The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said Wednesday it had captured a Russian military intelligence hit squad responsible for the attempted murder of a Ukrainian military spy in the run-up to a presidential election Sunday.

The issue of how to deal with Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014 and backs pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, is prominent ahead of the vote, with incumbent Petro Poroshenko casting himself as the commander-in-chief Ukraine needs to defend the country.

Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of the SBU, the main intelligence agency, told a news conference in Kiev that seven members of the Russian group had been detained and charged and that an eighth person had been detained Wednesday morning.

Two of the group's members were Russian citizens, said Anatoly Matios, Ukraine's military prosecutor, describing them as staff officers of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. The other six were Ukrainians.

There was no immediate reaction from Russia's GRU.

The SBU has reported before that it captured groups belonging to Russian special agencies.

"Those detained were involved in the attempted murder of an employee of the Ukrainian defense ministry's intelligence service...in Kiev in April," said Matios, adding the group had planted a bomb beneath the man's car which had gone off prematurely, badly injuring one of the accused.

The SBU released a video of the same incident which showed a man placing the bomb under a car before a big explosion. The video showed a man lying in a hospital bed with part of his right arm missing saying he was Russian and born in Moscow. </s> Ukraine security chiefs Vasyl Hrytsak and Anatoliy Matios

Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of the SBU intelligence agency, told a news conference in Kiev that eight members of the Russian group had been detained and charged in connection with the assassination plot. Ukraine's chief military prosecutor Anatoly Matios said two of the hit squad members were staff officers of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. He said the other six were Ukrainian nationals.

There was no immediate reaction from Russia's GRU. The SBU has reported before that it captured groups belonging to Russian special agencies. Mr Matios said: "Those detained were involved in the attempted murder of an employee of the Ukrainian defence ministry's intelligence service in Kiev in April.” He said the group had planted a bomb beneath the intended target’s car which had gone off prematurely, badly injuring one of the accused.

Head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasyl Hrytsak

The SBU released a video of the same incident which showed a man placing the bomb under a car before a big explosion. The video showed a man lying in a hospital bed with part of his right arm missing saying he was Russian and born in Moscow. The issue of how to deal with Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014 and backs pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, is prominent ahead of Sunday’s vote, with President Petro Poroshenko casting himself as the commander-in-chief Ukraine needs to defend the country. The GRU is thought to be behind the attempted murder of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018.

Vasyl Hrytsak shows images of the arrested GRU agents </s> Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of the SBU intelligence agency, told a news conference in Kiev that eight members of the Russian group had been detained and charged in connection with the assassination plot. Ukraine's chief military prosecutor Anatoly Matios said two of the hit squad members were staff officers of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. He said the other six were Ukrainian nationals.

There was no immediate reaction from Russia's GRU. The SBU has reported before that it captured groups belonging to Russian special agencies. Mr Matios said: "Those detained were involved in the attempted murder of an employee of the Ukrainian defence ministry's intelligence service in Kiev in April.” He said the group had planted a bomb beneath the intended target’s car which had gone off prematurely, badly injuring one of the accused.

The SBU released a video of the same incident which showed a man placing the bomb under a car before a big explosion. The video showed a man lying in a hospital bed with part of his right arm missing saying he was Russian and born in Moscow. The issue of how to deal with Russia, which annexed Crimea in 2014 and backs pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, is prominent ahead of Sunday’s vote, with President Petro Poroshenko casting himself as the commander-in-chief Ukraine needs to defend the country. The GRU is thought to be behind the attempted murder of Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a nerve agent attack in Salisbury in March 2018.

Both survived the attempt on their lives but four months later Dawn Sturgess, 44, died after coming into contact with an item contaminated with novichok in Amesbury, Wilts. Her partner Charlie Rowley, 45, also fell seriously ill after being exposed to the nerve agent, but survived. A GRU unit was arrested by Dutch agents last April as they attempted to hack into the computer systems of the the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) headquarters in The Hague. The OPCW was investigating both the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the Salisbury nerve agent attack. </s> Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Back from the dead?

Ukraine staged the murder of a Russian dissident journalist in Kiev on Tuesday in what it said was a sting operation to foil a Russian assassination plot.

Arkady Babchenko sent shock waves around the world when he arrived at a news conference on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after being reported dead.

Ukrainian security chief Vasyl Hrytsak said a sting had been set up to catch hitmen paid by Russian forces.

Russia described events in Kiev as an "anti-Russian provocation".

Ukrainian police say they made one arrest.

Babchenko's wife said on Tuesday she had found her husband at the entrance to their apartment block with bullet wounds in his back, and he was reported to have died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.

That story was widely reported by media around the world, until Wednesday's sudden and extraordinary development.

There were gasps and applause at the press conference in Kiev as Babchenko entered the room. He thanked the Ukrainian security services for saving his life and said he had had no choice but to take part in the sting.

"I did my job," he said. " I'm still alive."

"I have buried many friends and colleagues many times and I know the sickening feeling," he added. "I am sorry you had to experience it. But there was no other way."

Hours after the news broke, Babchenko tweeted to say he would "die at 96" after "dancing on Putin's grave", referring to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Babchenko fled Russia in 2017 after writing a Facebook post (in Russian) about a crashed Tu-154 transport plane, which went into the Black Sea while carrying a Red Army choir to Syria.

He said this Facebook post, in which he described Russia as an "aggressor", had led to death threats and abuse from the Russian state.

What do we know about the operation?

Babchenko said he had been informed a month ago about an alleged Russian plot to kill him. He said he had agreed to co-operate with a counter-operation and had been in constant contact with Ukrainian security services over the course of the past month.

He added that he thought security services had been planning the operation for up to two months.

Mr Hrytsak said the operation had begun after Ukrainian security services were informed about a Russian plot to kill the journalist.

He alleged that Russian security forces had recruited a Ukrainian citizen to find hitmen within Ukraine. He said the citizen had approached several acquaintances, including war veterans, offering $30,000 (£22,600) for the contract killing, one of whom revealed the plot to the security services.

Image copyright AFP Image caption Babchenko covering the Maidan protests in Kiev in 2014

The security services then informed Babchenko, apparently determining that the only way to reveal the plotters was to stage a fake hit.

Babchenko said that his wife Olga and his children had been aware of the plan but he publicly apologised to her at the press conference. "I am terribly sorry," he said, "but there were no other options."

Mr Hrytsak said the man detained by police was the Ukrainian who had allegedly attempted to find a hitman.

The reaction

Russia's foreign ministry condemned the staged assassination, calling it "obviously yet another anti-Russian provocation".

Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the operation as "a masquerade" done for "propagandistic effect". She added that Russia was happy that Babchenko was alive, saying: "I wish it were always like that."

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the country would offer protection to Babchenko. "It is unlikely that Moscow will calm down," he said on Twitter. "I've given an order to provide Arkady and his family with protection."

The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty network posted video footage of Babchenko's colleagues reacting to news that he was alive.

But many expressed reservations over the tactics used by the Ukrainian security services. Campaign group Reporters Without Borders condemned the operation as a "pathetic stunt".

"It is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police have played with the truth, whatever their motive," the head of the organisation, Christophe Deloire, told AFP news agency.

The Committee to Protect Journalists demanded that the authorities explain "what necessitated the extreme measure", describing it in a tweet as an "unprecedented situation".

Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov, a former colleague of Babchenko, said the sting had "crossed a line big time".

"Babchenko is a journalist not a policeman, for Christ sake, and part of our job is trust, whatever Trump & Putin say about fake news," he wrote on Twitter. "I'm glad he is alive, but he undermined even further the credibility of journalists and the media."

Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist and friend of Babchenko, told the BBC he felt "anger and relief in equal measure".

“From being incredibly gloomy and sad yesterday... to frankly anger today, we’ve all been hoodwinked and made to believe our friend died."

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Friend of Babchenko: "We’ve all been hoodwinked"

A glaring example of 'fake news'

Frank Gardner, BBC Security Correspondent

There can be few more glaring examples of 'fake news' than the deliberate misreporting by a sovereign government of a prominent journalist's death.

Relations between Russia and Ukraine are at an all-time low, following Moscow's annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, and Russia has been accused of several recent deaths of Kremlin critics in Ukraine.

But this staged non-death will inevitably muddy the waters. Russia already denies any involvement in the attempted assassination of its former spy Sergei Skripal in the UK city of Salisbury in March, calling it fake news.

It will now likely seize on this deception in Kiev to strengthen its claim in that case, and in others.

Deaths in Kiev

Kiev has in recent years seen a number of deadly attacks on high-profile figures, including journalists and politicians. Most of them were vocal critics of the Kremlin.

The leading Belarusian journalist and Kremlin critic, Pavel Sheremet, was killed by a car bomb in Kiev in July 2016.

Another car bomb killed Ukrainian military intelligence officer Col Maxim Shapoval in June 2017 in what the Ukrainian authorities called a terrorist act.

In March of the same year, former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov was shot dead outside a hotel in Kiev. </s> April 10 (UPI) -- Russia's Federal Security Service said it has prevented six terror attacks this year, including targets at election stations and in a shopping mall.

Alexander Bortnikov, chairman of the National Antiterrorism Committee and FSB director, said at a meeting Monday that the terrorism-related crimes were to be committed in the first quarter in the regions of Dagestan, Khabarovsk and Sakhalin.

Some of the attacks were foiled at election stations in the Ingushetia and Bashkortostan regions during the Russian presidential election and in a shopping mall in Saratov, Bortnikov said.

Russia's security service has exposed 12 terrorist cells since the beginning of this year -- arresting 189 gang members and killing 15 involved in the crimes.

"In February, two criminals from the Islamic State international terror organization that is outlawed in Russia, who had been plotting a terror attack at an election station during the presidential election, offered armed resistance and were eliminated in the Nazran district in the Ingushetia region during a counterterror operation," Bortnikov said.

The security chief added that two members of a far-right group, who had also been preparing a terror attack at Ufa's election stations, were arrested in the Bashkortostan region in March. Two home-made explosives were also confiscated.

"Members of an IS cell who planned to commit a terror attack in a shopping mall in Saratov were eliminated the same month in the Saratov region after offering resistance," Bortnikov said. "Weapons and improvised bombs with the explosive power were found." </s> In a totally surreal turn of events, less than 24 hours after it was reported that prominent Russian war journalist Arkadi Babchenko had been assassinated outside of his home in Kiev, he had risen from the dead. He was reported by the Ukrainian government to have died of three gunshot wounds to the back while being transported to a hospital in the back of an ambulance. Babchenko, who is the author of a beloved memoir of his war service in Chechnya, and who had fled to Kiev from his native Russia last year, stunned the post-Soviet world when he appeared alive and well at a Kiev press conference yesterday in a black hoody. The journalist appeared to be unscathed, standing with Vasyl Hrytsak, the head of the SBU, Ukraine’s main intelligence agency.

Learning several months ago of an impending assassination attempt on the high-profile journalist, the Ukrainian intelligence service created an audacious sting operation to entrap both the killer and the Russian agent who was organizing the attempted hit. The SBU chief released details of the plot, which was allegedly executed by an eastern Ukrainian separatist who was to have been paid $30,000 for the hit by Russian agents. Another $10,000 were promised to a middleman who found the assassin. The Ukrainian president thanked the SBU for having a tremendous success, and the interior minister smirked over yesterday’s accusations that the Ukrainian state was not capable of defending people living on its territory.

Babchenko gave his press conference in Ukrainian, which he seems to have learned to a passable level since having fled to Ukraine last autumn. He began with an apology to his wife, for having put her through what one can imagine was probably the worst night of her life.

In a wonderful touch, the influential Ukrainian parliamentarian and interior ministry spokesman, Anton Gerashenko, who had publicly confirmed that Babchenko had been killed yesterday, used a literary justification for the misdirection: “After all, Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero Sherlock Holmes successfully used the same method of staging his own death in effective investigations of complex and intricate crimes. No matter how painful it must have been for his family and Dr. Watson.”

An important fact largely missing from the deluge of Western commentary was the fact that the Ukrainian special services have certainly engaged in this behavior before, most notably in a case relating to the Ukrainian Odessa MP Alexi Goncharenko, who was “kidnapped” last year for his own protection. In Babchenko’s case, however, many of his fans were devastated to learn that the beloved journalist was executed in broad daylight.

The scheme has demonstrated a surprising capacity from the Ukrainian intelligence services to protect high-risk targets and carry out complex dragnet operations that many commentators and experts had doubted they could pull off. Still, the incident ignited a passionate debate on the necessity of the fake operation and of Babchenko’s faked death, with sharp divisions and arguments erupting over both social media and with foreign journalists and policy experts almost uniformly critical of the operation. On the Maidan, on the other hand, where crowds had gathered to mourn the writer, many were suddenly popping Champagne bottles.

, executive director at The American Center for a European Ukraine, told Tablet that “

On Twitter, meanwhile, the swaggering and irrepressible Babchenko wrote that “I promised to die at 96, having danced on the grave of Putin and taken a selfie.”

Vladislav Davidzon, the Chief Editor of The Odessa Review, is a Russian-American writer, translator, and critic. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris. </s> A Ukrainian military intelligence colonel has been killed in a car bomb in what is being described as a 'terrorist act', it has emerged.

Police in the capital Kiev said an explosive device in the Mercedes blew up at about 5.15am while the car was moving, killing the driver and wounding a passer-by.

Dramatic footage shows the moment the blast happened while pictures show the burnt out remains of the vehicle in the aftermath of the explosion.

Ukraine's defence ministry named the victim as Colonel Maksym Shapoval and said he was an employee of the military's 'main intelligence directorate.'

The bomb went off several miles from the centre of the city. I was the latest deadly incident to rock the area, as crisis-hit Ukraine battles a bloody Russian-backed insurgency in its eastern regions.

'As a result of (the explosion) a member of the defence ministry's main intelligence department, Colonel Maksim Shapoval, was killed,' the defence ministry said in a statement.

The police and the ministry did not give further details or say who could be behind the attack.

Interior ministry spokesman Artem Shevchenko said that judging by initial indications it appeared 'obvious' that the blast was caused by an explosive device, adding that investigators were probing it as terrorism.

'At the present time the picture gathered of the crime suggests it was a planned terrorist act,' Shevchenko said.

In early June a Ukrainian volunteer commander originally from the Russian region of Chechnya, who had once been jailed on suspicion of plotting to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin, was shot and seriously wounded by a would-be assassin.

In March former Russian lawmaker Denis Voronenkov turned Kremlin critic was shot dead in central Kiev.

Last year high-profile independent journalist Pavel Sheremet was also killed in a car bombing in central Kiev.

There have also been a string of assassinations of rebel leaders in the war-torn east of the country that the insurgents have blamed on Kiev but Ukraine's government has pinned on infighting among the separatists. </s> Earlier on Tuesday, the Ukrainian police said it had opened a criminal investigation into the murder of TV journalist and Russian citizen Arkady Babchenko, who was shot dead in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

"Independent and opposition [reporters are] being killed in Ukraine, but Ukraine [is]… not investigating it," Nebenzia said on Tuesday. Nebenzia also said he assumed the Ukrainian government will accuse Russia for the Babchenko murder.

Nebenzia accused the Ukrainian authorities for the "cleansing and closing" of independent media outlets in their country.

Nebenzia also said that "Ukraine lives in a parallel reality thanks to its authorities."

Later, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin told the UN Security Council that it is too early to tell who is responsible for the murder of Arkady Babchenko. Klimkin also claimed that Babchenko was a well-known opponent of the Russian government who was compelled to leave and has been considered as an enemy by Moscow.

On May 15, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) broke into the office of the RIA Novosti Ukraine in Kiev. The SBU detained Vyshinsky on charges of treason and accuses him of supporting the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine's southeast. On May 17, a court in the Ukrainian city of Kherson ruled that Vyshinsky should be arrested for 60 days without bail.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russia is outraged over Kiev’s decision to impose sanctions against the Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency and RIA Novosti Ukraine portal, and considers the moves to be an act of censorship.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Representative on media freedom Harlem Desir, as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Human Rights Watch said that foreign media should not be included on sanctions lists. </s> Chief of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasyl Hrytsak has said that law enforcers have detained a suspect in a terrorist attack committed in Kyiv in October 2017, in which two people were killed and three more, including Ukrainian MP Ihor Mosiychuk, were injured.

"Just a few days ago, we detained one of those who took part in organizing and committing this terrorist attack... I can say that we have solved this terrorist attack in cooperation with the prosecutor's office," Hrytsak said in Odesa on Tuesday, April 3.

He specified that one person had been detained and that two more were "in another territory, we understand where they are."

According to Hrytsak, during the searches law enforcers had seized several kilograms of TNT, an RPG-26 grenade launcher, grenades, other items and documents that could point to the person's involvement in committing this crime.

"I do not want to disclose the details," he said, adding that a briefing on this crime will be held in the near future.

As reported, two people were killed and three more, including Radical Party MP Ihor Mosiychuk and political analyst Bala, were injured in an explosion outside the building of the Espresso TV channel late on October 25, 2017. Both of them were hospitalized and underwent surgery. Those who were killed are two police officers - Mosiychuk's security guard, Ruslan Kushnir, who died on his way to hospital, and 36-year-old local resident Mykhailo Mormil.

The explosion was qualified as a terrorist attack. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is overseeing the investigation.

Mosiychuk said late in February 2018 that several terror suspects were in Chechnya and that the perpetrators of the crime had been identified.
The Security Service of Ukraine claims to have captured a Russian military intelligence hit squad responsible for the attempted murder of a Ukrainian military spy in the run-up to a presidential election on 21 April.