Ukraine arrests two Russian border guards who entered its territory
The court in the Kherson region has arrested two people whom the Ukrainian Border Guard Service has called "lost Russian border guards", Interfax-Ukraine reported.
The representative of the State Border Service of Ukraine, Oleg Slobodyan, said that the court ruled to arrest them for 15 days.
Ukrainian border guards, with the assistance of Ukrainian army servicemen, detained two people on the night of June 30. According to the State Border Service of Ukraine, at 2:30 they moored by boat to the shore of the Perekop Bay in the Kherson region. The detainees did not have documents with them. According to Ukrainian border guards, citizenship and belonging to the Border Guard Service of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) were established during the interrogation.
According to the head of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, Viktor Nazarenko, the Russian border guards explained their illegal crossing of the border as "playing the role of educational violators during the exercises, but lost their way and lost their orientation."
Slobodyan also said that the Border Guard Service of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) sent a request to the Ukrainian side to provide information on two Russian servicemen. This served as the basis for considering the detainees to be Russian border guards. RBC sent a request to the Border Service of the Russian FSB, but they did not confirm the detention of servicemen there.
Later, the Border Guard Service of the FSB of Russia in the Republic of Crimea has recognized two detainees in the Kherson region of the Russian military as its employees, RIA Novosti reports, citing the department's press service.
According to the FSB, they lost their way during exercises that took place on the night of June 29-30.
"On the night of June 29-30, 2017, during exercises on the Russian-Ukrainian border in the vicinity of the city of Armensk, two management officers strayed from the route and entered the territory of Ukraine, where they were detained by representatives of the border agency of the neighboring state," the Russian Border Guard Service said.