said on Monday it had arrested a German woman found with a home-made bomb in her backpack in what it alleged was a Ukrainian-hatched plot to blow up a security services facility in the south.
Russia has arrested dozens of people throughout the
, mostly its own citizens, on allegations of working for Ukraine to carry out sabotage attacks.
There has been a string of high-profile arrests of Western citizens since Moscow ordered its troops into Ukraine – typically on espionage charges that are widely seen as baseless, with those detained later swapped in exchange for Russians jailed abroad.
Detentions of Western citizens for carrying out or preparing actual attacks are much rarer.
The FSB security agency said the woman, born in 1969, had been dragged into the alleged plot by a citizen from a Central Asian country, who was working on orders from Ukraine.
She was detained and found with an improvised explosive device in her bag in the Caucasus city of Pyatigorsk, the FSB said.
The FSB said it had “prevented a terrorist attack planned by the Kyiv regime against a law enforcement facility in the Stavropol region, involving a German citizen born in 1969”, the agency said in a statement.