MOSCOW: Russia said it had foiled an Anglo-Ukrainian plot to hijack a military jet carrying a hypersonic missile which they planned to take to Romania in a “large-scale provocation”. Kyiv rejected the accusations and accused Russia of spreading “propaganda”. Russia, which launched its full-scale offensive against Ukraine in 2022, regularly accuses Kyiv and its European allies of brazen sabotage operations on its soil, often without providing evidence.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had “uncovered and thwarted an operation by the… Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and its British supervisors to steal a Russian MiG-31 high-altitude supersonic fighter jet, which carries the Kinzhal hypersonic air-launched missile”. It accused Kyiv of trying to “recruit Russian pilots” by promising them $3 million and citizenship of a Western country.
The FSB said it thwarted a plan by Kyiv to have the plane flown towards a Nato base in the Romanian city of Constanta on the Black Sea, where it would have been “shot down” by air-defences. State media published an FSB video showing a Russian soldier, face concealed, saying that he had received an email from a Ukrainian intelligence agent trying to recruit him. Kyiv and Bucharest rejected the accusations.
The “spread of such false accusations is a typical tactic of Russian intelligence services,” Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation said on social media. It said Moscow was trying to “intimidate Western societies” and “undermine military assistance to Ukraine”. Romania’s foreign ministry spokesperson Andrei Tarnea called it an “invented” story reminiscent of “Soviet spy novels”. “What is real, however, is Russian aggression and Russian provocations, which these stories about planes and spies attempt to cover up,” he added.
The accusations had echoes of an incident in August 2023, when a Russian Mi-8 helicopter pilot defected after flying into Ukraine in an operation led by Kyiv’s security services. His crew members were unaware of his intentions and were killed as they tried to escape, both Kyiv and Moscow had said at the time. The pilot, Maxim Kuzminov, was found dead in Spain in February 2024.
Meanwhile, Russian drone attacks killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk and wounded three in the Kharkiv region, officials said. Kramatorsk, which had a pre-war population of around 150,000 people, is one of the few remaining civilian hubs in the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control. The city council posted on Telegram that seven drones hit the city within 30 minutes on Monday evening. A man in his 60s was killed in the shelling, according to preliminary information, it said.
“Civilian infrastructure and the residential quarters were under fire; there was damage to an educational institution and residential buildings,” it added. Last month, a Russian drone killed two Ukrainian journalists and wounded a colleague in Kramatorsk, their news outlet and regional officials said. A drone also hit a car in a village in the northeastern Kharkiv region on Monday.
Separately, Russia said it was delusional to think Ukraine could win the war, while Moscow’s army said it had captured three more villages on the sprawling front line. Moscow is trying to press its advantage in manpower and equipment but territorial gains have been slow and costly.
Both sides are heavily entrenched, almost four years after Russia launched its all-out war of Ukraine. “The Europeans believe that Ukraine can win the war and secure its interests through military means,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “This is the deepest delusion indulged in by the Kyiv regime. The situation on the front indicates the opposite,” he said in a briefing call with reporters.
The Russian defence ministry said on Monday it had seized the villages of Slodkie and Nove in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine and Gnativka. Peskov said the war would only end “when Russia achieves the objectives it set at the beginning”. Moscow has said it is fighting to protect Russian speakers in the east of Ukraine, to prevent the Nato military bloc moving eastwards and to remove “neo-Nazis” from power in Ukraine – all of which have been rejected as baseless by Kyiv and its Western partners. — AFP
