Russia’s intelligence services are plotting to carry out targeted killings in the United States and in European nations supporting Ukraine, federal authorities said Tuesday as they announced charges against five people who remain at large.
An indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court said a network of the intelligence services had paid and attempted to pay individuals in the United States and in other countries to surveil targets to be killed with plans to then kill them.
The associates recruited in the network also had been solicited to carry out acts of terrorism against civilian and military infrastructure in European countries that were perceived to be aligned with Ukraine, the indictment said.
James Barnacle Jr, head of New York’s FBI office, said the FBI disrupted the plans “through relentless work” as members of the Russian intelligence services and their affiliates “conspired to intimidate, threaten, or murder people on US soil and around the world”.
Darren Cox, head of the Washington DC office of the FBI, cited “extraordinary work by multiple FBI field offices, components, and partner agencies that collectively disrupted Russia’s attempts to conduct violent acts in our nation’s capital and throughout the United States”.