Ukraine accuses Russia of recruiting teenage girls to assassinate Ukrainian soldiers

The head of Ukraine's national police has accused Russia of recruiting young Ukrainian women to carry out targeted assassinations of Ukrainian soldiers. This accusation comes after the arrest of a 17-year-old girl suspected of killing a soldier allegedly on the orders of a Russian agent.

In an interview with the Ukrainian media outlet Censor.NET, Ivan Vyhivskyi claimed that Russian security services were using recruitment networks operating primarily through the Telegram messaging app. According to him, six such contract killings have been recorded in Ukraine since the beginning of the year, one of which was allegedly thwarted before its execution.

The Ukrainian official described these operations as assassinations planned and organized by the special services of the "aggressor state," then carried out by locally recruited Ukrainian citizens. He asserts that these methods are part of a broader destabilization strategy conducted within the context of the war between the two countries.

The accusations indirectly target the FSB, Russia's main domestic security service. The FSB has not yet responded to the Ukrainian police chief's statements. Moscow has consistently rejected Kyiv's accusations regarding its clandestine operations on Ukrainian territory.

Russia, for its part, accuses Ukrainian authorities of recruiting Russian citizens to carry out attacks and sabotage operations inside Russia. Furthermore, Ukrainian military intelligence has claimed responsibility in recent years for several operations targeting senior Russian officers since the start of the large-scale invasion launched in 2022.

These new accusations illustrate the intensification of the covert warfare accompanying the military conflict between Moscow and Kyiv. Beyond the fighting on the front lines, both sides accuse each other of using clandestine networks, sabotage operations, and targeted assassinations to weaken the adversary far from traditional combat zones.