Russia’s FSB security agency has arrested a Ukrainian in Crimea, claiming he is an agent of Ukraine’s SBU security service who planned acts of sabotage.
The FSB on the morning of Aug. 15 reported that it had captured Ukrainian Gennady Lemeshko on Aug. 12. The agency claims Lemeshko is an SBU agent who had come to Crimea to commit acts of sabotage near the Sudak-Noviy Svit highway, some 100 kilometers from Simferopol.
The SBU denies the claims, and in a statement accused Russia of “provocation.”
The FSB claimed Lemeshko had planned to down power lines, cause forest fires, and set off a landslide near a highway.
It said that when Lemeshko was arrested he had in his possession two TNT blocks, a grenade, petrol bombs, a saw, and a camera to “document sabotage activities and report them to SBU supervisors.”
The FSB claimed Lemeshko is a Kharkiv-born Ukrainian who has fought in eastern Ukraine against Russia. In Ukraine, he’s a senior intelligence officer, according to the agency.
The video shows Russian FSB agents detaining and searching Gennady Lemeshko in Crimea on Aug. 12. The FSB said it suspects Lemeshko to be a Ukrainian SBU agent sent to commit sabotage on Ukraine’s, Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula. Russian News Agency TASS published the video, which allegedly had been first published by FSB.
However, the SBU denies the allegations, and said Russia was carrying out “yet another” provocative act against Ukraine by claiming Lemeshko is an SBU agent.”
“The Russian secret services need such fake news to frighten the population of the (Crimean) peninsula, who are now more often expressing their dissatisfaction with the occupation authorities,” the SBU said in a statement released later on Aug. 15.
“Against the backdrop of the worsened lives of the Crimean people, the FSB has again played a ‘broken record’ in an attempt to blame Ukraine and its law-enforcement bodies for their own misfortunes and problems in Crimea,” the SBU said.
Russian security agencies have reported the arrest of “Ukrainian saboteurs” in Crimea, before: In one case, in November 2016, the FSB claimed it had arrested “a group of Ukrainian saboteurs.”
Russia illegally annexed and now occupy the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in March 2014. The country is now under international sanctions for this, and its fomenting of a war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region that has killed over 10,000 people and displaced over 2 million, according to UN estimates.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
