Oleh is 19 years old, a newborn daughter and a mobile phone with Telegram. It was with that – and a thousand dollars promised in Stablecoin – that almost exploded at the door of a squad. Not because he is a terrorist, but because he is unemployed. And because someone, at a distance, decided that his body could be useful. The invisible war that is locked within Ukraine is recruiting teenagers, exploring misery and turning victims into guilty
It was called Alexander, or so performed on Telegram. Oleh told Oleh that it was simple: to travel to Rivne, in western Ukraine, to take a backpack and dump paint on the facade of the local police squad. Thousand dollars – paid in USDT, a stablecoin, that is, a cryptocurrency designed to maintain the value stable, in this case indexed to the US dollar – by this “artwork” of one day.
But when the 19 -year -old coming from the Sumy region, he opened the white bag next to the police building, saw wires, a mobile phone and a makeshift device that had nothing innocent. It was not ink. It was a bomb. And Oleh would be the “painter-people” without knowing it. It was, therefore, narrowly that Oleh did not, unknowingly, became a suicidal bomber to the service of Moscow. A pawn sacrificed in a shadow war that Russia has been intensifying within Ukraine.
which heard the SBU operational reports, the Ukrainian security service, and now detained suspects, more than 700 people have been caught since the early 2024 for involvement in sabotage, fires or attacking attempts. Many are teenagers. The youngest was 11 years old.
The strategy began with small fires, filmed with mobile phone and released in pro-Russian channels, as “proof” of internal discontent. But by the end of 2024, Kremlin will be climbing, opting for explosives – placed by Ukrainians enticed online with promises of easy money. The “curators”, operating from Russia, resort to psychological manipulation: they praise, threaten, offer emotional support or simply pay on cryptocurrency. Many of the targets are young unemployed or in a precarious situation. Oleh had just been a father. I needed money.
Initially he refused to set a building on fire, but weeks later gave in to the promise of such a thousand dollars in Stablecoin. He asked a friend, Serhiy, also without work and with two children, to accompany him. The mission seemed harmless. But in Rivne, the pair was closely followed by SBU. Three days earlier, another young man, recruited in a similar way, had died by detonating a mill with a military recruitment center. He killed and injured eight soldiers.
Oleh and Serhiy were caught the moment Oleh, suspicious, warned a local police. The SBU, which followed their route from the moment they collected their backpack, had technology to remotely block the signs of detonation sent by Alexander. The worst was avoided.
Now both await trial. You can catch up to 12 years in prison. Oleh’s girlfriend cut contact. The parents were more concise: “You are an idiot,” they told him on the phone.
The shadow war, warns a source of the Ukrainian police cited by Guardian, serves as a laboratory for Russia to test hybrid tactics that then apply to the West: sabotage, cybership, attacks. It remains to be seen when – or if – Moscow will also decide to export this new weapon: young people enticed, manipulated and disposable.
