MELITOPOL, April 19. /TASS/. A man who has been passing information about Russian military equipment and personnel to Ukrainian special services has been detained in Melitopol, in the Zaporozhye Region, the region's law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday.
The detainee, born in 1993, was pushed into committing these acts by his own mother, a permanent resident of Kiev.
"The woman persuaded her son that unless he helped the Ukrainian military he would be unable to visit her. Should he try to come back, he would be persecuted by the [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky regime as a 'collaborator'," the law enforcement official said.
The detainee sent photos and coordinates of army units and equipment to his mother, who then passed them on to the Ukrainian special services. In some cases, in order to gather such information he traveled to communities near the front line. According to law enforcement, the detainee did not receive any money for his activities, although he was under great financial stress and had no permanent home. He often stayed at hostels or stayed the night at his acquaintances' homes or the places where he was doing odd jobs.
"I knew that the information regarding the location of Russian forces and critical civilian infrastructure I was providing could be used by the Ukrainian military for missile and artillery strikes and for terrorist attacks and sabotage, and that military personnel or civilians might be killed or harmed as a result of these actions. I did not care much about that. I wanted to go back to Kiev. My mother told me such actions would help me do that," the detainee testified to law enforcement. Under Russian law, he faces a long prison sentence.
On Tuesday, law enforcement in the Zaporozhye Region said that they had thwarted the activities of a brother and sister who were collecting information about the Russian military for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.