MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said on Monday that it had cracked a network of Ukrainian agents in Crimea who were involved in attempts to assassinate pro-Russian figures.
It said the targets included the Moscow-appointed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, and a former pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament, Oleg Tsaryov.
Tsaryov survived despite being shot twice in an attack in October in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. A source in Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency told Reuters at the time that the shooting was an SBU operation.
The FSB said the Ukrainian network had also targeted railway and energy infrastructure on the peninsula. It said it had found caches of arms and explosives, and detained 18 “agents and accomplices of the Ukrainian special services”.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
