Ukraine’s national police chief has accused Russia of recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to carry out attacks against Ukrainian servicemen, following the arrest of a 17-year-old suspect linked to the poisoning and killing of a soldier.
In an interview published on Wednesday by Ukrainian news outlet Cenzor.NET, Ivan Vyhivskyi said Russian operatives had organised 6 contract killings through the Telegram messaging platform this year, with Ukrainian authorities preventing 1 of the plots.
“We are talking about planned murders organised by the special services of the aggressor state and carried out by Ukrainian citizens,” he said.
According to Vyhivskyi, Russian recruiters target young women through messaging apps, offering them money and directing their activities remotely.
He alleged that the recruits were instructed to identify Ukrainian military personnel through dating websites and were provided with funds to rent apartments where meetings could take place.
The police chief said the women were also directed to locations where they could obtain methadone, a synthetic opioid used medically as a painkiller but potentially fatal in large quantities, to lace drinks.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the Federal Security Service, did not immediately comment on the allegations.
Russian security agencies have repeatedly accused Kyiv of recruiting Russians to carry out bombings inside Russia, while Ukrainian military intelligence has claimed responsibility for several assassinations of senior Russian military officers since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Ukraine’s security service says more than 1,100 Ukrainians have been accused of arson, terrorism or sabotage offences during the war.
Last week, police in the western Ukrainian region of Zhytomyr detained a 17-year-old woman following the poisoning of a serviceman. Investigators said she had been communicating via Telegram with a man believed to be an agent of Russian security services.
Police said the suspect had received a parcel containing a crystalline substance that investigators believe was methadone. The case remains under investigation.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
