WASHINGTON — A New Jersey man who authorities said was traveling to Ukraine to join a volunteer combat unit has been arrested on suspicion of attacking a U.S. power plant to promote his white supremacist views, the Justice Department said Thursday.
Andrew Takhistov, 18, was arrested Wednesday at Newark Liberty International Airport, where he was en route to Paris to join Ukraine’s Russian Volunteer Corps, a pro-Ukrainian group fighting Russian forces, officials said.
Authorities said Takhistov began talking to the person he did not know was an undercover agent in January and began discussing a plan to attack a power plant. They drove together to two power plants in North Brunswick and New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Takhistov provided information on how to make Molotov cocktails, what to wear and where to park to avoid detection, authorities said.
He also discussed various “strategies for terrorist attacks, including rocket and explosive attacks on synagogues,” and expressed a desire to move illicit supplies back from Ukraine to carry out attacks that would threaten the U.S. government, a law enforcement official wrote in court documents.
A lawyer for Takhistov did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment from The Associated Press. A person listed as a relative also did not immediately respond to a message from AP.
According to Philip Sellinger, the US Attorney from New Jersey, Takhistov expressed white supremacist views in his conversations with the undercover agent and in his messages “encouraged violence against black and Jewish communities, praised mass murderers, and discussed causing death and destruction on a massive scale.”
Takhistov discussed a “three-step plan for white supremacy” at a meeting in June: ending the war in Ukraine, invading Russia and then starting “political activism in Europe and America, supporting National Socialist political parties,” the official wrote in court documents.
Takhistov “explained that rallies and protests would not work; people were rather waiting for a big event, like the Oklahoma City bombing,” authorities allege. Takhistov told the undercover agent that the person in Ukraine needed to conduct “at least one serious activism event,” they said.
Takhistov said his “ultimate dream was to attack a synagogue with a Hamas-style rocket,” officials said.
“We will not tolerate these types of perceived terrorist threats and, working with our partners, we will always stand ready to root out and bring to justice anyone who attempts to carry out these types of acts,” Sellinger said.