Russia hands long jail term to man convicted of trying to kill ex-lawmaker at Ukraine's behest

(Reuters) - A Russian military court sentenced a man from Moscow-annexed Crimea to 24 years in prison on Tuesday for attempting to kill a former pro-Russian member of the Ukrainian parliament as part of a network of Ukrainian agents operating in the peninsula.

The court in the southern city of Rostov found Pyotr Zhitsky, a resident of Yalta, guilty of high treason, attempted murder of a public figure and a slew of other charges, the office of Russia's prosecutor general said in a statement.

The former lawmaker, Oleg Tsaryov, survived despite being shot twice in October 2023 in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which Russia forcibly annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

A source in Ukraine's SBU intelligence agency told Reuters at the time that the shooting was an SBU operation.

The prosecutor's office said the court found Zhitsky had established contact with the SBU in 2022 and "expressed a desire to assist in activities against the Russian Federation".

It said Zhitsky had trained in the use of explosives and tracked Tsaryov's travel routes for several months, passing the information on to the SBU, who paid him roughly 15,000 roubles ($175) per month for a year until he shot Tsaryov in Yalta.

In 2022, three sources familiar with the Kremlin's thinking told Reuters that Moscow had been lining up Tsaryov to lead a puppet government in Kyiv if Russia had succeeded in ousting President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the first days of the war in February 2022.

Tsaryov dismissed Reuters' account as having "very little to do with reality".

The 54-year-old hotelier was previously a member of the Ukrainian parliament and then speaker of the parliament of "Novorossiya", an entity formed after Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine began fighting Ukrainian forces in 2014.

Tsaryov has been placed under sanctions by Ukraine, the United States and a number of other Western countries.

Ukraine has taken responsibility for some assassinations in Russia since the start of the war - most recently for the killing of Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, in December.

($1 = 85.9000 roubles)

(Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Gareth Jones)