You're reading: Security Service says Russian-orchestrated terrorist plot foiled in Kyiv

Ukraine’s Security Service said on Dec. 19 that it had foiled a terrorist attack in the center of Kyiv likely orchestrated by Russia.

“The Security Service’s counterintelligence department has managed to foil a terrible tragedy in the center of Kyiv – a terrorist attack that was supposed to happen recently,” Markian Lubkivsky, an adviser to the Security Service’s head, said at a news briefing.

The attack was supposed to be carried out by a woman named “Kovalenko,” a Ukrainian citizen and a resident of Luhansk. On Dec. 17 she was carrying a bomb in the area between the Ivan Franko Theater and Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Lubkivsky said.

He said that the explosive device was equivalent to three kilograms of dynamite.

The Security Service released a video in which the suspect is being interrogated.

The woman suspected of orchestrating an attack in Kyiv with a powerful explosive.

“Four months ago I got acquainted with Konstantin,” she said. “Before I left Luhansk on Dec. 16, Konstantin gave me a bag containing something that would make Ukrainians uncomfortable. I got on a bus and I knew that there were explosives in that bag.”

The woman is being held, pending Kyiv’s Shevchenkovsky district court’s consideration of an arrest warrant for her on Dec. 19, said Vasily Vovk, head of the Security Service’s main investigative directorate.

Lubkivsky said that, according to his information, the attack had been orchestrated by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian armed forces. Russia’s Defense Ministry declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, head of Ukraine’s Security Service, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the committee, said on Dec. 19. 

Nalyvaychenko is accused of kidnapping journalists of pro-Kremlin television channels LifeNews and Zvezda.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].