Throughout the years of war, the security services of Ukraine and Russia have discovered a cheap and accessible resource – young people who can be recruited for unique secret attacks, often without even knowing who they are working for. It is a shocking evolution in this brutal war: the transformation of children into weapons.
In the early hours of May 8, 2023, Pavel Solovyov, a 17-year-old Russian teenager, sneaked through a hole in the fence of an aircraft factory in Novosibirsk, Russia. He and two friends were looking for a warplane to set on fire. An anonymous Telegram account had promised them a million rubles, around $12,500, to do so – a huge sum for the boys.
But when they saw the supersonic Su-24 bomber, they got scared. This heavy warplane, whose versions have been bombing Ukraine for the past three and a half years, looked impressive and too dangerous to simply set on fire.
After some discussions, the kids decided to burn the grass around the plane but film it to make it look like the plane was engulfed in flames. The stranger on Telegram had promised to pay only after receiving video evidence of the fire.
Solovyov is now serving nearly eight years in a penal colony. He and his friends, detained within a week, were found guilty of committing deliberate acts of sabotage.
The Little Actors of the New Hybrid War
The children had no idea that, as Russian investigators concluded, this was a covert attack by Ukraine. Solovyov and his friends had simply been asked to "help the aircraft factory get insurance" for the burned plane, his mother said. Her son had once dreamed of opening his own auto repair shop. "Now all his plans have fallen apart," she said.
This is by no means an isolated incident. Small-scale attacks like this are part of a new type of hybrid war waged by Russia and Ukraine.
Over the years since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the security services of both countries have discovered a cheap and accessible resource - young people who can be recruited for unique secret attacks, often without even knowing who they are working for. It's a shocking evolution in this brutal war: the transformation of children into weapons, as stated in an article published by the New York Times.
Stories of cross-border surveillance and sabotage have been circulating for several years. But the phenomenon has gained momentum as the war stagnates and both countries seek new ways to attack enemy territory.
To learn more about this, Lilia Yapparova, a reporter at Meduza, read through the message history of children with those who recruited them, even spoke with some who hired children for sabotage, and listened to a recording of one of them offering a recruiter a recipe for explosives.
Over several months, she analyzed hundreds of cases in both countries. It was an intensive course on deception and disaster, the journalist writes.
Blackmail, Manipulation, and Irresistible Offers
Here's how the scheme works: first, an anonymous user contacts children through Telegram, WhatsApp, or a video game chat, quickly offering them a sum of money. Once contact is established, intermediaries provide instructions.
Sometimes, these directives are disguised as a "geolocation game." "Yes, we pay for photos here!" says an online ad posted by recruiters on Telegram, requesting images of police cars and ambulances with the location stamped. "It's like Pokemon Go, but for money."
The methods can be darker than simple deception. A 14-year-old Ukrainian student was harassed by her Russian recruiters: they gained access to her intimate photos, then threatened to post them online if she didn't become a saboteur.
Similar blackmail was used against students in the Russian town of Miski. After hacking the boys' social media accounts and finding compromising materials, Ukrainian intermediaries forced them to spray toxic substances in their school. This recruitment technique ensures a network of saboteurs at a low cost.
On the Russian side, the results are impressive. A Ukrainian teenager, taught by Russian military intelligence how to use encrypted communications and a timed fuse, carried out an incendiary attack at an IKEA store in Lithuania.
A group of teenagers was manipulated to spread hateful anti-Semitic slogans throughout Ukraine. Two 14-year-olds detonated a bomb near a police station north of Kiev. Three teenagers blew up a van in Mykolaiv.
Even when sabotage fails, it's frightening. A sixth-grader from Ternopil in western Ukraine was offered money to set fire to critical infrastructure; he reported it to the police. And a student from Zhytomyr followed his supervisor's instructions to build a homemade explosive but was apprehended before he could use it. Behind all these acts, successful or not, were Russian agents.
Ukraine's efforts are no less. It seems that in the bathrooms of Russian schools in small towns, you can find leaflets with personal QR codes of Ukrainian recruiters.
At the behest of these recruiters, anything can be set on fire. A police car in St. Petersburg, a veterans' headquarters in Stavropol, a railway in Irkutsk.
A 16-year-old tried unsuccessfully to set fire to a bomber at a military airfield near Chelyabinsk. Two boys from Omsk set fire to a helicopter using a Molotov cocktail. Children with fewer resources resort to cigarettes and gasoline from their scooters instead of explosives.
Harsh Punishments for Child Warriors
Children do not go unpunished. The numbers are small but significant: since the spring of 2024, the Ukrainian security service has arrested approximately 175 minors involved in espionage, arson, and bomb plots orchestrated by Russian intelligence agents. The youngest of them is 12 years old.
Russia does not disclose such information, but human rights activists say there are at least 100 equivalent cases. According to Igor Volcikov, a family law attorney, the number of children in one of Moscow's main pretrial detention centers has increased from 20 to 100 adolescents during the war, all suspected of pro-Ukrainian sabotage.
Yaroslav Kuligin, 18, faced worse things than detention. After a stranger on a darknet forum asked him to help a railway company get insurance, he set fire to railway equipment and a train compartment.
Upon his arrest, the police were not interested in such details: agents used stun guns on him for so long that they repeatedly discharged and had to be changed several times until he confessed to working for Ukraine - something he didn't know he could do.
His mother has gotten used to seeing her son only through a "small, dingy window in a semi-dark room" at the pretrial detention center. He has already tried to commit suicide twice. "You can sing songs in a completely invented language, or crawl on all fours like a dog, or fish in a sink. You still won't stand out much from the crowd here," he wrote in a letter from a psychiatric hospital in a prison.
Lives Destroyed by the Trap Game
Sometimes Moscow goes even further. In at least three cases, Russian agents have tried to eliminate those they hired by remotely detonating explosives while the recruits were carrying out sabotage. This happened to two teenagers from Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, who tried to blow up a railway: one died; the other lost his legs. Those who survive the mission can be prosecuted as terrorists or sentenced to years of psychiatric treatment.
This hybrid war has left behind a trail of destroyed lives - hundreds of children on both sides of the front. A former Ukrainian recruiter whom the journalist spoke with still cannot calm her conscience for the role she played. One day, she came across a 17-year-old student from Central Russia who wanted to fight against the Russian regime. The young man, clearly a valuable asset, was handed over to the recruiter's own intermediary and from there to higher-ranking agents.
A month later, the child stopped appearing online. Then he appeared in a detention center near Moscow, accused of possessing explosives and preparing to assassinate a Russian lieutenant colonel.
"I don't want anyone else to end up like him. We make children do things that we wouldn't even risk doing ourselves," said the former recruiter.
T.D.