BELGOROD. Feb 21 (Interfax) - The Belgorod Region Court has convicted two Belgorod residents, who planned to damage rail tracks, on charges of plotting an act of sabotage, the press service for Belgorod region branch of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said.
The defendants, identified only by their last names Zelenin and Turyansky, were each sentenced to 3.5 years in a high-security penal colony for preparing an act of sabotage, the press service said.
According to the FSB's Belgorod region branch, in March 2022, the men, "who shared the ideas of Ukrainian Nazism, decided to help the Ukrainian Armed Forces [...] by committing acts of sabotage and other actions aimed at rendering inoperable facilities of military and state significance in the territory of the Russian Federation," it said.
Investigators have established that Zelenin and Turyansky decided to damage a section of a railroad near the village of Tomarovka in the Yakovlevsky urban district of the Belgorod region before a train was due to pass there.
"According to the criminal plot, such actions were supposed to cause the train to derail, damage military hardware and the train and entail casualties among military personnel," the press service said.
The men planned to film it with their mobile phones and then to widely circulate the video on the Internet, it said.
"Furthermore, the aforementioned persons sent to a Ukrainian website [...] information about Russian Armed Forces personnel taking part in the special military operation," the press service said.
The sentence has already entered into force.