Russia recruits young women to kill Ukrainian servicemen, Ukraine's police chief claims

Ukraine's police chief has accused Russia of recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to kill Ukrainian military personnel, following the arrest of a 17-year-old suspected of murdering a serviceman on the instructions of a Russian operative.

In an interview published on Wednesday by Ukrainian media outlet Cenzor.NET, national police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi said there had this year been six cases of contract killings arranged via the Telegram messaging app, one of which was prevented.

"We are talking about planned murders organised by the special services of the aggressor state and carried out by Ukrainian citizens," he said.

Russia's FSB security service was not immediately available for comment. Russian security 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.

Vyhivskyi said Russian recruiters found young women via messaging platforms, promising them easy money and coordinating their actions remotely.

Devon Spurgeon, a Telegram spokesperson, said in an emailed comment that attempts to recruit people for sabotage on Telegram were routinely detected and removed. "Telegram is a platform for peaceful communication and privacy, not war."

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.

They were told of places where they could obtain methadone, a synthetic opioid used as a painkiller that can be lethal in high doses, for lacing drinks, he said.

More than 1,100 Ukrainians have been accused of committing arson, terrorism or sabotage in betrayal of their country during the war, Ukraine's security service has said.

Police detained a 17-year-old woman in the western region of Zhytomyr last week following the poisoning of a serviceman and said she had been communicating via Telegram with a man who was likely a Russian security services agent.

She had received a parcel containing a crystalline substance which investigators presumed was methadone, police said.

-Reporting by Anna Pruchnicka, Editing by Daniel Flynn and Timothy Heritage/Reuters