An armed drone has been intercepted near a telecom center in Moldova's breakaway region.
A weaponized cargo drone was intercepted overnight near a large telecom center in the village of Mayak, the Interior Ministry of Transnistria said on Tuesday.
The ministry said that the drone appeared to be a home-made contraption, jury-rigged from different parts.
A drone with a diameter of one and a half meters was assembled from various components. It said that the equipment was so powerful that it could move loads of up to 20 kilograms to a distance of some 30 kilometers from the operator who controlled it.
The drone carried a canister with unknown brown liquid and a small barrel containing two kilograms of plastic explosives with radio detonators attached. Imagery obtained by the Transnistrian authorities shows that the drone was fitted with a payload release system to drop its deadly cargo.
According to the Interior Ministry's information, the drone operators were trying to attack a transformer cooling station of the telecom center. The ministry noted that if successful, the attack would have knocked out the whole facility at once, the attack would have knocked out the whole facility, and that the weaponized drone came from the Ukrainian side. The aircraft was neutralized by the border guards deployed to patrol the crucial facility after it was attacked by unknown assailants late in April. Two large radio masts transmitting Russian radio stations were blown up in the centre.
In recent days, Transnistria has been a victim of a series of mysterious incidents involving the region's critical civilian and military infrastructure. Transnistria s Ministry of State Security was targeted by three unknown assailants who fired shoulder-mounted rocket launchers at the building, shattering its windows and damaging its fa ade, apart from the attacks on the Mayak broadcasting center. Several explosions also occurred at a military compound outside the capital city of Tiraspol in Transnistria.
The president of the self-proclaimed republic, Vadim Krasnoselsky, blamed the incidents he described as terrorist attacks on Ukrainian nationals, and urged Kiev to investigate the armed groups that had infiltrated his region.
Transnistria, officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic PMR is an unrecognized state located along a narrow strip of land between the Dniester River and Ukrainian border in the eastern part of Moldova.
The region broke away from Moldova in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The region maintains close ties with Russia, with Russian peacekeepers stationed there and a large part of the local population holding Russian citizenship.