By Galina Korol | 2025-04-03

KYIV -- As Ukraine fights for its independence, Russian intelligence has found a new mechanism to try to undermine the country from within: children.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) recently reported that it had prevented a terrorist act in Ternopil.

"As a result of comprehensive operations in Ternopil, a 14-year-old schoolgirl was arrested after being recruited by the occupiers to carry out a suicide bombing with explosives near the local police district office," the SBU wrote on Telegram March 21.

The Russian agents found the girl through her Telegram channel, hacked her mobile phone and blackmailed her with threats to post revealing photos of her on the internet, said the SBU.

Ultimately, the girl succumbed to the agents' pressure. Following their instructions, she made an improvised explosive device. She then concealed it in a backpack and surreptitiously left it under a car that was parked near the police station.

Russian intelligence was planning to remotely detonate the explosive device at that moment in order to kill its recruit and as many passersby as possible, according to Kyiv.

However, Ukrainian law enforcement thwarted the terrorist act, neutralized the explosives and arrested the underage suspect.

She faces charges of attempting to carry out a terrorist act, the SBU said in a statement.

'Disturbing numbers'

Since the beginning of 2025, the Ukrainian National Police and the SBU have documented 17 criminal offenses that courts categorized as "an act of terrorism," Tetyana Dotsyak of Kharkiv, a correspondent for the Ukrainian TV news program "Fakty," told Kontur.

From March 2024 to March 2025, the culprits of more than 600 crimes -- mostly arson -- were teenagers in Ukraine, according to information Dotsyak obtained from the Ukrainian National Police.

"These are serious crimes, and these are disturbing numbers. And we're talking about kids between 14 and 17 years old," Dotsyak said.

Kateryna Rashevska, a legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights (RCHR), cited a case where Russian intelligence even tried to recruit an 11-year-old boy.

"We need to understand that every Ukrainian child has suffered from the Russian aggression," she told Kontur. "In one way or another, every Ukrainian child is living in this state of stress, so it's not very hard to play on their feelings."

"Recruiting our children is a policy of Russia that unfortunately is compatible with other efforts to militarize Ukrainian children in the occupied territories -- and also involves attempts to recruit Ukrainian children even in EU [European Union] states where they have gone to flee the war," Rashevska said.

A fire in an IKEA warehouse in Vilnius last May 9 provides one example. The arsonists were two young Ukrainian men, one of whom was a minor, according to the Lithuanian prosecutor general's office.

Russian military intelligence recruited and connected the culprits through a long string of middlemen meant to conceal the origins of the plot, Vilnius said.

Luring children to crime

The Ukrainian National Police told Dotsyak that the sweeping campaign to recruit teenagers through Telegram and social networks began in March 2024.

"Russian intelligence released these malignancies throughout Ukraine," she said.

The recruitment happens according to a standard plan: either teenagers find groups online focused on quick earnings or their friends show them such groups.

When they join these groups, at first they receive offers to complete simple tasks but then the organizers gradually pull them into the criminal world.

"I talked to three children who are now under investigation. They say they just wanted to earn money," Dotsyak said.

The majority of the teenagers do not harbor pro-Russia views. Of all the minors who were arrested in Kharkiv province, for example, only one was negative toward Ukraine. The others just wanted to earn money.

Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents are ensnaring children from various social strata, Ukrainians contend.

Dotsyak pointed to the story of a 15-year-old girl who lived with her mother and wanted to find a way to make money online.

At first, unspecified Russian instigators asked her to put up flyers, and then a Telegram group called "Arson and Sabotage" invited her to join. When she refused to set fire to sites, the handlers asked her to "wiretap a corrupt cop." The "wiretap" turned out to be explosives.

Instigators "allegedly promised the girl between $1,000 and $3,000 [€914 and €2,741] to set up this wiretap. Naturally, that much money makes these kids' heads spin, and they lose their minds from those kinds of promises," Dotsyak said.

In another case, a 14-year-old boy from an affluent family told the handlers running one of the groups that he knew how to make explosives.

The boy was making rudimentary explosives out of curiosity, said Dotsyak. But he was willing to "work from home." He did not want to go out to the streets and attract attention.

The handlers gave him instructions to put together a powerful remote-controlled explosive device. The boy's online boss then used threats and blackmail to force him to take the explosives to a particular police station.

"I said, why didn't you refuse at that point, and he said, 'I was afraid they'd detonate [the explosive device], because I was the one who made it, and I knew it was activated,'" Dotsyak said, recounting her conversation with the boy.

How can recruitment be stopped?

The common thread among all these incidents is that the Russian handlers promise money for committing a terrorist act, but in the end the perpetrator's "reward" is either a jail cell or death when the explosive device detonates under him or her.

"These criminals don't care what happens to these children," Dotsyak said. "The SBU believes that it's possible that they often blow them up to eliminate witnesses."

"The children don't understand that they're just being tricked, so they get reeled in," said Viktor Yahun, a former deputy director of the SBU.

If Ukraine pays not enough attention to the problem now, "we could lose an entire generation," he told Kontur.

The National Security and Defense Council, along with the education and other ministries need to be involved to resolve this problem, he said.

"Obviously everything starts with the family, and parents need to sit down and have a talk with their children ... there need to be educational activities in schools to supplement these actions," Rashevska said.

The SBU has created a chatbot on Telegram that adults and children can use to report recruitment attempts, she said.

"We have a bot called Spaly FSBeshnika, where you can anonymously report if someone has tried to recruit you or if a recruitment was successful at any stage," Rashevska said.

"You can report the incident and lighten the negative consequences for yourself."