The pair were said to have been recruited by Ukraine to kill Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, 66, the Metropolitan of Crimea, in a bomb attack on a Moscow monastery.
They appeared to confess in an FSB video, in which Popovich said: “The task was to find an ally and liquidate Metropolitan Tikhon by means of explosives.”.
Pro-war Tikhon, the senior Russian Orthodox church figure in occupied Crimea, has likened Putin to Russian emperor Peter the Great.
But Orthodox priests Denis Popovich, 27, and Nikita Ivankovich, 28, were nabbed by Putin’s FSB security service.
In the FSB video, he said he was recruited by Ukraine’s GUR security service, who threatened to kill his relatives.
