Indictment comes amid an uptick in targeted attacks on Ukrainian officials and public figures.
Ukraine has arrested and indicted a man accused of assassinations and blowing up buildings on orders from Russia.
The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said on Tuesday in a statement that the suspect is accused of murdering a Ukrainian soldier and plotting the assassination of officials.
The arrest comes amid an apparent uptick in targeted attacks on Ukrainian officials and public figures, including a local lawmaker who was killed by a car bomb on Friday in the city of Dnipro.
The prosecutor general’s office said under the orders of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the 56-year-old from the Crimean Peninsula, reportedly a persistent offender over many years, shot a Ukrainian soldier dead in March 2024.
Prosecutors have also accused the suspect of planting an explosive under the car of Vyacheslav Zadorenko. However, the Kharkiv official spotted the bomb, “saving his own life”, they said in the statement.
The suspect was also allegedly tasked with killing the head of the Kharkiv region, Oleh Synyehubov, for a reward of $50,000.
He also planted and set off explosives at strategically important buildings in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the statement added.
Russia and Ukraine have targeted one another’s officials in assassination plots since Moscow’s invasion in February 2022.
Ukrainian counterintelligence investigators claimed last May to have foiled a Russian plot to assassinate President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as the heads of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency and the SBU security service.
Zelenskyy has said there had been numerous attempts to assassinate him since the start of the war with Russia, which has now stretched into a fourth year.
The FSB did not comment on Kyiv’s claims regarding the suspect.