As Kommersant learned, the Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has completed an investigation into the criminal case of a raid by Ukrainian UAVs on Russian military airfields. The final charges were brought against four drivers of heavy trucks who delivered drones to the sites of the attacks. The direct organizer of the crime disappeared, the remaining defendants have not been identified. The truckers do not admit guilt, claiming that they were “used in secret.”
The Main Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee has completed a criminal case regarding an attack by Ukrainian UAVs on Russian military airfields. Four defendants are in custody: drivers Andrei Merkuryev, Alexander Zaitsev, Mikhail Ryumin and Sergei Kanurin, who are familiarizing themselves with the case materials, which amount to 90 volumes.
They were charged with committing a terrorist attack by a group of persons by prior conspiracy, which resulted in the infliction of significant damage and the illegal acquisition and transportation of explosives by an organized group.
According to investigators, the drivers were part of a group of Ukrainian natives Artem and Ekaterina Timofeev and a certain Borisovsky (who are wanted), recruited by the SBU to commit terrorist attacks in Russia
Some of the drivers were employed directly by an individual entrepreneur registered in the name of the main organizer of the crime, Timofeev, while he approached the rest as an ordinary customer of transportation.
At the end of May 2025, they left Chelyabinsk on trailers to different regions of Russia with cargo in the form of frame houses, in the roofs of which, as experts later established, the UAVs were hidden.
When heavy trucks were in the area of military airfields on June 1, SBU officers remotely activated drones that attacked the planes (in Ukraine the operation was called “Web”). The case states that the Ministry of Defense suffered damage in the amount of 2 billion rubles.
The drivers were detained shortly after the terrorist attack. They did not hide from the investigation. Together with other drivers, they tried to stop or shoot down the drones, minimizing the damage caused to the military.
One of the drivers, Vasily Pytikov, died during the terrorist attack; criminal prosecution against him was dropped, as well as against another driver who went on the trip only at the last moment, replacing his colleague. Other drivers, detained and then arrested by the court, do not admit their guilt. They insist that they were carrying out routine flights and did not know that UAVs were hidden in the cargo.
“Where is the evidence that Zaitsev was part of an organized group? Where is the information that someone warned Zaitsev about the impending attack or that he talked to someone about it? If the security authorities failed to prevent this terrorist attack, how should a simple truck driver have done it?” — lawyer Oksana Olgerdt said in court.
On April 29, the Basmanny Court granted the petitions of the Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and extended the period of detention for three months for Andrei Merkuryev, Mikhail Ryumin and Sergei Kanurin.
At the request of the investigator, the trials were held behind closed doors. The next day, the court extended the arrest period for Alexander Zaitsev. This time, the investigator also asked to close the process, but the judge agreed with the arguments of lawyer Oksana Olgerdt that all the information that the investigation was going to disclose in the petition had already been mentioned several times in open trials.
The investigator stated that there are unidentified persons involved in the case, and several more examinations need to be carried out on it. The defendant’s lawyer objected, saying that the preliminary investigation in the case had been completed, and now she and her client were already familiarizing themselves with the materials.
Eight defendants, who eventually received life sentences following the verdict of the Southern District Military Court in the criminal case of blowing up the Crimean Bridge with a trailer in October 2022, also spoke about “secret use” in court. According to their lawyers, there was no evidence in the case that the defendants knew about the explosives (they were hidden in reels of plastic film) and planned to carry out a terrorist attack.
