MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s FSB security service said on Tuesday it had arrested a Russian woman it suspected of collecting information on a “critical infrastructure facility” at the order of Ukraine’s intelligence services.
It did not name the facility, but a surveillance video which Russian media said was taken by the FSB showed the suspect using her phone to film near a hydroelectric power plant in the town of Uglich in Russia’s Yaroslavl region north of Moscow.
She is then shown being arrested in her office by masked FSB and police agents. A court on Saturday ordered the suspect to be detained for two months, the RIA news agency reported.
Baza, a Russian news outlet which sometimes publishes material from the FSB, released a message exchange between the suspect and a purported Ukrainian coordinator in which the woman agrees to supply the map coordinates of local railway lines, military recruitment offices and the hydroelectric plant.
In the exchange, the authenticity of which Reuters was not able to verify, the suspect writes of wanting Ukrainian drones to strike deep inside Russia in order to undermine support for President Vladimir Putin.
The other person writes of organising explosions across Russia and says there are many hydroelectric power plants in the Yaroslavl region.
“We’ll blow them to smithereens so that Russia withdraws its troops from (the eastern Ukrainian town of) Bakhmut,” the unidentified person writes.
The FSB said in a statement it had detained the woman “who, on the instructions of the Ukrainian special services, collected and transmitted information about one of the critical infrastructure objects in the Yaroslavl region with the aim of committing a terrorist attack.”
The FSB said a criminal case had been opened against the woman on charges punishable by up to ten years in prison. It was not immediately clear how the woman had pleaded.
The arrest comes one day after an attack on the Crimean Bridge, a key supply line for Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. Moscow blamed the incident on Kyiv.
Russia has detained a number of suspected saboteurs thought to be aiding Ukraine since it sent troops into Ukraine last year.
The FSB last month arrested a group of ex-defence workers it accused of supplying Kyiv with technical documents relating to the Russian Air Force.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
