FSB officers shoot dead ‘Ukrainian military intelligence agent’ in northwestern Russia

Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers have shot and killed a man suspected of plotting a series of terror attacks in Russia, its press office reported Friday.

The FSB said the man, whom they called “a Ukrainian military intelligence agent”, had arrived in Moscow from Lithuania in March to prepare terror attacks “on the region’s military and energy infrastructure”.

Russian security officers attempted to detain the suspect in the Moscow region, the FSB wrote, but he had initially put up armed resistance and managed to flee.

The suspect was later tracked to Gatchina, a town in the Leningrad region in northwestern Russia, where he put up armed resistance again, but this time was shot dead, the FSB added.

The FSB said the man, an unnamed Russian citizen born in 1976, had received “explosives and shooting training” in the Lithuanian town of Pabradė.

Telegram channels Mash and Baza named the dead man as 47-year-old Nikolay Surnov from the Moscow region, claiming he was involved in the Crocus City Hall terror attack in March that took the lives of 145 people and injured hundreds more.

The FSB made no mention of the Crocus City Hall attack in its report, claiming however that the suspect was part of a “Ukrainian terrorist organisation” and that he had planned to carry out multiple terrorist attacks in St. Petersburg, Moscow and its suburbs.

Leaked information Novaya Gazeta Europe has seen suggests Surnov was born in 1976, the same year as the suspect in the FSB report, lived with his family near Moscow and worked as a car repairman. Daily tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets said in April that Surnov had sold his apartment in the Moscow region a year and a half earlier and moved with his family to Lithuania, where his wife comes from.