series of assassination tries on high-ranking military personnel of the Defence Ministry,” the FSB stated. “Four Russian citizens concerned in the preparation of these episodes have been apprehended,” it said in a statement.
The FSB stated that the Russian nationals had been recruited by the Ukrainian intelligence services. One of the guys retrieved a bomb hidden as a mobile charger in Moscow that was to be connected with magnets to the auto of one of the Defence Ministry’s top officials, the FSB stated.
Another Russian individual was assigned to the observation of senior Russian defence officials, it stated, with one plot concerning the delivery of a bomb hidden as a document folder. “An incendiary device disguised as a portable charger, with magnets connected, had to be put under the official car of one of the senior executives of the Russian Defence Ministry,” it said.
The actual date of the intended attacks was unclear though one of the suspects expressed he had recovered a bomb on Dec. 23, according to the FSB. Russian state TV demonstrated what it expressed was footage of some of the suspects who confessed to being recruited by Ukrainian intelligence for a hit against Russian defence ministry officers.
