By Halyna Hergert | 2026-07-17

A Ukrainian soldier agreed to meet a young woman he had recently met online. Hours later, he was dead.

Ukrainian investigators say the encounter was no random crime. They allege Russia's intelligence services recruited the 17-year-old girl through Telegram, promised her quick money and directed every step of the operation. The case, they say, reflects a new phase in Moscow's covert campaign against Ukraine: replacing traditional spies with young Ukrainians recruited online to kill.

Officials say the Zhytomyr case is no longer an isolated incident. Instead, it marks an evolution in Russian recruitment tactics, which previously focused on persuading teenagers to carry out acts of sabotage.

Recruitment evolves

According to investigators, the 17-year-old from Berdychiv in Ukraine's Zhytomyr region met a 27-year-old Ukrainian service member after making contact through social media. The pair rented an apartment and drank together.

Police allege the girl received a package containing what investigators believe was methadone from a parcel locker several days before the meeting. She allegedly slipped the substance into the soldier's drink before leaving the apartment after he lost consciousness. The landlord later discovered his body.

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) believes Russian intelligence officers recruited the girl through a Telegram channel advertising easy money.

According to Ukraine's National Police, law enforcement agencies have documented at least six similar cases since the beginning of the year.

National Police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi said the killings were planned by Russian intelligence services and carried out by Ukrainian citizens.

"The particular cynicism lies in the fact that to carry out their plans, the enemy [Russia] uses young people who often do not fully realize the consequences or are hoping for a quick profit," he said.

Investigators say the recruitment process follows a familiar pattern. Russian handlers find vulnerable people online, promise quick payments, provide detailed instructions and coordinate each stage of the crime.

The tactic represents a shift rather than an entirely new approach. For several years, Russian operatives allegedly recruited Ukrainian teenagers to set fire to military vehicles and critical infrastructure or unknowingly transport explosives to military enlistment offices and police stations. Some recruits were arrested. Others died when explosives detonated prematurely.

Old tactic, new target

Ivan Stupak, an expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future and former SBU officer, said Russian intelligence services are adapting after Ukraine achieved a series of successful operations against senior Russian officials.

"They need something to show the leadership. If they don't manage to reach high-level people, they start to look for more accessible targets," he told Kontur.

Stupak cited the killings of General Igor Kirillov, Yaroslav Moskalik and Illia Kyva, arguing that Russia lacks comparable successes against Ukraine's military and political leadership.

Mykhailo Prytula, a military counterintelligence expert and reserve colonel in the SBU, said the concept itself dates back decades.

"This is a very old method that KGB officers used against each other. It even had its own name: honey trap," he told Kontur.

Prytula said Soviet security services historically used romantic relationships to compromise or eliminate targets. Today's operations serve a broader psychological purpose.

"Even disseminating information about incidents like these psychologically harms our military personnel. People start looking over their shoulders, they're afraid of new acquaintances, they're suspicious of the people around them. That's what the adversary achieves," he said.

He described the young recruits as disposable.

"These are so-called onetime agents. They're used once, and then they're of no interest to anyone. On top of that, they can just be set up or eliminated. The Russian intelligence services aren't the least bit concerned about the fate of those kinds of perpetrators," Prytula said.

He added that many recruiters may not even be experienced intelligence officers.

"On the [Russian] side this might be done by ordinary trainees who are looking in large numbers for vulnerable people online. If they manage to recruit, great. If not, they move on and keep looking for the next targets. For them it's just a stream of people," he said.

Prytula argued that countering the recruitment effort requires more than intelligence work.

"The SBU has indeed gotten much more effective, and it's successfully thwarting many schemes like these. But combating the spy networks is not solely the task of the state. Parents need to explain to their kids that this kind of recruitment exists, and adults need to understand that in wartime you need to be careful even in the most ordinary encounters," he said.

Weaponizing trust

Fedir Shchusenko, an instructor in psychological readiness for the nongovernmental organization Therapy of Win, said service members remain vulnerable because the desire for companionship does not disappear during war.

"A service member is constantly living in a state of heightened psychological stress, so the desire to meet someone online is totally natural. This is an ordinary human need to socialize," he told Kontur.

Russian intelligence exploits that need.

"People are often convinced that something like this won't happen to them, or they think the war taught them to understand people well. But that's dangerous self-confidence. You can always find someone who will be more devious," Shchusenko said.

Recruiters often rely on ordinary conversation rather than sophisticated psychological manipulation.

"Sometimes it's enough to be a good listener, show genuine interest, sympathize, tell similar stories about yourself. That creates a sense of emotional closeness, and the person starts to trust," he said.

In other cases, the operation is even simpler.

"Sometimes in these cases, there's no complicated psychology involved. The service member is looking for a date or sex—you can see it in his social media activity. A girl comes along who agrees to meet, she shows up with a substance, spikes his drink and leaves," Shchusenko said.

The emerging tactic was reinforced by a documentary released in mid-June by Slidstvo.Info, whose reporters posed as a young woman and spent nearly a month communicating with suspected Russian recruiters.

According to the filmmakers, the recruiters quickly moved beyond requests for intelligence gathering or sabotage.

"We thought we'd be asked to relay information or be ordered to make deliveries. But instead, they started recruiting us to kill a Ukrainian service member. We needed to find the service member ourselves, agree on the choice with the handler, and then kill him," director Vladyslava Kobko said.

The investigation also suggested that some handlers may be operating from inside Ukraine. One participant, Maria Hontarenko, alerted the SBU and continued communicating with recruiters under the supervision of counterintelligence officers.

"I managed to get a lot of information. It turned out to be a Ukrainian who was in Ukraine and spoke Ukrainian fluently," she said.

Hontarenko urged people to preserve recruitment messages rather than delete them.

"If someone writes to you with similar proposals, don't ignore it. Go to the SBU. Even a portion of the correspondence can help prevent new crimes," she said.