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An Invasion By Any Other Name: The Kremlin’s Dirty War in Ukraine
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has announced the arrest of another “Ukrainian spy” in occupied Crimea.
The FSB told Interfax today that Leonid Parkhomenko, a retired second-rank In Occupied Crimea, FSB Arrests Retired Black Sea Fleet Captain On Charges Of Spying For Ukrainecaptain in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, was arrested in Russian-occupied Sevastopol on Tuesday.
The FSB claims:
“Fulfilling duties for the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense [GUR], collected and transmitted information, constituting state secrets, on the activities of the Black Sea Fleet to the foreign intelligence service.”
Video footage of the arrest was released this morning by the FSB:
A criminal case has been opened against Parkhomenko under article 275 of the Russian Criminal Code – state treason. If convicted, Parkhomenko faces up to 20 years in prison.
Colonel Andriy Lysenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, today denounced the Russian claims as “another fake,” labelling the arrest a “provocation.”
The occupying authorities in Crimea have already conducted two waves of arrests of Ukrainian “agents,” both earlier this month and in August.
Tensions have been further heightened by Monday’s arrest, on the frontier between mainland Ukraine and the Russian-occupied peninsula, of two former Ukrainian servicemen who had defected to the Russian armed forces.
Lysenko said that the Ukrainian MOD believes that the Russian security services will continue to arrest Crimean residents on charges of spying for Ukraine, and claimed that any former member of the Ukrainian armed forces or the Black Sea Fleet, still resident in Crimea, could be at risk of being set up by the FSB.
The Black Sea Fleet remained deployed in Crimea at their base in Sevastopol after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine, with the base rented from Ukraine on a lease basis until Russian forces took over the whole of the peninsula in February, 2014.
— Pierre Vaux