A growing number of young Ukrainians have been unknowingly recruited by Russian forces as unwilling suicide bombers as the Ukraine-Russia War drags on in its third year, the Guardian reported last week.
Russian forces have been recruiting Ukrainians, mainly teenagers, to bomb police stations, post offices, or military targets under the guise of odd jobs postings on Telegram as part of an ongoing shadow war.
For example, 19-year-old Oleh told the Guardian that he was offered $1,000 to video himself vandalizing a police station in western Ukraine with provided materials. He collected a rucksack from a given exchange point with what he thought was a canister of spray paint. When he opened the bag, he found a crude bomb with a cell phone attached to it as a crude remote detonation system.
Oleh's experience is part of a trend that has seriously injured or killed over a dozen people. Ukraine's SBU security agency said that this sabotage campaign began in the Spring of 2024. The attacks appear to target areas in western Ukraine, far beyond the frontlines in the east of the country.
In the earlier part of the campaign, teens were lured by "curators" who used a mix of blackmail and enticement to carry out arson attacks on Ukrainian civil and military infrastructure. This effectively allowed the Kremlin to target deep into western Ukraine without being physically present.
It also allowed the Kremlin to stoke discontent in the war-weary country because the video would inevitably find its way to pro-Russian Telegram channels.
Now, the attacks have escalated to bombings that mirror terror group attacks. The SBU has reportedly arrested nearly 700 people since the start of 2024 for sabotage, arson, or terrorism.
"They started the mass recruitment of Ukrainians to plant bombs: in cars, near conscription offices, near police departments, and so on,” SBU spokesperson Artem Dekhtiarenko told the Guardian.
"In some cases, the agents don’t only plant the bomb, but unconsciously perform the role of a suicide bomber. Russians blow up their own agents, this is becoming common practice."
Russia's unknowing recruits: teenagers and children
The Guardian noted that while many of the perpetrators are unemployed, nearly a quarter are teenagers. The youngest unknowing victim in the attacks was an 11-year-old child from Odessa.
SBU officers say that Russian agents will start with easy requests to hook their recruits, but they will quickly move on to more substantial tasks and will up the ante of the arrangement.
“Sometimes they use threats, sometimes they are friendly and encouraging. It depends on who is curating the agent; they use different psychological manipulations on different people,” said Dekhtiarenko. “After people perform the first task, they are on the hook."
Oleh, for example, was unemployed and was trying to support his girlfriend and their new child. He was looking at posts on a Telegram channel that advertised easy jobs. He contacted one lister, who asked him to take pictures of areas in his hometown.
“He said he had easy jobs, payment in dollars. When I contacted him, he told me to take photos of the courthouse, the conscription office, the police station [in my home town]. He paid me $50, to a crypto wallet,” Oleh, whose name has been changed, told the Guardian.
The lister later asked him to burn down a building in his hometown. Oleh refused and blocked the lister, but was later contacted by a different user who offered him a gig vandalizing a police station.
When Oleh got to the scene with a friend whom he had recruited as backup, SBU agents were already monitoring the scene.
An SBU source told the Guardian that the city of Rivne had experienced a similar attack the day before, resulting in the death of an unemployed 21-year-old citizen, and wounding several soldiers.
“Ukraine is the testing ground for Russian conventional and hybrid warfare. Look at cyber-attacks, look at arson attacks, look at the sabotage on railways. They test things here, and then they do it in western countries,” a Ukrainian law enforcement source said.
Oleh and his friend have been arrested and are currently awaiting trial, where they both could be sentenced to up to 12 years in prison. Despite the charges levied against him, Oleh is unsure about pleading guilty, being in the dark about who his true employers were or what the consequences of his actions would have been.