State television showed the two men confessing to conspiring to kill the Russian strongman in a bombing attack that was revealed to the public less than a week before Putin's likely victory in Sunday's election.
The plot was confirmed by Putin's spokesman as well as the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and its Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) counterpart, who worked jointly to break up the conspiracy.
The purported confessions showed the two men saying they acted on the orders of Chechen Islamist militant Doku Umarov -- the warlord who has claimed Moscow's deadliest airport and metro bombings in the past two years.
Officials said the pair, along with a third man who died while trying to prepare a bomb, were both ethnic Chechens and were detained in Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odessa in January and early February.
It was not clear why the authorities had waited until just days were left before the March 4 poll to make their announcement.
"It just seems like an incredible coincidence that these monsters were discovered today," independent military analyst Alexander Golts told AFP.
But Prime Minister Putin's official spokesman Dmitry Peskov called such suggestions "blasphemous".
Channel One said the three plotters went to Ukraine from the United Arab Emirates via Turkey with "clear instructions from representatives of Doku Umarov".
"They told us that first you come to Odessa and learn how to make bombs," Channel One showed a man a man identified as Ilya Pyanzin as saying.
"And then later, in Moscow, you will stage attacks against commercial objects, with the subsequent assassination attempt against Putin," the man said.
The state television footage showed a video of Putin getting into his car being played on the laptop computer belonging to second suspect Adam Osmayev, a man the report said had lived and studied at university in London.
The hidden-camera footage of the Russian prime minister's movements was shot "so that we had an understanding of how he was protected," Osmayev said.
Osmayev had bruises and cuts across his face in the Channel One video and was later led away to his cells by hooded agents from Ukraine's SBU.
An SBU official told Interfax that the two men's fate was uncertain because Russian prosecutors had still not requested their extradition.
Osmayev was shown telling investigators that some explosives had already been hidden near the Kutuzovsky Prospekt avenue that Putin passes daily to reach the government White House.
Channel One also quoted an unidentified Russian FSB official as saying that the blast would have been "powerful enough to tear apart a truck".
Putin's spokesman Peskov said the Russian premier had no plans to alter his schedule because of the threat and hit out at suggestions that the report was planted in the media to benefit his election campaign.
"The fact that the information was published now is easily explained by the fact that the preparations were being made not only in Moscow but also in Ukraine," he told Interfax.
The Channel One news director said his station received the first details about the plot from Russia's FSB on February 17 and dismissed speculation about the report's benefits to Putin's election campaign.
"This is a very serious group (of plotters) who had funding and real bombs," Channel One news director Kirill Kleimenov told RIA Novosti.
An FSB official told RIA Novosti that the suspected plotters were all Chechens who belonged to one of Umarov's armed groups.
But the kazvkazcenter.com news site that Umarov regularly uses to air his views cast doubt on the validity of the Channel One report and carried no claim of responsibility for the plot.
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