Ukrainian intelligence said they’ve caught a Dnipropetrovsk man who had been working for Russia and who’d been recruited by a prominent, now-deceased, Russian milblogger, “Vladlen Tatarsky.”
The alleged Russian agent had been collecting information about troop movements on the eastern and southern fronts, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) wrote on Telegram.
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He then sent the information to the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU) – the successor agency to the KGB – the SBU said.
“From November 2022 to April 2023, the suspect remotely transmitted all the information he gathered to his ‘handler,’ the Russian ‘military correspondent’ Vladlen Tatarsky,” who relayed the data to the GRU, the SBU said.
The Ukrainian-born milblogger, whose real name was Max Fomin, had worked as a propagandist for Russia following an unsuccessful career as a bank robber.
Fomin was killed in an April 5 explosion in St Petersburg after a woman presented him with a box containing a bust of him that blew up.
Afterward, the agent in communication with Fomin attempted to lie low, but SBU operatives found him, they said.
The alleged GRU agent was revealed to be a resident of a town near Dnipro city. The man had two previous criminal convictions for theft, unauthorized vehicle possession, hooliganism, and inflicting grievous bodily harm for which he had served combined prison terms of nearly eight years.
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The SBU said they discovered that Fomin had recruited the agent after he’d noticed the man’s activity on social media.
“The traitor drew the attention of the hostile blogger due to his anti-Ukrainian comments, which he regularly posted on one of the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels associated with the Russian GRU,” the SBU said.
To gather intelligence, the individual allegedly frequently traveled within the Dnipropetrovsk Region and covertly recorded the Ukrainian army’s movements.
The suspect is currently in custody and faces potential life imprisonment.
A local St Petersburg activist, Russian Darya Trepova, was arrested for Tatarsky’s assassination in April.
Trepova purportedly confessed to the bombing after being recruited by Ukrainian intelligence.
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