WARSAW, Poland \u2014 Ukraine’s police chief has accused Russia of recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to \u200bkill Ukrainian military personnel, following the arrest of a 17-year-old suspected of murdering a serviceman on the instructions of a Russian operative.<\/p>\n
In an interview \u200cpublished on Wednesday by Ukrainian media outlet Cenzor.NET, national police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi said there had \u2060been six cases of contract killings \u200bthis year arranged via the Telegram messaging app \u2014 \u2060one of which was prevented.<\/p>\n
“We are talking about planned murders organized by the special \u200cservices of the aggressor \u200cstate and carried out by Ukrainian citizens,” he said.<\/p>\n
Russia’s FSB security \u2060service was not immediately available for comment. Russian \u2060security services accuse Kyiv of recruiting Russians for bombings in Russia, and Ukrainian military intelligence has claimed responsibility for assassinating several senior Russian officers since Moscow’s 2022 invasion.<\/p>\n
Vyhivskyi said Russian recruiters found young women via messaging platforms, promising them easy money and coordinating their actions remotely.<\/p>\n
Devon Spurgeon, a Telegram spokesperson, \u200csaid in an emailed comment that attempts to recruit \u200bpeople for sabotage on Telegram were routinely detected and removed. “Telegram is a platform for peaceful communication and privacy, not war.”<\/p>\n
The young women were instructed to search for Ukrainian military personnel on dating websites, and received money from their handlers to rent apartments to meet them, Vyhivskyi said.<\/p>\n
They were told of places where they could obtain methadone, a synthetic opioid used as a painkiller that \u200bcan be lethal in high doses, for lacing drinks, he said.<\/p>\n
More than 1,100 Ukrainians have \u200cbeen accused of \u200ccommitting arson, \u2060terrorism or sabotage in betrayal of their country during the war, Ukraine’s security service has said.<\/p>\n
Police detained a 17-year-old girl in the western region of Zhytomyr last week following the poisoning of a serviceman and said she had been communicating via Telegram \u200cwith a man who \u200bwas likely a Russian security services agent.<\/p>\n
She had \u200creceived a parcel containing \u2060a crystalline substance, which investigators presumed was methadone, police said.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WARSAW, Poland \u2014 Ukraine’s police chief has accused Russia of recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to \u200bkill Ukrainian military…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2548,2547,551,2550,430,2549,2555,213,82,79,2552,2553,357,2551,2545,2554,2546],"class_list":["post-4827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-crime","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ukraine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}