James' World 2

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At dawn on May 8, 2023, a 17-year-old Russian teenager named Pavel Solovyov climbed through a hole in the fence of an aircraft plant in Novosibirsk, Russia. He and two friends were looking for a warplane that could be set on fire. An anonymous Telegram account had promised them one million rubles, around $12,500, to do so — a surreal amount of money for the boys.

But when the boys saw the Su-24 supersonic bomber, they got scared. This heavy war plane, versions of which have been pounding Ukraine for the past three and a half years, looked too impressive and dangerous to simply incinerate. After some deliberation, the kids decided to singe the grass around the jet but film it to make it look like the plane was engulfed in flames. The stranger from Telegram had promised to pay only after receiving video evidence of the arson.

Mr. Solovyov is now serving almost eight years in a penal colony. He and his friends, detained within a week, were found guilty of carrying out deliberate acts of sabotage. The children did not suspect that this was, as Russian investigators concluded, a covert attack on behalf of Ukraine. Mr. Solovyov and his friends, according to his mother, had simply been asked to “help the aircraft plant get insurance” for the burned plane. Her son once dreamed of opening his own car repair shop. “Now,” she told me, “all his plans have crumbled.”

This is far from an isolated incident. Small-scale attacks like it are part of a new kind of hybrid warfare being carried out by Russia and Ukraine. Over the years since the Russian invasion, the security services of both countries have discovered a cheap and accessible asset — youngsters who can be recruited for one-off covert attacks, often without even knowing who they are working for. It’s a shocking development in this brutal war: the weaponizing of children.

Stories about cross-border surveillance and sabotage have been circulating for a couple of years. But the phenomenon, as stalemate deepens and both countries look for new ways to strike inside enemy territory, has clearly picked up. To learn more about it, I read through the message histories of recruited children with their handlers, spoke with handlers themselves and even listened to a recording of one of them providing a recruit with a recipe for explosives. Over months, I reviewed hundreds of cases in both countries. It was a crash course in deception and disaster.

This is how it works. First, an anonymous user contacts kids over Telegram, WhatsApp, or a video game chat with an offer of a quick buck. Once contact is made, handlers provide instructions. Sometimes these directives are disguised as a “geolocation game.” “Yes, we pay for photos here!” says one online ad posted by recruiters, asking for location-stamped pictures of police cars and ambulances. “It’s like Pokemon Go, but for money.”

The methods can be darker than deceit. A 14-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl was harassed by her Russian recruiters: They gained access to her intimate photos, then threatened to post them online unless she became a saboteur. Similar blackmail has reportedly been used against schoolkids from the Russian town of Myski. After hacking the boys’ social media accounts and finding compromising material, Ukrainian handlers forced them to spray toxic substances at their school. This recruitment technique ensures a network of saboteurs on the cheap.

On the Russian side, the results are striking. One Ukrainian teenager, taught by the Russian military intelligence service how to use encrypted communications and a timed fuse, carried out an arson attack at an IKEA store in Lithuania. A group of teenage boys were manipulated to spray hateful antisemitic slogans across Ukraine. Two 14-year-olds detonated a bomb near a police station north of Kyiv. A trio of teenage boys blew up a pickup truck in Mykolaiv.

Even when the sabotage doesn’t succeed, it’s scary. A sixth grader from Ternopil, in western Ukraine, was offered money to set fire to critical infrastructure; he reported the approach to the police. A Zhytomyr schoolboy followed his handler’s instructions to build a homemade explosive but was apprehended before he could use it. Behind all these acts, successful and not, were Russian agents.

Ukraine’s efforts are no less shocking. Flyers with Ukrainian recruiters’ personal QR codes can reportedly be found in the toilets of small-town Russian schools. At those recruiters’ urging, anything can be torched. A police car in St. Petersburg, a veterans’ headquarters in Stavropol, a railway in Irkutsk. A 16-year-old fruitlessly tried to set fire to a bomber at a military airfield near Chelyabinsk. Two boys from Omsk succeeded where he couldn’t and set aflame a helicopter using a Molotov cocktail. Less well-resourced kids resort to cigarettes and gasoline from their scooters instead of explosives.

They don’t tend to get away with it. The numbers are small but significant: Since the spring of 2024, the Ukraine security service has arrested around 175 minors implicated in espionage, arson, and bomb plots orchestrated by Russian intelligence agents. The youngest among them is 12 years old. Russia does not disclose such information, but human rights activists I interviewed say there are at least 100 equivalent cases. According to Igor Volchkov, a lawyer specializing in family law, the children’s block in one of Moscow’s main pretrial detention centers has grown from 20 to 100 teenagers during the war, swelling with kids suspected of pro-Ukrainian sabotage.

For 18-year-old Yaroslav Kuligin, worse was in store. After a stranger from a darknet forum asked him to help a rail company get insurance, he set fire to railway equipment and a train compartment. Upon his arrest, the police were not interested in such details: Mr. Kuligin was beaten with stun guns for so long that they kept running out of charge and had to be changed several times until he confessed to working for Ukraine — something he didn’t know he might have been doing.

His mother has gotten used to seeing her son only through a “tiny shabby window in a semidark room” of the pretrial detention center, she told me. He has already attempted suicide twice. “You can sing songs in an entirely made-up language, or crawl on all fours like a dog, or fish in a sink,” he wrote in a letter from a prison psychiatric hospital. “You still won’t stand out from the local crowd much.”Russia sometimes goes even further. In at least three cases, Russian operatives tried to eliminate the people they’d hired by remotely detonating explosives while the recruits were carrying out the sabotage. That’s what happened to two teenagers from Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, who had tried to blow up a railway: One died; another lost his legs. Those who survive the job can be prosecuted as terrorists or sentenced to years of psychiatric treatment.

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Ben Hickey

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