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Russia must be pushed toward peace. The key to this, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, is unified action by Europe and the US, including sanctions and tariffs.

The Ukrainian president spoke about his recent meetings and visits, noting that 26 countries are now prepared to guarantee Ukraine’s security through concrete measures.

However, Zelenskyy emphasized that before peace can be secured, the Russian Federation must be compelled to move in that direction. He stressed the need to ensure Moscow stops rejecting all peace initiatives and fully understands the consequences of prolonging the war.

“Strong sanctions and tariffs — combined European and American efforts — are key to this. No opportunity to fund Russia’s war machine can remain. Next comes even more transatlantic work to ensure the pressure is truly tangible,” the president concluded.

Security guarantees for Ukraine and Putin’s withdrawal from talks

Since August 18, when US President Donald Trump hosted Zelenskyy and European leaders at the White House, the parties have actively discussed security guarantees for a postwar Ukraine.

On September 4, the Coalition of the Willing met in Paris. Following the meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron said the countries had completed preparations for Ukraine’s security guarantees. He later clarified that 26 states are ready to either send soldiers to Ukraine or support such a mission

Commenting on the potential deployment of foreign troops, Zelenskyy said the plan would involve thousands of soldiers.

Yesterday, the Ukrainian president stressed that security guarantees must take effect immediately, without waiting for the cessation of hostilities. He clarified that these measures include not only military support but also economic guarantees.

Zelenskyy added that the Ukrainian army is the strongest safeguard for the country and for all of Europe. He noted that it numbers 800,000 personnel, making it one of the largest and most capable forces on the continent.

US President Trump has also expressed readiness to provide Ukraine with security guarantees. However, he has repeatedly clarified that American troops will not be deployed in Ukraine. He emphasized that Europe should play the primary role in delivering security guarantees.

While security discussions continue, talks between Zelenskyy and Putin have stalled.

After the Washington meeting on August 18, Trump announced plans for a bilateral meeting between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia. However, Russia began denying that Putin had promised to meet Zelenskyy, and the situation has since remained stalled. The US president stated that the leaders are not yet ready to hold the meeting.

On September 3, Putin publicly said he does not rule out meeting with Zelenskyy. However, he added that Zelenskyy would need to travel to Moscow if he is ready for the talks.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Zelenskyy said Putin could come to Kyiv. He explained that he cannot travel to Moscow, the capital of this terrorist, while Ukraine faces daily attacks.

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University students might soon have something other than black-light posters to brighten their dorm rooms. Researchers have created glow-in-the-dark plants by injecting succulents with materials similar to those that make the posters light up. The fleshy plants shine as brightly as a night light, and can be made to do so in a wide variety of colours — a first for glowing houseplants, according to the team.

The researchers, led by Xuejie Zhang, a materials scientist at the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, describe today how they produced the plants in the journal Matter. They have applied for a patent on the technology, which they hope will lead to decorative installations and living lighting.

The idea of making glowing plants has captivated scientists since the late 1980s, when researchers made the first bioluminescent plant by inserting a gene from a firefly (Photinus pyralis) into a type of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum). This work laid the foundation for the first genetically engineered luminescent houseplant to come on the market in the United States, last year. The biotechnology firm Light Bio in Sun Valley, Idaho, sells the petunia (Petunia hybrida), which glows a very faint green thanks to genes from a light-emitting mushroom.

Leafy greens … and blues and reds

Unlike the petunia, which emits light through chemical reactions in its cells, the succulent glows because of materials injected into its leaves. These materials — phosphor particles made of strontium and aluminium dosed with other metals — absorb energy from light at one wavelength, store some of that energy and then slowly re-emit it at a different wavelength for several hours. For instance, one material the scientists injected into their succulents absorbs ultraviolet and blue light, and re-emits it as green light.

This type of ‘afterglow’ phosphor is used in glow-in-the-dark toys and paints, and as an imaging tracer for laboratory animals. Whereas genetically engineered bioluminescent plants are, so far, limited in the range of colours they emit, afterglow phosphors span a wide variety of hues, including red and blue, and they can be combined to produce a white glow

The researchers purchased phosphors containing strontium aluminate and ground them down to particles of various sizes before injecting them into an assortment of plants. They found that particles around 7 micrometres in diameter glowed more brightly than did nanoparticles in plants, and were able to fill up the interior tissues of succulent leaves for a stronger, more uniform glow. By contrast, plants with simple leaf structures, such as tobacco plants and pak choi, emitted a more patchy glow.

The plant favoured by the team is the succulent Echevaria ‘Mebina’, a common houseplant that grows rosettes of dense, fleshy leaves. To make every leaf glow, the researchers had to inject each one with phoshor particles, a process that takes about ten minutes. The luminescence — which the team generated in hues of blue-green, blue-violet, green, red and white — lasted as long as 120 minutes after exposing the plant to tailored wavelengths of light or sunlight, and could be triggered again and again over the 10 days of the study.

The researchers estimate that the cost of materials to create one plant is about 10 yuan (US$1.40).

Co-author Shuting Liu, also at the South China Agricultural University, says that the team hopes to move away from injecting each leaf by using smaller particles, which can spread more readily throughout plants. But the team will need to overcome an obstacle: the smaller the particle, the dimmer the glow

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A sprawling Hyundai manufacturing plant in a quiet southeast Georgia community became ground zero on Thursday for one of the most extensive immigration raids in recent US history. The operation, months in the making, ended with 475 arrests, most of them Korean nationals.

As state troopers blocked roads leading to the plant and set up a security perimeter, nearly 500 federal, state, and local officers poured into the sprawling battery production facility, still under construction.

Agents moved swiftly, lining up workers along the walls. Word of the raid spread across the property, triggering a scramble among workers who attempted to flee, with some running to a sewage pond and others hiding in air ducts.

The officers spoke with each worker, one by one, working to determine which were in the US legally, allowing some to leave and taking the rest into custody, moving them off-site and transporting them to the Folkston ICE Processing Center, officials said.

By 8 p.m., their work was done.

The high-stakes raid in Ellabell, about 25 miles west of Savannah, Georgia, was the result of what authorities characterized as a meticulously coordinated investigation involving multiple federal and state agencies and weeks of intelligence gathering, all converging in a pivotal day, marking the largest sweep yet in the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at US worksites.

Workers describe tense, chaotic scene

Federal agents descended on the Hyundai site Thursday morning like it was a “war zone,” a construction worker at the electric car plant told CNN Friday.

The worker, who asked not to be named to protect his privacy, said he was part of the first group of people rounded up by federal agents.

“They just told everybody to get on the wall. We stood there for about an hour and were then taken to another section where we waited. Then we went in another building and got processed,” the employee said.

Masked and armed agents gave orders to construction workers wearing hard hats and safety vests as they lined up while officers raided the facility, video footage obtained by CNN showed.

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Discovery of vast natural hydrogen reserves could fuel clean energy and reshape Earth’s future power supply.

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Like many other meteorologists around the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of August 26, 2005, Alan Gerard was monitoring the latest computer model forecasts for Hurricane Katrina, which had just emerged over the Gulf of Mexico after striking South Florida as a Category 1 storm. Gerard, then meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s (NWS’s) office in Jackson, Miss., saw that the newest projections indicated that Katrina would track farther south than previous model runs had predicted. “It was a big change,” he says—and a concerning one because it meant that the storm would have more time over warm water to strengthen and that Katrina’s path had shifted westward, toward Mississippi.

With the weekend fast approaching and several hours before the official forecast would be updated, Gerard quickly e-mailed Mississippi’s emergency management agency to warn them that the state was facing a worse hit and that they needed to start preparing right away.

Just three days later, on August 29, Katrina rammed into the coast at the Louisiana-Mississippi border with a 20-mile-long wall of storm surge estimated at 24 to 28 feet high. (The exact heights that the surge reached aren’t known because most of the gauges, buildings, and other structures that would provide evidence of a high-water mark were obliterated.) In the subsequent hours, the levees around New Orleans failed, releasing torrents of water into the city and making Katrina the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. in nearly 80 years.

Despite the disaster that unfolded because of human mistakes, Katrina had been a well-predicted hurricane; the forecast errors involved were lower than the average at the time. But Katrina, along with the rest of the blockbuster 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, helped spark a dedicated, government-funded effort to make hurricane forecasts even better. Over the past 20 years, that project has nearly halved the error in predictions of where a storm will go and has given communities an extra 12 hours of warning time. By one estimate, these and other improvements have saved the nation up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007—3.5 times as much as the NWS’s budget for 2024. The resounding success is an example of “how this can all work when it’s done right,” Gerard says.

But that success, he and other hurricane experts warn, is under threat as the Trump administration is chopping away parts of the research staff and infrastructure that made such remarkable, lifesaving progress possible.

How Hurricane Forecasts Have Improved

When Frank Marks began forecasting hurricanes in the 1980s, it was only really possible to try to roughly predict the track that a storm would take. “Intensity was a wing and a prayer,” he says. Back then, a storm similar to Hurricane Erin, which parallelled the East Coast in mid-August 2025, would have likely prompted meteorologists to warn the entire coast of a possible hurricane hit because of the inherent uncertainty in forecasts. But this year, forecasters were able to tell that Erin would stay well out to sea; they only issued warnings for rip currents, heavy surf, and some storm surge in coastal areas. “To me, that is astounding, to see that evolution,” says Marks, who became director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division in 2002 and is now retired.

By the time Katrina formed near the Bahamas on Aug. 23, 2005, increased computing power, a better understanding of the physics of hurricanes, and more detailed observations of storms had substantially improved forecasts. But after the Gulf was battered by storms throughout 2004 and 2005, Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, then administrator of NOAA, thought there was still plenty of room for improvement, Marks says.“If you eliminate all of that research, you’re basically creating a stagnant weather service and a stagnant weather community in general.” —Alan Gerard, former National Weather Service meteorologistWhat grew out of that initial request was a fairly revolutionary effort that was eventually dubbed the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP). (The full name was subsequently changed to the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program.) Its first step was to ask forecasters what problems they faced—and to bring together NOAA’s hurricane researchers and modelers, as well as academic scientists, to solve those issues.

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A new international study that included a large-scale analysis of U.S. workers has highlighted an interesting aspect of the ways women relate to other colleagues. It could partially explain their underrepresentation in senior, influential business roles.

The international team of researchers, including a professor of sociology from the University of South Carolina, examined the way women think about social networks in professional settings. In this context, this means, essentially, how people create a mental map of how colleagues are connected to each other, through particular projects, through various managerial chains, and other, more subtle links.

The team’s research found that women have a much, much better ability than men when it comes to spotting who is connected to who else in a professional way — and they’re better at remembering these networks, research news site Phys.org notes. That may not surprise you, at least if you’ve ever been impressed by the way a female colleague can remember details like, “Oh yes, that’s colleague X who worked for boss Y on that big project Z last year…you know, the one where person A did that amazing work with person B?”

But the researchers found that women are able to carry out this sort of impressive mental feat by relying on a “triadic” trick, which means they assume some form of professional relationship exists between two people who are both connected to a third person. In complex, dense team situations in the workplace, this is a superpower. Researchers found this approach boosts the accuracy with which women understand professional social networks.

The thing is, when you get to more open, informal, and less densely interlinked social networks, the report says it could lead to women making more incorrect assumptions about how people are connected, potentially leading to confusion and less team cohesion.

Think of a situation where your company has asked people to work on a new project that crosses existing teams, where many workers may not have had too many opportunities to work together before. In these situations, information, instruction, and expertise tends to flow through one or two highly knowledgeable people, or informal leadership networks, rather than passing along the usual direct reporting chains. For example, Steve from Accounts may know exactly who to speak to on the new project to solve a particular issue, but you may not, even though you may be senior to Steve.

The researchers found that thess situations tend to disadvantage women. Men can then find themselves in a position of being able to wield more power and advantage.

Why should you care about this? It may sound like a bit of scientific psychobabble to you, but it touches on something important.

You should care because having a deep understanding of relational patterns in a workplace is vital for a good leader. Remembering who reports to which manager for which project, and how the projects are allocated across teams, is more than a memory trick: if problems occur, knowing which person can fix them can be critical. Essentially, knowing which personnel lever to pull to get your company to achieve its goals makes you a more effective leader.

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I did it as well.

I began to dream.

What if I won the Powerball jackpot, which now exceeds $1 billion? Supersize lottery prizes often spark a frenzy, leading people to dream about their “Take this job and shove it” moment.

The lure of microwave wealth might have you thinking about grand living, be it aboard a private jet or relaxing poolside at a beachfront villa.

Or, understandably, your dream might be an escape from worry, whether it’s inflation and the rising cost of housing, groceries, and cars. A big windfall could mean eliminating credit card debt or the ability to help struggling friends and family members.

Ten years ago, the New York Lottery ran an ad campaign with this tagline: “You’d make a way better rich person.”

It was intended to mock the frivolity of the ultra-wealthy.

One commercial showed a smug guy soaking in a tub filled with expensive wine as a butler poured the pinot noir. Another shows a man purchasing solid gold staples. “Sometimes regular staples, they just don’t capture the richness of what you’re stapling,” he explains.

The point being that you’d be much better about spending the money, right?

Yeah, probably not.

Here’s what usually occurs when people get a big infusion of money.

1. There’s always a price to pay

Know that nothing comes free — even winning the lottery. Consider those free subscription offers. You might think why not, “it’s free.”

But before you know it, it’s three years later, and you forgot you’d signed up for automatic renewal. Because even legit companies can hook you into a subscription that becomes nearly impossible to cancel.

Then there are the not-so-legit offers. Many scams have hidden behind the promise of “free stuff.”

Or maybe you inherit a home without a mortgage, only to discover the house is a money pit.

It doesn’t take much for a windfall to become a significant financial burden.

Don’t expect sudden wealth to make all your problems disappear. It never will.

2. Fast money can bring out the worst in people

In some states, by law, lottery winners must be identified. This can make them targets for criminals and lead to a flood of requests for money from family, friends and even strangers.

In November 2015, Craigory Burch Jr. won $434,272 in a Georgia lottery. A few months later, the forklift driver was killed at his home after seven people burst through his front door. Relatives suspect he was targeted because of his lottery win.

Michael Todd Hill of North Carolina won more than $4 million after taxes in a 2017 lottery scratch-off game. Nearly five years later, the 54-year-old married man was sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing his 23-year-old girlfriend.

A California woman won $1.3 million in a lottery pool with her co-workers. A month later, she filed for divorce from her husband of 25 years but did not disclose her winnings during divorce proceedings. Her ex discovered the payout and sued, and the court ordered her to turn over her share to him for intentionally hiding it.

3. Wealth without good money management skills can leave you broke

It happens to movie stars, athletes, music icons, and everyday people.

They receive big paychecks, and the shopping sprees result in bankruptcy.

William “Bud” Post III won $16.2 million in 1988 but ultimately died broke. When he purchased the Pennsylvania Lottery ticket, his bank account had just $2.46, according to his obituary. But within three months of collecting the first of 26 annual payments of nearly $500,000, he was in debt; he’d purchased a plane, a restaurant, and a used-car business.

“Everybody dreams of winning money, but nobody realizes the nightmares that come out of the woodwork, or the problems,” he said five years after his win.

Yes, some lottery winners spectacularly squander their winnings, but those who seek good financial advice and manage their money wisely can keep their wealth.

4. Chasing easy money can become addictive

Spending a few dollars on the occasional lottery ticket isn’t going to hurt anyone who is saving for retirement or building a solid emergency fund. However, I’m concerned about the many others who fall into gambling addiction.

Through sports betting and state lotteries, too many people become compulsive gamblers, which can result in major financial problems, including job losses and bankruptcy.

5. Sure, dream big. But wealth is more likely to come from boring investments.

The millionaire next door or someone working in the cubicle beside you, probably didn’t invest all their money in a tech company that made them wealthy. They didn’t gamble on cryptocurrency.

Many 401(k) millionaires are civil service workers, teachers, military members (or retired military), managers or co-workers who clock in just like you, then leave at the end of their shift to pick up their kids from school. Many of them never earned six-figure salaries.

These millionaires built their wealth over decades. They took advantage of matching retirement plan contributions from their employers. They also didn’t cash out their retirement savings when changing jobs. And, most importantly, they didn’t let a pandemic, a change in presidency or economic issues scare them away from the stock market.

This steady approach, while boring, is what turns regular paychecks into real, lasting wealth over time.

Although it may be fun to romanticize about instant riches, it can be a costly distraction, diverting attention from a solid plan to achieve financial security.

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A bright-yellow worm that lives in deep-sea hydrothermal vents is the first known animal to create orpiment, a brilliant but toxic mineral used by artists from antiquity until the nineteenth century. The findings were published in PLoS Biology this week.

The worm (Paralvinella hessleri) is the only creature to inhabit the hottest part of deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the Okinawa Trough in the western Pacific Ocean. The hot, mineral-rich water that shoots up from the sea floor contains high levels of toxic sulfide and arsenic.

Researchers found that the worm accumulates microscopic particles of arsenic on its outer skin cells as well as along its internal organs. This reacts with sulfide from the hydrothermal vent to form small clumps of orpiment, fashioning a microscopic armour around the worm that protects it from the toxic environment.

Orpiment is a naturally occurring arsenic sulfide mineral, often found in hydrothermal and magmatic ore deposits.

The findings came as a surprise to the research group. In the deep sea, creatures dwell in total darkness and are typically grey-ish white or adorned in hues of orange to dark red, says co-author Hao Wang, a deep-sea biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao. It “doesn’t make any sense to make pigment in total darkness,” Wang says.

Unknown mechanism

The team is yet to discover how arsenic is transported into the creature’s internal organs.

Other deep-sea creatures are known to produce minerals as a protective armour. The scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum) for instance, hosts bacteria that detoxifies sulfide through the extracellular biomineralization of iron sulfides in its scales, says Narissa Bax, a marine scientist at Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk.

“Paralvinella hessleri may intentionally combine toxins into a single, ‘safe’, crystalline mineral within its own cells,” she says. It’s ability to fight poison with poison in this way is remarkable, she adds.

But further research to confirm how this occurs will be challenging, owing to the extreme conditions in deep-sea vents, and difficulties studying such species outside their natural environments, she says. Cultivation of P. hessleri in a laboratory setting is currently not possible.

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Paris Jackson would very much like to be excluded from the making of the Michael Jackson biopic. On Wednesday, the singer called out Colman Domingo for claiming she’d given the makers of the upcoming film Michael her support.

While they were both at the amfAR benefit gala at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, Domingo hosted, Paris performed — Domingo told People that he was excited to be there with Michael’s daughter, celebrating. “It feels like that’s a nice way for us to be together,” he added. Domingo, who plays Joe Jackson, Michael’s father and Paris’s grandfather, also said that Michael’s children are “very much in support of our film” and that he “chatted briefly” with Paris about the project, adding that she’s been “nothing but lovely and warm.”

It sounds like Paris begs to differ. She took to her Instagram Story on Tuesday to tag Domingo and write, “Don’t be telling people I was ‘helpful’ on the set of a movie I had 0% involvement in lol that is so weird. I read one of the first drafts of the script and gave my notes about what was dishonest / didn’t sit right with me and when they didn’t address it I moved on with my life.” She signed off the message with, “Not my monkeys, not my circus. God bless and god speed.”

A few hours later, Paris hopped on Instagram again to hash out more of her thoughts. “The film panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in a fantasy,” she said, comparing the upcoming movie to music biopics like The Dirt and Bohemian Rhapsody, which were both criticized for inaccuracies. “It’s Hollywood. It’s fantasyland. It’s not real, but it’s sold to you as real,” she continued. “There’s a lot of inaccuracies and there’s a lot of full-blown lies. At the end of the day, that doesn’t really fly with me. I don’t really like dishonesty. I spoke up, I wasn’t heard, I fucked off, that was it.”

Some of Paris’s other family members are much more actively involved in the movie, including her cousin Jaafar Jackson, who’s starring as Michael, and her brother Prince Jackson, who Domingo said is a producer on the film. She seemed to reference Prince, explaining that she’s “not, like, calling the shots on set being a big-shot producer of a movie that’s filled with just inaccuracies,” adding, “I prefer honesty over sales and monetary gain.”

Michael is set to hit theaters April 24, 2026. I have a feeling Paris won’t be making it to the premiere.

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Photo: Chad Salvador/Variety via Getty Images

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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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