Moscow alleged on Tuesday that it had uncovered an operation by Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) and its “British handlers” to hijack a Russian MiG-31 fighter jet.
According to a statement from the Public Relations Center of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), Ukrainian military intelligence officers attempted to recruit Russian pilots for the purported scheme, “offering them a payment of three million U.S. dollars” in exchange for stealing the jet.
“The intelligence service then planned to send the aircraft, armed with a Kinzhal missile, toward the largest NATO air base in southeastern Europe, located in Constanța, Romania, where it could have been shot down by air defenses,” the FSB claimed.
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The agency also released a video featuring a person wearing a flight helmet that conceals his face. The man appears against a backdrop of military aircraft, his voice digitally distorted. In the clip, he claims that in the fall of 2024, he was contacted on Telegram by someone using the name “Sergey Lugovsky,” who said he was a journalist from Bellingcat and offered to pay him for “consulting on military issues.” To confirm his identity, the man says, Lugovsky sent him a press card. “I believe Sergey’s real goal in contacting me was to compromise me and later use that to the advantage of intelligence services,” he says.
An FSB operative told Russian state news agency TASS that “the intelligence service used the so-called journalistic organization Bellingcat, which is controlled by the U.K.’s CIS.” The source added that in 2022, the FSB had already accused journalist Christo Grozev, who worked for Bellingcat at the time, of involvement in a “failed HUR operation to hijack a Su-34 fighter jet.”
“In one of our conversations, Sergey mentioned paying me a reward for allegedly providing him with military-related information. He said the money would be transferred to my personal bank card,” the man in the FSB video says, adding that he “refused further communication.”
The man goes on to say that shortly afterward, he received an anonymous email offering him one million dollars to hijack an aircraft. If the plane carried a Kinzhal missile, the payment would rise to three million. A man named Alexander allegedly kept in touch with him through “various foreign messaging apps,” at one point sending him a video showing a large amount of cash.
According to the man, when he said he “did not have sufficient skills to land a MiG-31 on his own,” Alexander arranged a phone call with a Ukrainian Air Force pilot who attempted to train him remotely, assuring him that “there was nothing difficult or complicated about it.”
The man in the video also claims that the HUR plan would have seen a Russian flight commander being “neutralized in the air.” “They wanted me to treat the commander’s oxygen mask with some kind of poisonous substance or break the glass partition and incapacitate him,” he says.
He adds that the hijacking was meant to occur during a flight over the Black Sea. “Alexander suggested approaching an airfield in Ukraine’s Odesa region via Romanian airspace over the city of Constanța,” the man claims. According to him, Alexander also promised to stage a fake news report simulating footage of a plane crash to send to the media as a cover story.
Later on Tuesday, the FSB reported that, “in response to the provocation” by Ukraine, Russian forces had launched Kinzhal missile strikes on Monday night against the HUR’s Main Center for Electronic Intelligence in the Kyiv region and the Starokostiantyniv airfield in the Khmelnytskyi region, “where the notorious F-16 fighter jets are stationed.”
Grozev dismissed the allegations as absurd. “They’re using an AI-generated face, the speech is unnatural and fake, and on top of that, the whole thing makes no sense,” he said.
Why would ‘British intelligence’ or Ukraine’s HUR use a non-existent journalist from an ‘undesirable’ organization — someone no Russian pilot would ever agree to talk to? And why would they show a photo of a dead helicopter pilot as supposed proof of how attractive the offer was? The whole thing is so clumsy that, in my view, it doesn’t deserve further comment.
The Ukrainian authorities have not commented on the FSB’s claims.