Some 22% of Ukrainians recruited by Russian intelligence services to prepare sabotage acts or terrorist attacks in the country are minors, Artem Dekhtiarenko, the spokesperson of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), said on April 2.
The SBU regularly reports detentions of suspected Russian agents, exposing and preventing terrorist acts prepared by Russian security services against military and civilian targets.
For their tasks, Russian intelligence services tend to recruit unemployed people, as well as people with criminal records or various types of addictions, according to the SBU's data.
"According to our statistics, 22% of the detected criminals are minors, 55% are unemployed, and 7% of the perpetrators have previously been convicted of various crimes," Dekhtiarenko said.
"These people are more easily swayed by psychological manipulations because young people are not able to assess the consequences of their actions fully, and addicts need money at any cost," he added.
The youngest executors of Russian orders, whom the SBU exposed for setting fire to Ukrainian Railways' (Ukrzaliznytsia) railroad switchboards, were 13-year-old teenagers. The oldest was a 52-year-old man who tried to place explosives in the Dnipro River, according to Dekhtiarenko.
Vasyl Bohdan, head of the Juvenile Prevention Department of Ukraine's National Police, said that the police are currently seeing a decrease in the number of cases of child recruitment compared to last year, while the number of reports of attempts to recruit children has increased.
Citing teenagers who have been recruited, the police identified several reasons why minors agree to such cooperation: material gain, psychological manipulation techniques based on a sense of adventure, romanticization of crime, and blackmail.
"Having some sensitive information about the child, either personal or related to simple tasks already completed, the handler can blackmail them into disclosing it," Bohdan said.
Kateryna Hodunova
(Updated: )
