According to the SBU report of 6 October, the agency prevented terrorist acts in the border area of the Zakarpattia Oblast. The attackers reportedly planned to set fire to the Consulate General of the neighboring country and order the murder of a public figure.
“The participants in the subversive activities tried to commit the terrorist attacks to destabilize the socio-political situation in the region and discredit Ukraine in the international arena. The identity of the organizer of the crimes has been established. According to operational data, he is hiding in Russia,” SBU said.
The report doesn’t mention the country whose consulate’s arson was plotted. However, the regional capital of Uzhhorod city has only two consulates-general – of Hungary and Slovakia, plus, there is a Hungarian consulate in the village of Berehove, a center of the local ethnic Hungarian community.
The Slovakian consulate hasn’t ever been a target of the attacks, aimed at eroding Ukraine’s international relations. Typical targets of those are Hungarian, Polish, and Jewish cultural, diplomatic, and heritage sites.
Meanwhile, in February 2018, there were two attempts to set on fire the Zakarpattia Society of Hungarian Culture in the city of Uzhhorod, later Poland detained three Poles connected to pro-Russian “radical right-wing groups” shortly after the first incident as perpetrators of the first attack, then, Ukrainian police arrested three Ukrainians suspected of the second attack and put an alleged “foreign perpetrator” on the search list. And in 2017, SBU detained two Ukrainian men connected to a local pro-Russian party, who reportedly were planting explosives near a Hungarian monument in the west of Ukraine.
According to the investigation data, the organizer of the plotted attacks is a native of Luhansk Oblast. He was recruited by representatives of the special services of the Russian Federation to conduct intelligence and subversive activities against the state security of Ukraine, the SBU report reveals.
The agency says that his Russian handlers instructed the plotter to set fire to a foreign diplomatic mission, several cars with foreign registration, and damage a historical monument in Transcarpathia. Additionally, the suspect was looking for an assassin to commission him the murder of a local public figure.
The alleged Russian agent “guaranteed” to pay $30,000 for the crime, according to SBU. Among other tasks of the agent was collecting secret data about Ukrainian military facilities in the region and sending the data to Russian secret services.
SBU officers have reportedly prevented the plotted crimes and exposed their participants and security investigators sent an indictment act to the court against the organizer of the illegal activities charging him with high treason, creating a terrorist group, plotting a terror attack, and public calls for committing a terror attack.
Read more:
- Hungary to continue blocking Ukraine’s NATO
- Attack on Hungarian center in Ukraine: three Poles charged with terrorism in German journalist-planned plot (2018)
- Putin’s Falanga: meet the Polish neo-fascists who tried to burn down a Hungarian center in Ukraine
- Polish pro-Russian far-right radicals behind arson attempt of Hungarian center in Ukraine
- Ukraine’s law enforcers bust gang plotting to blow up Hungarian monuments (2017)
- How Hungary became a weapon of Russian disinformation
- Hungary has stabbed us in the back, says Ukrainian political scientist
- Hungary openly helping Putin destabilize Ukraine
