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On December 2, the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) reported that several employees of the Ukrainian intelligence services were detained in different Russian regions, including in Crimea. Two of them were collecting information about the Russian strategic objects, and the third was preparing a terrorist attack.
The FSB announced that it had thwarted “intelligence and sabotage activities on the territory of three Russian regions.”
Two of the detainees were identified as Zinoviy Koval and his 22-year-old-son, Igor Koval. They both confessed that after being recruited by a member of Ukraine’s SBU security service, they were asked to gather information about sensitive sites. They were promised a $10,000 reward. Short-barreled and automatic weapons were reportedly found in their car.
The third detainee was claimed to be Shvidenko Sergey, officer of the Ukrainian Military Intelligence “sent to Russia with the task to commit a terrorist act,” namely to detonate two IEDs.
In his turn, a spokesman for the Security Service of Ukraine denounced the FSB statement as fake.
“Such statements from the Russian FSB should be considered exclusively through the prism of hybrid war, in which information propaganda and the spread of fakes play an important role.” Artem Dekhtyarenko commented on the issue.
However, these are not the first Ukrainian terrorists arrested on the Russian territory. Today, FSB claimed that Sergey Shvidenko, a senior officer in the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, was convicted of overseeing a group plotting to corry out sabotage attacks in Crimea, including at the facilities of the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet.
Earlier, the FSB detained Ukrainian diplomate Alexander Sosonyuk, who served in the Ukrainian consulate in Saint Petersburg, and was gathering secret data from law enforcement and FSB databases.
In 2020, a Russian officer from the Strategic Missile Forces was also detained on charges for passing highly classified information on the county’s strategic forces to Ukrainian intelligence officers.
