Russian FSB and Investigative Committee officials claim to have prevented an assassination plot allegedly planned by Ukrainian special services to kill propagandist Margarita Simonyan and TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak.
Source: The Insider
According to the Russian secret service, members of the Paragraph-88 group, who had been spying on Simonyan and Sobchak, were detained in Moscow and the Ryazan region in this case. A Kalashnikov assault rifle with ammunition, rubber truncheons, knives, brass knuckles, and handcuffs were allegedly seized from the detainees, the FSB reported.
The security forces said that the detainees had already confessed that they were preparing the assassination attempt "on the instructions of the SBU" for a reward of 1.5 million rubles "for each murder."
In April 2022, the FSB announced the prevention of an assassination attempt on Vladimir Solovyov and several other propagandists. At that time, the court arrested six suspects of planning the murders.
According to The Insider, one of the representatives of the neo-Nazi association NS/WP said that those detained on charges of plotting an assassination attempt are being tortured to extract testimony about the preparation of terrorist acts.
"They are torturing them with electricity, strangling them, and one of them (allegedly) had his arm broken," the source said. According to him, a total of five people were detained, one was released. He named two of the detainees – Yegor Savelyev and Sergey Korolenkov.
A video of the interrogation of another detainee was published by RT. The young man introduces himself as Mikhail Balashov and claims that he created a "neo-Nazi group" and then received an order to kill Sobchak and Simonyan from the Ukrainian special services. It is also reported that the detainees with the surnames Novik, Zakharov, Gusev, and Emelyanov are involved in the case.
The FSB report says that the detainees are members of the Paragraph-88 group, but The Insider's source said that this organization did not last long and disbanded "due to a gross security breach by one of the members."
Regarding the accusations of the detainees' ties to the SBU, The Insider's source explained: "We are not 'pro-Ukrainians' and certainly not 'trans-Ukrainians', but some of us have friends in Ukraine. None of the detainees have ever been to Ukraine."
The source called the accusations of preparing an assassination attempt on Simonyan and Sobchak "a lie of the Chekists."