MOSCOW. July 17 (Interfax) - Moscow's Basmanny district court has remanded in custody six suspected hooligans who investigators believe were preparing attacks on Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the RT television channel and Russia Today news agency, and the journalist Kseniya Sobchak, at the behest of Ukrainian security services, the court's press service told Interfax late on Saturday.
Mikhail Balashov, Yegor Savelyev and four underage persons, born in 2005 and 2006, were remanded in custody until September 14, 2023.
The court turned down the defense petitions for an alternative to custodial detention and for the minors to be handed over under parental supervision, the service said.
The six were indicted with hooliganism.
Earlier on Saturday, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced having foiled, jointly with the Investigative Committee and Interior Ministry, a plot of the "Ukrainian security services" to assassinate SImonyan and Sobchak.
On July 14, "members of the Paragraph-88 neo-Nazi group, who reconnoitered the work and home addresses of the attack targets," were arrested in Moscow and the Ryazan region and "confirmed the preparation of the attempted murders at the behest of Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) for a remuneration of 1.5 million rubles for each murder," the FSB's public relations center said.
Officers searched the suspects and seized an AK rifle and 90 cartridges to it, knives, brass knuckles, rubber truncheons, handcuffs, "means of communication and PCs containing information confirming their criminal intents," the FSB said.
The FSB also released a video of several young men being apprehended in their hideout flats. The clip shows one of them saying they received an order to kill Simonyan and Sobchak from the SBU and explaining where the murder weapon was hidden.
The Russian Investigative Committee plans to open criminal cases of an "extremist and terrorist hue," according to FSB data.