This is the chilling moment a top Ukrainian powerlifting champion is interviewed by Russian police after she was accused of going behind enemy lines in Russia in a bid to assassinate a top official. Yulia Lemeshchenko, 41, was one of four women agents detained by the FSB security service, it is has been claimed. She had a Russian passport and Kyiv used this to deploy her to seek to assassinate a leading military target, according to the FSB. Lemeshchenko is seen testifying on an FSB video, but it is not known if she was put under pressure to confess to recruitment during the war.
She was detained at her flat in Voronezh city in mid-January and it is unclear why the Russians only now revealed her custody. She was a 2021 Ukrainian winner in the Classic Powerlifting Championship, securing three gold medals. In 2017 she finished second. “In 2024, I arrived in Russia and, on the instructions of Ukrainian special services, was [ordered] to commit a terrorist act against a high-ranking serviceman from the Russian Defence Ministry.” All four women detained by the FSB had been trained “in handling firearms and bombs, drone control and outdoor surveillance”, said the FSB. They had been promised to travel in Europe.
“In 2023, I was recruited by the Ukrainian security services,” she said on a video from Putin’s. “I was trained in Kyiv and acquired skills in handling small arms, operating drones, evading surveillance, and making explosive devices. My handler gave me the alias Luffy. Another female agent was recruited two years ago and deployed to Rostov-on-Don on a ‘mission to kill’. One more was assigned to snoop on top officials and sent to Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea. First she had to pass a polygraph test in Kyiv. “I had to plant an explosive device in his office,” she said, referring to her target.
It comes after Vladimir Putin's "death plane" was seen delivering 50 coffins of Russian soliders killed in the Ukraine war as they return home to their relatives. The Il-76 aircraft was seen delivering the bodies to the world’s coldest city, Yakutsk, in Siberia. It is also used to carry dozens of new soldiers to fight in Putin’s killing fields, according to witnesses. The eerie footage was recorded by a mobilised soldier - one of those who boarded this plane as he was sent back to war, despite being wounded.
It takes place at the city’s airport deep in the night, so the unloading of wooden coffins into three trucks on the snow-caked tarmac in minus 30C is invisible to Putin’s people. Highlighting the footage, the FreeYakutia Foundation stated: “The [Russian] state continues its endless cycle. It takes lives, throws people into the meat grinder of war, and so on, in a circle. “The conveyor belt of death works smoothly.”.
