The Russian FSB today claimed to have foiled a plot to kill Vladimir Putin’s TV star ‘goddaughter’ and his most powerful female campaigner.
Vladimir Putin’s Secret Service agency claimed the hits were directed by Ukrainian intelligence who offered £12,700 to kill Ksenia Sobchak and Margarita Simonyan.
22-year-old alleged neo-Nazi Yegor Savaliev was arrested in Ryazan along with five accomplices.
The story is shady and Savaliev was previously reported to be the ‘victim’ of a 2019 FSB ‘provocation’.
Sobchak, 41, has known Putin since his childhood as his late father Anatoly – the liberal mayor of St Petersburg – was a political adviser to the former KGB spy.
The Russian FSB today claimed it had foiled a plot to kill Vladimir Putin’s TV star ‘Goddaughter’ Sobchak (pictured), 41, and his most powerful female campaigner.
Vladimir Putin’s (pictured left) Secret Service Agency claimed the hits were directed by Ukrainian intelligence services who offered £12,700 to kill Ksenia Sobchak and Margarita Simonyan (pictured right).
Sobchak, a prominent TV personality who stood against Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential election after speaking personally with him, finished fourth.
Putin attended her Orthodox christening, thereby claiming to be her godfather.
He now runs an independent media outlet that is often critical of Putin and the war against Ukraine.
He fled Russia to Belarus before entering Lithuania on foot to avoid arrest after police raided his home in a Moscow suburb in October.
Police said the search of his home was part of an investigation into alleged wrongdoing by his media director Kirill Sukhanov, who was arrested a day earlier on extortion charges.
Sobchak dismissed the charges against Sukhanov at the time as ‘incendiary and nonsense’ and described his arrest as part of the authorities’ attempt to stifle independent media.
He then reportedly entered the country through a border post with Latvia and returned to Russia two weeks later.
Simonyan, 43, is a staunch Putin loyalist, nicknamed ‘Goebbels in a skirt’.
He is the editor-in-chief of Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT and state-owned media group Rossiya Segodnya.
22-year-old alleged neo-Nazi Yegor Savaliev (pictured) detained in Ryazan along with five accomplices
Savaliev appeared to give a rehearsed confession, saying: ‘I am Mikail Balashov, born 27 March 2005.
‘I live in Moscow. I created a neo-Nazi gang and got Article 88 [my] Minor friends are involved in…
‘I was contacted by the Ukrainian special services…
‘We were offered [to commit] The contract killings of Margarita Simonyan and Ksenia Sobchak.
‘I…re-investigated Margarita Simonyan’s house to get the money.
‘I then contacted a curator who was supposed to leave a Kalashnikov automatic gun for me and the money.
‘I was caught by the staff after reaching where the weapon was supposed to be. [Russian] Intelligence Service.’
The FSB claimed it had stopped the murders of Sobchak and Simonyan, yet independent observers doubted this.
‘It’s probably an FSB provocation,’ said one.
“Members of the Paragraph-88 neo-Nazi group, acting under the direction of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), planned their murder.”
Vladimir Putin, Lyudmila Narusova (pictured right), and Ksenia Sobchak (pictured second right) in St. Petersburg in November 2003
The FSB claimed its officers seized ‘a Kalashnikov assault rifle, cartridges, edged weapons, Nazi symbols, literature, as well as communications equipment and computers containing information on the preparation of the assassination attempt.’
Simonyan said: ‘The FSB, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Investigative Committee, detained a group that, on the orders of Ukraine, was preparing to kill me.
‘[They] Followed me, knew all my addresses.’
He urged them to send them to their fisherman father ‘for re-education – he will make real men out of them’.
The Warning – run by Sobchak – reported that the detainee had spent four years in jail for an ‘extremist’ offence.
Savaliev attended a pro-trial custody hearing in court along with other alleged members of his group.
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