bulletin news news dispatch
Russia’s security service (FSB) on Saturday said it foiled assassination attempts against Margarita Simonyan, one of Russian state television’s recognisable faces, and against Ksenia Sobchak, an influencer often critical of the Kremlin. news dispatch
The FSB said on Friday it detained members of a neo-Nazi group called “Paragraph-88” who it claimed had been hired by the Ukrainian secret service to kill the two women.
AFP was not able to independently confirm these claims, and Ukrainian officials have not commented.
The FSB published footage showing several suspects being detained, as well as allegedly seized weapons and books on Nazism.
“If this is all true, then thanks to all the services involved for their work,” Sobchak said on Telegram.
“If not, and if the point was simply to put me in the same sentence as Simonyan, then this is just plain mean,” she added.
Sobchak is a popular media personality who ran against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 2018 presidential election.
She is the daughter of a former Saint Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who was Vladimir Putin’s mentor.
Her popular YouTube channel is often critical of the authorities, and she has left Russia several times since the offensive began.
Simonyan, the matriarch of Kremlin propaganda and the head of state-run television network RT, was already a vocal supporter of Putin before Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.
“Keep on working, brothers!” she said in a message thanking the FSB.
bur/giv
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