By Galina Korol | 2025-02-27

KYIV -- In early February, Ukraine was rocked by a series of explosions near its Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCRSS), which are military agencies that conduct draft registration and conscript eligible Ukrainians.

Since the beginning of 2025, Ukraine has experienced nine terrorist attacks near or on the premises of TCRSS facilities, police say.

The perpetrators are most often young, unemployed or antisocial individuals looking for easy money, says law enforcement.

Attacking TCRSS facilities

The first high-profile terrorist attack occurred on February 1 when a 21-year-old man brought explosives into a recruitment center in Rivne, western Ukraine.

As soon as he was inside the building, someone blew him up remotely. Eight troops were injured.

"He was recruited by a Russian intelligence officer, who offered him money for completing the task," said Anna Svintsitskaya-Savchuk, a spokeswoman of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) department in Rivne province, Suspilne Zhitomir reported February 6.

"The man arrived in Rivne with an improvised explosive device [IED] disguised in a tourist's backpack. The explosives were equipped with a mobile phone that Russian intelligence could access remotely."

On February 2, this time on the other side of Ukraine, an IED went off near the Pavlohrad TCRSS building in Dnipropetrovsk province, injuring a 24-year-old serviceman.

On February 4, law enforcement officers detained two young men in Chernivtsi province who are accused of trying to lure police to a bomb-rigged building with a phone call, likely on the instructions of Russian intelligence.

And on February 5, an explosion occurred near the TCRSS in Kamianets-Podilskyi, in Khmelnytskyi province, instantly killing the man who brought the explosives there and injuring four.

"A man approached the TCRSS checkpoint with a bag in his hands and pretended to be handing it over. That's when the explosion occurred," said Ukrainian National Police Chief Ivan Vyhivskyi during a briefing on February 5.

"Arson of Ukrainian military vehicles, railroad sabotage, the blowing up of TCRSS buildings -- these are some of the subversive activities of the intelligence agencies of the aggressor country," said SBU First Deputy Head Serhiy Andrushchenko during a briefing on February 5.

"Thousands of FSB [Federal Security Service] officers, GRU [Russian military intelligence] agents and full-time and freelance agents are working around the clock to undermine us from within. To sow chaos, panic and mistrust," Maria Berlinskaya, a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war, director of the Victory Drones project and co-founder of the Dignitas charity, wrote on her Facebook page after the terrorist attack in Kamyanets-Podilskyi.

Looking for perpetrators online

On February 6, Texty.org.ua, a Ukrainian online news outlet, published a journalistic investigation of how Russian intelligence recruits potential terrorists.

The news outlet's correspondents say that they managed to communicate with FSB recruiters by masquerading as would-be terrorists.

All communication takes place in Telegram groups, whose administrators openly suggest various acts of sabotage with payment of up to $5,000, the reporters said.

"What immediately caught my eye was the extremely well-developed workflow of the [site]. First, it asked us to answer questions from a kind of questionnaire. After we answered the questions, the FSB's HR officer conducted an additional short online interview with us: What would you like to do? What skills do you have?" reads the article.

The scheme for attracting a new "employee" resembles standard online marketing, says Texty.org.ua.

"If you work well, you'll get more. And, of course, some sort of career growth cannot be ruled out," the article continues.

"Thus, the Russian intelligence agencies raise a talented agent step by step -- from a small-time saboteur who posts ads or does stenciling to a terrorist who could subsequently be assigned to commit truly murderous terrorist attacks," the article says.

Turning into a suicide bomber

"But nobody tells the person who signed up for such crimes that he will not actually receive any money, and that he will be transformed from an ordinary terrorist into a suicide bomber," Ivan Stupak, a former SBU officer and analyst with the Ukrainian Institute of the Future, told Kontur.

"As soon as the perpetrator arrives at the location of the future explosion and his phone is in video conference mode, he has in fact turned into a suicide bomber. Russian intelligence operatives detonate the explosives remotely."

Russia's FSB kills the perpetrators to "cover its tracks," he said.

"It seems to me that there is some evidence that Russia does not want to be revealed if such a person were to be arrested. After all, [Russian intelligence agencies] understand perfectly well that arresting someone might allow Ukrainian intelligence agencies to expose a string of others involved in an operation," said Stupak.

"We know perfectly well that you can't just buy explosives on OLX [an e-commerce platform] or on some website somewhere, that someone is passing it on to these perpetrators or leaving it, for example, somewhere in Kharkiv province," he said.

"And I suppose there could be up to five of these channels for transferring explosives to Ukraine. Perhaps two or three. Perhaps even one. That's why [the Russians] are trying so desperately to keep them secret [meaning, by blowing up the perpetrators]," said Stupak.

'Sowing despondency and apathy'

Russia targets vulnerabilities in society, according to analysts.

"Where there is a weak spot, that is where the enemy takes aim and strikes," Ukrainian Lt. Gen. (ret.) Ihor Romanenko told Kontur.

The overall goal of the Russian campaigns is to disrupt the Ukrainian war draft and aid from Ukraine's partners, Serhiy Kuzan, director of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, told Kontur.

All this can be done by "sowing despondency and apathy in the minds of Ukrainians, because a destroyed society is not willing to continue the fight," he said.

In the long term, the Kremlin believes "this [strategy] should lead to, first, the collapse of the [Ukrainian] Defense Forces themselves, the collapse of the front and, of course, the collapse of the state," explained Kuzan.

"If society stomachs these attacks [on the rear], the bad symptoms will become the diagnosis. I want to believe that at the point where we are now, this is impossible," Mykhailo Drapatyi, commander of Ukrainian ground forces, wrote on Facebook on February 2.

".... the only thing separating us from the enemy is the Ukrainian Defense Forces, the armed forces. ... [W]e must not lose our conscience in the rear," Drapatyi wrote.