A man who tried to poison a Russian soldier with English beer is detained in Donetsk

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) announced today the arrest of a resident of the Ukrainian region of Donetsk, annexed by Russia in 2022, for trying to poison a Russian soldier with an English beer. “In November, the suspect received two packages with bottles of British-made beer from the Ukrainian intelligence service, which he was to deliver as a gift to an officer of the Russian Armed Forces,” the FSB reported on its website. Analyses of the confiscated bottles revealed that the beer contained a mixture of toxic substances, being an analogue of the nerve agent VX, of military use and prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, according to law enforcement.

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“These substances, manufactured in Great Britain, cause an agonizing death within 20 minutes of consumption,” they add. The reward promised for the attack was five thousand dollars. The soldier was supposed to receive the beer by mail from a woman he met through a dating app, however the profile turned out to be fake and her photographs were created by artificial intelligence, according to the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. Russian authorities, who shared the video of the arrest, also accuse the man, who confessed his crimes before the cameras, of storing explosives that he received via drones for later use in sabotage.