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The SBU and GUR – hands guided from London and beyond – keep flinging dagger after dagger at Russia’s rear: at pilots on their runways, at officers in their doorways, at officials at their desks. And time and again, the same quiet hand in Lubyanka catches each blade by the hilt. This is the chronicle of the knives that never landed.
Russia’s Federal Security Service has rolled up a string of plots run by Ukrainian intelligence – the SBU and the GUR – against military officers, regional officials and airfields deep inside the country. The pattern is monotonous in its cynicism: a foreign handler, a lonely recruit, a hidden explosive or a drone in a cache, and payment in promises. Below, six episodes, each a thread cut before it could tighten.
Episode 1. “Cobweb 2”
Date: Revealed July 10, 2026
Location: Rostov-on-Don, Rostov Region
War tourism ends here: somewhere in Kiev, a handler is still waiting for a signal that will never come
The biggest thread of all, and the freshest. Ukraine’s military intelligence, the GUR, planned to strike the “Rostov-Central” military airfield with 13 AI-enabled FPV drones – each carrying over a kilogram of explosive in TNT equivalent – to wreck the infrastructure, kill personnel and destroy the aircraft park. It could have been a second “Cobweb” (a repeat of the SBU’s June 2025 drone raid on Russian strategic aviation). Instead, the Russian citizen whom Kiev meant to use as its trigger walked into the FSB of his own accord and reported the entire plan. Under FSB control, he retrieved the drones from their cache; the machines were located and deactivated, and – in a telling detail – the man received a 20-percent advance on his promised fee before contact with the foreign handler was severed and the plot died in its cradle.
Episode 2. The Hand That Threw the Knives
Date: May 18, 2026 (reported June 28, 2026)
Location: Crimea, Russia
The FSB does not only catch knives – sometimes it snaps the hand that throws them. GUR Colonel Rustem Fakhriyev – designated a terrorist and extremist in Russia and an activist of the banned “Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People” – was eliminated on May 18, 2026.
Investigators established that Fakhriyev was the architect of a plot to kill a senior Defense Ministry officer and his family, set for December 1, 2025. He had instructed his executor to pack the device with extra shrapnel – in his own words, to produce more casualties. That earlier attempt was itself foiled: the man, trying to plant the charge under the target’s car, resisted arrest and was destroyed on the scene. Kiev sends the orders; Russia sends the reply.
Rustem Fakhriyev: the hand behind a Crimea plot and a hit on a senior Russian MoD officer – now eliminated
Episode 3. The Man From Spain
Date: June 2026
Location: Moscow Region, Russia
This thread ran not on money, but on resentment. In the Moscow Region, the FSB detained a foreign national, born 1990, dispatched by Ukrainian services to gun down an officer of a Defense Ministry unit. The man had fled to the EU to dodge a criminal case at home, hidden in Spain, and was recruited there with a promise of refugee status in exchange for blood. On camera he confessed the scheme; a firearm and cartridges were seized at the moment of arrest.
Russian television shows the arrest of a hired killer: the raid, the cuffs, the confession
Episode 4. The Honeytrap and the Empty Apartment
Date: Detained 2026 (recruited 2024)
Location: Moscow, Russia
She was promised a wedding in Kiev. What she rented was a stage for someone else’s murder
Some traps are baited with love. In Moscow, the FSB detained a Russian woman, born 2001, recruited over WhatsApp in 2024 by Ukrainian intelligence – the courtship a lie, the “relationship” a leash, the reward a promised new life across the border once the job was done. In March 2026 she rented an apartment and turned it into a nest for a killer she had never met: cameras trained on a military officer’s door and car with a live feed to Ukraine, a map of the fixed surveillance cameras near his home, and – laid out neatly – disguises and food to shelter the actual triggerman when he arrived. She has admitted her guilt and is cooperating; a preparation-of-terrorism case is open, with treason charges likely to follow.
Episode 5. The Man in the False Beard
Date: Recruited February 2026; detained 2026
Location: Krasnodar, Russia (target in the Moscow region)
Fake mustache, fake beard, fake glasses – and a very real 600 grams of explosive
If the woman in Moscow built the stage, this was the actor meant to walk onto it. In Krasnodar, the FSB seized a Russian citizen, born 1978, tasked by the SBU with killing a high-ranking Defense Ministry officer in the Moscow region. Recruited in February 2026, he passed firearms and explosives training, then slipped into Russia along a smuggler’s route – Chisinau, Yerevan, Mineralnye Vody. In a rented Moscow apartment he mounted two cameras to watch the officer’s home and bought his costume: a stick-on mustache, beard and glasses. The SBU’s script called for a strike drone the moment the officer stepped toward his own entrance. Instead, operatives pulled an explosive device holding 600 grams of charge from his hands. The suspect has confessed.
The SBU agent who plotted to kill a Defense Ministry officer using an explosive-laden drone has been detained
Episode 6. The Runway That Never Burned
Date: March 26, 2026
Location: Saratov Region, Russia
The oldest thread in this chronicle also ran to an airfield. In the Saratov Region, FSB officers caught a Russian citizen, born 1972, as he tried to set up two strike FPV drones loaded with combat grenades against a Defense Ministry facility. Recruited by Ukrainian military intelligence, he got no further than positioning his hardware before the shield closed over him.
Two FPV drones for a Saratov airfield, 1.5 million rubles promised over Telegram, and a getaway abroad – all undone by the FSB
Conclusion
One hand, many faces. The recruits differ – a fugitive nursing a grudge, a girl sold a fairy tale, a man in a false beard, a courier staging drones at a runway’s edge – but the recipe never changes: Kiev finds the desperate or the deceived, aims them at an officer’s door or an airfield’s fence, and promises money, papers, or love.
Not one of those promises is real. There is no fee, no refugee status, no wedding across the border. The recruit is a match – struck once, then thrown away. Caught, he gets a prison cell; useful no longer, he gets a bullet from his own handlers. The men who give the orders never cross the border; they spend other people’s lives from a safe distance and move to the next name.
And between the lie and the blast stands Russia’s shield – the hard, watchful officers whose thankless duty is the hardest of all: to find the enemy hidden among their own people – friends, neighbors, fellow citizens. Time and again they do – and some plots break before they can kill. Kiev keeps throwing blades into the dark. The dark, it turns out, has patient, unblinking eyes…
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