The Russian FSB today claimed to have halted plans to assassinate Vladimir Putin’s TV star “goddaughter” and his most powerful female propagandist.
Vladimir Putin’s secret service claimed the hits were ordered by Ukrainian intelligence, which offered £12,700 each to kill Ksenia Sobchak and Margarita Simonyan.
A 22-year-old alleged neo-Nazi Yegor Savalyev was detained in Ryazan along with five accomplices.
The story is murky and it was previously reported that Savalyev was a “victim” of a “provocation” by the FSB in 2019.
Sobchak, 41, knows Putin from her childhood because her late father Anatoly – liberal mayor of St Petersburg – was a political mentor to the ex-KGB spy.
Russia’s FSB today claimed to have halted plans to assassinate Vladimir Putin’s TV star ‘goddaughter’ Sobchak (pictured), 41, and his most powerful female propagandist
Vladimir Putin’s secret service (pictured left) claimed the hits were ordered by Ukrainian intelligence, which offered £12,700 each to kill Ksenia Sobchak and Margarita Simonyan (pictured right).
A prominent TV personality Sobchak, who opposed Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential election after speaking to him personally, finished fourth.
Putin attended her Orthodox baptism, leading to claims that he is her godfather.
She now runs an independent media outlet often critical of Putin and the war against Ukraine.
In October, she reportedly fled Russia for Belarus before entering Lithuania on foot to avoid arrest hours after police raided her mansion in a prestigious Moscow suburb.
Police said the search of her home was part of an investigation into alleged misconduct by her media director, Kirill Sukhanov, who had been arrested a day earlier on racketeering charges.
At the time, Sobchak dismissed the allegations against Sukhanov as “raiding and nonsense” and described his arrest as part of authorities’ attempts to silence independent media.
She reportedly returned to Russia two weeks later, entering the country through a border checkpoint with Latvia.
Simonyan, 43, is a Putin loyalist nicknamed ‘Goebbels in a skirt’.
She is editor-in-chief of the Russian state broadcaster RT and the state media conglomerate Rossiya Segodnya.
A 22-year-old alleged neo-Nazi Yegor Savalyev (pictured) was detained in Ryazan along with five accomplices
Savalyev seemed to make a rehearsed confession, saying, “I am Mikail Balashov, born March 27, 2005.
‘I live in Moscow. I created a Neo-Nazi gang Paragraph 88 and got [my] underage friends involved…
“I was contacted by the special services of Ukraine…
‘We were offered [to commit] the contract killing of Margarita Simonyan and Ksenia Sobchak.
“I….explored Margarita Simonyan’s house to get some money.
“After that, I contacted a trustee who would leave me an automated Kalashnikov pistol and money.
“When I arrived at the place where the weapon was supposed to be, I was caught by the employees of the [Russian] intelligence service.’
The FSB claimed it had stopped the killings of Sobchak and Simonyan, but this was questioned by independent observers.
“This is more likely a provocation from the FSB,” said one.
“Members of the neo-Nazi group Paragraph-88, acting on instructions from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), planned to kill them.”
Vladimir Putin, Lyudmila Narusova (pictured right) and Ksenia Sobchak (pictured second right) in Saint Petersburg in November 2003
The FSB claimed that its officers “seized a Kalashnikov assault rifle, cartridges, edged weapons, Nazi symbols, literature, as well as communications equipment and computers containing information on the preparation of the assassination attempt.”
Simonyan said, “The FSB, together with the Interior Ministry and the Commission of Inquiry, apprehended a group that, under instructions from Ukraine, was preparing my assassination.
‘[They] followed me, knew all my addresses.’
She urged her to send them to her fisherman father “for re-education – he will make real men of them.”
Caution News – run by Sobchak – reported that the detained man had served four years in prison for an “extremist” crime.
Savalyev, along with other alleged members of his group, appeared in a pro-trial custody hearing in court.