Abkhazia detains person accused of plotting Ukrainian attack on Sukhumi Airport
Abkhazia has announced the arrest of a Russian national they accused of facilitating a Ukrainian plan to attack on Sukhumi’s (Sukhum) airport in June.
The unidentified suspect is reported to have been an employee of a construction company carrying out repair work at the airport.
Abkhazia’s State Security Service said the suspect was detained following a joint investigation with Russia’s FSB, which concluded that he maintained contact with Ukraine’s Defence Ministry.
According to the agency, the suspect confessed to cooperating with a foreign intelligence service to ‘organise a sabotage and terrorist act on the territory of the airport’.
‘An unknown person contacted me in the Telegram messenger, introducing himself as an employee of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine’, the State Security Service quoted the suspect as saying. ‘He explained that he had found me in anti-war and anti-Russian groups on the Internet and he asked me to fight the regime together with him. I agreed.’
‘He took the initiative to suggest that he organise an explosion at the VIP parking lot of the Sukhum airport’, he continued.
The State Security Service said the suspect also sent the airport’s engineering plans to Ukraine marked with possible locations where explosive devices could be planted.
‘According to operational data, the terrorist attack was planned to be carried out in June this year’, read the agency’s statement.
The suspect was detained on charges of espionage.
The airport in Sukhumi received its first flight in 33 years in May, having been out of service since the war in Abkhazia in the early 1990s.
It reopened after reconstruction work by a Russian company; the airport’s Russian ownership has been criticised by some in Abkhazia over fears it was part of a wider abdication of sovereignty to Russia.
For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.
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