The Russian security service FSB claims to have prevented an assassination attempt on Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-controlled Russian broadcaster RT.
Several suspected members of the “neo-Nazi group Paragraph-88” have been arrested, the FSB says. They accuse the security service SBU in Ukraine of being behind the alleged assassination plans.
According to the FSB, the SBU paid Russian neo-Nazis to kill both Simonjan and the well-known TV anchor and influencer Ksenia Sobchak. Simonyan is a staunch supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, while Sobchak has often criticized the authorities.
RT has published a video of a young man in a T-shirt with the inscription Waffen SS claiming that the Ukrainians gave him the order to carry out the murder. The 18-year-old gives his name and date of birth before describing the planned crime in the RT video.
Background from Ukraine
Ukraine has not yet commented on the case. The Russian security service FSB regularly accuses Ukrainian intelligence services of planning attacks. The claims have not been independently verified.
On Saturday evening it became clear that a court in Moscow has detained a total of seven people who are accused of being “motivated by national hatred” to kill Simonyan and Sobchak. Five of them are minors, reports the state-owned news agency Tass.
The FSB says it has seized several weapons, Nazi flags and books.
– If all this is true, then thanks to the services for the work they have done, says Sobtsjak on Telegram.
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– If not, and the point is simply to place me in the same sentence as Simonjan, then this is just mean, she adds.
Challenged Putin
Sobchak challenged President Vladimir Putin in the presidential election in 2018. She is the daughter of St. Petersburg’s former mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who was considered Putin’s mentor in his time. Sobchak’s popular YouTube channel is often critical of the Russian authorities, and she has left Russia several times since the invasion of Ukraine last year.
Simonjan is considered a figurehead in Russian propaganda and was a prominent supporter of Putin even before the invasion.
– Keep up the work, brothers, she said in a message of thanks to the FSB on Saturday.
Several killed
Several supporters of Putin’s war in Ukraine have been killed in Russia in the past year. Among them is the well-known military blogger Vladlen Tatarskij, who was killed in an explosion at a cafe in St. Petersburg in April.
Last August, Darja Dugina, the daughter of right-wing nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, was killed by a car bomb near Moscow.
And in May, a prominent Russian writer, Zakhar Prilepin, was seriously injured by a car bomb.
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2023-07-15 20:31:18
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