Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has uncovered a plot to poison a high-ranking Russian officer of the Ministry of Defence in an attack disguised as a gift from an online love interest. According to the FSB , the officer narrowly avoided consuming beer that investigators say had been doctored with a British-made version of nerve agent VX, a substance capable of killing within 20 minutes. The bottles were intercepted before the officer could drink them, and a resident of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) was taken into custody. The officer told Russian media that the chain of events began months earlier, when he met a woman named Polina on an online application. Their exchanges soon shifted to Telegram, where she regularly sent photos and videos of herself. "She sent me photos and videos from the gym several times, all roughly the same. After a few months of our communication, she said she wanted to give me a gift, which she would deliver through a friend...
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) says it has uncovered a plot to poison a high-ranking Russian officer of the Ministry of Defence in an attack disguised as a gift from an online love interest.
According to the FSB, the officer narrowly avoided consuming beer that investigators say had been doctored with a British-made version of nerve agent VX, a substance capable of killing within 20 minutes. The bottles were intercepted before the officer could drink them, and a resident of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) was taken into custody.
The officer told Russian media that the chain of events began months earlier, when he met a woman named Polina on an online application. Their exchanges soon shifted to Telegram, where she regularly sent photos and videos of herself.
"She sent me photos and videos from the gym several times, all roughly the same. After a few months of our communication, she said she wanted to give me a gift, which she would deliver through a friend," he told Russian media.
The "friend" was the man now under arrest. FSB officials say he had been instructed by Ukraine's military intelligence service, the GUR, and had been promised $5,000 for delivering two packages of British beer.
Polina, investigators say, was never a real person at all but a manufactured profile created by the GUR through artificial intelligence to lure the officer into the trap.
"Based on the results of the tests on the confiscated bottles, it was established that the beer contained a mixture of highly toxic poisons, colchicine and tert-butyl bicyclophosphate (an analogue of the military-grade nerve agent VX, banned by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention), produced in Britain, which, when consumed, causes an agonising death within 20 minutes," the FSB noted.
The "friend" contacted the officer, arranged a meeting point, and handed over the package. Within moments, FSB personnel intervened and detained him.
"I was ordered to carefully place the package on the ground. After which they explained to me that the bag contained beer, which contained a military-grade poison intended to eliminate me, and that Polina's account was used by Ukrainian intelligence officers," he said.
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