(Reuters) – A military court in Moscow has sentenced a dual Russian-Ukrainian citizen to 22 years in jail for blowing up rail track in Russia’s Bryansk region last summer at the behest of Ukraine, the state TASS news agency reported on Wednesday.
It said Sergei Belavin, who it said had confessed to his crimes, had been convicted of terrorism and other charges.
State prosecutors said Belavin, whom they accused of working for Ukrainian military intelligence, had entered Russia last summer and placed an explosive device on a stretch of railway near Russia’s border with Ukraine and Belarus.
He had detonated the device on July 9 last year, damaging a passing freight train and the track below, according to investigators. Nobody was injured, but service on the line was disrupted for 10 hours.
There was no immediate reaction to the verdict from Ukraine, which rarely comments on attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled territory but makes no secret of its desire to disrupt or destroy infrastructure used by the Russian military.
(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
