Russia says foiled Ukrainian plot to kill Putin-linked bishop

Russia's FSB security service said Friday it had thwarted a Ukrainian-ordered plot to kill Tikhon Shevkunov, a senior bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church with close links to President Vladimir Putin.

Metropolitan Tikhon, often described in media reports as "Putin's confessor", is a member of the Russian leader's advisory council for culture and the arts and has known him personally since the 1990s.

He was appointed Metropolitan of Crimea -- a title denoting a senior bishop -- after the peninsula's annexation by Russia from Ukraine in 2014.

The 66-year-old has often been seen in public with Putin and has been touted as a successor to Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church's most senior figure.

The FSB said that it had arrested a Ukrainian and a Russian man in Moscow on suspicion of planning the attack, and that the men had been "recruited by Ukraine's GUR intelligence service through Telegram".

"It is clear that the Kyiv regime does not shy away from anything. In this instance, nothing is sacred," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to the FSB report.

The TASS news agency identified the suspects as Shevkunov's assistant Denis Popovich and fellow cleric Nikita Ivankovich.

It said the men had been given an improvised explosive device in December "to physically eliminate Metropolitan Tikhon" and then leave Moscow with false passports.

They planned to leave explosives in the "living quarters" of Moscow's Sretensky Monastery while Shevkunov was visiting, TASS said.

Videos posted by Russia's Zvezda news outlet appeared to show security forces silently restraining one of the suspects and carrying him into a van, while another video showed a suspect lying face-down in a flat wearing handcuffs.

It also shared videos purporting to show the suspects confessing to the crime.

Ukraine made no immediate public comments on the allegations.

Russia, which has been waging an offensive in Ukraine since February 2022, has seen several Russian or pro-Russian figures targeted by attacks over the past three years.

Most of them have been attributed to Kyiv or claimed by the Ukrainian secret services, the latest being the assassination of General Igor Kirillov in December in Moscow.

© Agence France-Presse