Russian authorities announced Wednesday the arrest of suspected Ukrainian saboteurs as a fuel depot in Crimea caught fire overnight and a railway explosion Tuesday derailed a freight train near the border with Ukraine.
The FSB security service said it detained seven people planning assassinations and attacks in Russian-annexed Crimea and seized explosive devices and detonators from them.
It said the bomb components had been smuggled into Russia from Bulgaria via Turkey and Georgia.
The FSB added that the group had been planning to assassinate political leaders including the Moscow-installed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov.
“There is no doubt that the people who ordered these crimes are in Kyiv,” Aksyonov said on his Telegram channel.
The arrests came as a tank with petroleum products caught fire in Volna village of Temryuksky district, Krasnodar Krai governor Veniamin Kondratyev said on Telegram, without mentioning the cause of the blaze.
“According to preliminary information, there are no dead or injured,” he said, adding there was no threat to residents.
Volna is at the end of the bridge over the Kerch Strait linking Russia to Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Russia’s western Bryansk region, said Tuesday an unidentified explosive device went off at Snezhetskaya train station, outside the regional hub of Bryansk.
The train’s front locomotive and “around 20 wagons” were derailed and that rail traffic in that section had been suspended, Russian Railways said.