Russia’s security services claim to have foiled an assassination attempt on a former Defence Minister. Sergey Shogui was the boss of the Defence Ministry in February 2022, when Vladimir Putin ordered his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

He was eventually replaced in May 2024, and was replaced by Andrey Belousov. Shogui was blamed by many inside Russia for the poor performance of the Kremlin’s army and had a famous run-in with the former leader of the Wagner militia, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Wagner boss launched a blistering attack on the then Defence Minister in June 2023, accusing him of unnecessarily starting the war in Ukraine.

“The war was needed… so that Shoigu could become a Marshal, so that he could get a second Hero Star,” he raged in a video posted online. “The war wasn’t for demilitarising or de-nazifying Ukraine. It was needed for an extra star.”

Now, Russia’s FSB security agency claimed to have foiled a plot to kill the former Defence chief.

The agency claimed Ukraine’s intelligence services recruited a four-person team to carry out the assassination.

The team was allegedly made up of a husband and wife from Russia, an illegal migrant from Central Asia and a Kyiv resident named Jaloliddin Shamsov.

An FSB video was circulated on state media channels showing the arrested woman confessing to her role in the plot.

The assassination was supposed to take place while Shogui visited a family grave at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

The woman said she had been promised drugs by her handler – a man called Ruslan – in exchange for placing the hidden camera vase on the grave at the cemetery.

The woman’s age and name were not revealed and it remains open to question whether she had been forced into a false confession.

The FSB said it issued an arrest warrant for Shamsov on charges of illegal arms trafficking and murder, which was reportedly connected to a 2021 killing in the republic of Bashkortostan.

Several Kremlin officials and pro-Kremlin figures have been killed by assassins both in Russia and the occupied areas of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war.