Ukrainian teen saboteurs recruited on Telegram to attack their own country

In July this year, a 17-year-old traveled 800 kilometers from his home in eastern Ukraine to retrieve a bomb and phone hidden in a park in the western city of Rivne.

He says he was promised $2,000 (£1,520) to plant the bomb in a van used by Ukraine’s military conscription service.

“When I was connecting the wires, I thought it might explode. I thought I might die,” he told the BBC.

Vlad is one of hundreds of older children and teenagers who the Ukrainian government says were recruited online by Russia and offered remuneration to carry out sabotage and other attacks against their own country. His name has been changed to protect his anonymity.

He says he was asked to set the phone to broadcast the scene live to his handler so he could detonate the device remotely when someone entered the vehicle.

However, Ukraine’s SBU security services monitored the attack and foiled it. Vlad, now 18, is awaiting trial on terrorism charges, which carries a sentence of 12 years in prison.

Sitting in the heavily guarded Rivne detention center, with his lawyer at his side, he acknowledges that he could have helped kill someone.

“I thought about it. But no one likes conscription officers,” he said. “I thought, well, I’ll be like everyone else.”

The SBU says that over the past two years, more than 800 Ukrainians have been identified as having been recruited by Russia, including 240 minors, some as young as 11 years old.

However, cybersecurity expert Anastasiia Apetyk, who teaches internet security courses in Ukraine, is aware of even more recent cases. “They tried to recruit children who were nine or ten years old,” she says.

Andriy Nebytov, deputy head of the Ukrainian National Police, says there is a deliberate strategy to seek out vulnerable people who can be manipulated.

“Children don’t always fully realize the consequences of their actions,” he says.

“The enemy is not ashamed to use miners to make explosives from household chemicals, placing them in various locations, such as army recruitment offices or police stations.”

The SBU claims that recruitment is mainly carried out on the Telegram application, but also on TikTok, and even on video game platforms. Officials say those who are recruited are almost always motivated by money rather than pro-Russian sympathies.

Vlad says he does not support Russia and has never been involved in criminal activity.

He had joined two Telegram channels and posted that he was looking for remote work. After half an hour, a man calling himself Roman answered. Later, when they spoke on the phone, Vlad said that Roman spoke Russian with a street accent.

Vlad says he was initially reluctant, but was persuaded to accept a series of increasingly dangerous tasks. He was first asked to retrieve a grenade, but when he arrived at the designated location, it was not there. He still got paid $30.

A few days later, another task arose: setting fire to a van belonging to a conscription center, filming it and fleeing.

For this attack, Vlad claims to have received around $100 in cryptocurrency, much less than the $1,500 he was promised. Roman told him he’d get the rest if he planted the bomb in Rivne.

Money for chaos

The Telegram channels that the BBC saw at recruitment sites are not explicitly pro-Russian, but they amplify the anger felt by some Ukrainians towards the conscription service, which has been dogged by allegations of brutality and corruption.

Using a burner phone and a pseudonym, we contacted several people we had been informed about.

The channels contained clips of fires and explosions they claimed were caused on their orders. But the BBC has not been able to verify the circumstances surrounding these videos.

One account we contacted immediately offered payment, either in cryptocurrency or via bank transfer, to carry out an arson attack. We were asked to contact a second account for more details, then received a message with a price list detailing how much they offered to pay for different targets.

Payouts ranged from $1,500 for burning down a post office to $3,000 for a bank. Banks were worth more, they explained, because security glass made them harder to attack.

“You either need to pour gasoline inside or throw a few Molotov cocktails inside,” the account advises.

But even ordinary Ukrainians looking for work can be offered money to carry out sabotage.

We found ads offering high salaries for unspecified part-time work posted in various unrelated Ukrainian Telegram groups, including some aimed at refugees and even beauty tips. When we followed one up, a recruiter again offered thousands of dollars for arson and asked us to send videos as proof.

“I need all the arson I can get,” they messaged. “Finding a reliable person is much harder than parting with money. That’s why I pay exactly what I say and I do it very quickly, usually within hours of receiving the video.”

The BBC reported a number of these channels, accounts, chats and bots to Telegram, which removed some, but not most, of them. One of the still-active channels has gained more than 750 subscribers since we started monitoring it, while an account that we told Telegram directly offered to pay for arson is still online.

In a statement, Telegram said: “Calls for violence or destruction of property are explicitly prohibited on Telegram and are immediately removed when discovered. »

Ukrainian officials have publicly named members of the Russian intelligence services whom they suspect of acting as advisers to the saboteurs.

The BBC was unable to independently verify that the Russian state itself was responsible.

However, several European governments have said they have evidence that Russian agents were recruiting young men to carry out acts of vandalism, arson or even surveillance in their countries. In the UK, six men have been jailed for their part in a Russian-ordered arson attack on a London warehouse supplying aid to Ukraine.

In Ukraine, hundreds of suspected saboteurs await trial, but for some the consequences can be deadly. Several suspects were killed by the explosives they were carrying.

The SBU claims that Russian agents deliberately detonated devices remotely, knowing that their agents would be killed.

In March, a 17-year-old died and a 15-year-old was seriously injured when a bomb they were supposed to transport to a train station in Ivano-Frankivsk exploded.

The BBC forwarded the SBU allegations to the Russian embassy in London. In a statement, he accused Ukraine of carrying out a similar sabotage campaign involving Russian citizens.

“The practices you mention have become a trademark of the Ukrainian special services. In particular: the recruitment of civilians, including children, to commit arson, sabotage or bomb attacks against people, buildings or vehicles.”

Information was published on Telegram attributing acts of sabotage in Russia to Ukrainian recruitment. But again, it is notoriously difficult to verify who exactly is behind these attacks.

Meanwhile, Vlad has a message for those who are tempted by recruiters.

“It’s not worth it. Either they will cheat on you, and then you will end up in prison just like me, or you will take a bomb in your hands and it will simply blow you up.”