How our children are recruited by saboteurs from Ukraine

Boys in a cage

Dima's fashionable boyish haircut is gone. His hair is almost bald, and his childishly protruding ears immediately catch the eye. When leaving the cell, the guy, as usual, stands facing the wall, hands behind his back, and, on the guard's orders, walks forward along the corridor past the iron doors. When he sees his mother, who has come with us for a visit, he seems to forget about the guard and tries not to cry – she has enough tears for both of us now.

Dima is 15 years old. A tall, lop-eared guy with a naive look – one of eight Ural teenagers detained last July for committing a series of sabotage acts on the railway in two cities of the Sverdlovsk region – Pervouralsk and Krasnouralsk. The cities are separated by hundreds of kilometers, but the arson of relay cabinets and attempts to destroy diesel locomotives occurred one after another. Now it has been proven: on command from Ukraine, received via messenger. The teenagers did not have time to complete the dirty deed and send a photo report to the customers in order to get money – they were detained at the scene of the crime, and now all eight are in the only pre-trial detention center for minors in the Ural region at the Kirovgrad educational colony. Criminal cases have been opened against each of them under Article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (attempt and preparation to commit a terrorist act by a group of persons by prior conspiracy), which provides for a punishment of 10 to 20 years of imprisonment.

– I wanted easy money. I didn't even think about any enemy plans. Friends invited me, they said I could earn 130 thousand. Of course, I didn't count on such a sum, but it seemed like everything would be simple, no one would notice us… – Dima simply explains to me how he ended up in a group of terrorists.

Our conversation takes place in complete silence. In a row of neighboring cells behind heavy doors are all his accomplices. Locks, bars, barbed wire – silent confirmation that, despite the naivety of the messages, a serious crime was committed. Against the Motherland, the state. The teenagers' stories about how the recruitment took place are made as if from a carbon copy, and, as it seemed to me, in their naivety resemble an essay on the topic "How I spent this summer." "At about 11 p.m. I went to the specified coordinates, taking with me the acetone and crowbar I had bought. Everyone in the house was asleep, I managed to leave unnoticed. In the dark I reached the relay cabinet. It was locked, and on the door there was a sign "Article 281 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation Sabotage. "Deprivation of liberty from 10 to 20 years." He got scared and returned home. He hid everything he had bought under the sofa. He wrote to the BBG account that he couldn't set it on fire, to which they replied that he would be able to do it again in a few days. Then he asked his friend if he wanted to earn some extra money. He agreed and sent him his account details. It wouldn't be scary together. Then he went to bed, since it was already late…" – this is how Slava from Pervouralsk, one of Dima's current "neighbors" in the pretrial detention center, explained his participation in the sabotage.

Across Fear

A series of sabotage acts coordinated from abroad has been growing in Russia since 2022. The impetus for the offensive is clear: the start of a special military operation to liberate the DPR and LPR. The participants involved in the first actions are also understandable: mature people who disagreed with the state's policies went to terror. But now the situation has changed. According to FSB analysts, the age of people drawn into sabotage actions is rapidly getting younger. If in 2022 it averaged 38 years, then next year it was already 28, now recruiters are targeting 25-year-olds and younger. This is a real threat to society, for which we were not ready and now we must counter with a serious system of education and patriotic work with young people, informing society, the Federal Security Service is confident.

– The war is not only on the front line, the opposition to the enemy covers the entire country. And to think that somewhere out there, far away, the fate of the SVO is being decided, while in our town everything is quiet and calm, is senseless, even dangerous. With current technologies and methods of psychological influence, the enemy can reach every family and in one way or another penetrate every home, – says Alina Kazantseva, official representative of the UFSB for the Sverdlovsk region.

As one analyst explained to RG, the goal of recruiting Russians by the Ukrainian Armed Forces is now not so much to cause serious material damage to the country's economy, but rather to sow fear and involve the younger generation in criminal activity.

– In fact, they are stealing our children, their future, and destroying at a very young age the opportunity to build a normal life for the benefit of themselves and their homeland. This is even more terrible than mass fraud with money, – believes Alexey Starostin, an expert at the Ural association "Center for the Prevention of Extremism and Counteraction to the Ideology of Terrorism".

By the rules and without

In Dima's native Krasnouralsk, they are still in shock from the sabotage carried out by the guys. They are perplexed as to why it happened and cannot find an answer. In the popular rating, stupidity, thirst for adventure and the desire to make easy money are leading. Krasnouralsk is a small town, a true backwater. The nearest highway is ten kilometers away, and the only railway line is used exclusively for industrial purposes. However, despite its dead-end transport location, the town does not fit into the average person's idea of an abandoned and impoverished territory. The local metallurgical plant is working at full capacity, salaries are good, and the social infrastructure is in full swing. There is even an ice palace with a year-round arena for training, and most of the sections and clubs are free. So there is no need to blame the devastation out of habit.

Our guys are expendable material for the "recruiters". Like a match: you set fire to your own – they throw it away

And the school where all the boys accused of the terrorist attack study is unusual. It bears the name of the hero of the Chechen campaign, FSB major Andrei Kiselev, who died during the liberation of hostages in the Dagestani village of Pervomayskoye. Fighters from the Alpha group regularly come here to meet with the current generation of children. The school's director, Olga Mezenina, easily listed a series of events from the patriotic education plan in which the teenagers recruited by the Ukrainian Armed Forces were involved. But when asked directly what did not work, after some hesitation she briefly answered: "We were unable to find contact with the children and parents."

– Many of the old schemes that were used for patriotic work in peacetime do not work now. It is necessary to constantly be in contact with children and select methods that will be interesting to the youth themselves. In order to involve them in positive processes, and not impose an "agenda", – believes the head of the psychological service of the UFSB of the Russian Federation for the Sverdlovsk Region Anna N.

Having opened the page of the leader of the Krasnouralsk "terrorists", seventeen-year-old Alexey, I shuddered: every post featured bodybuilders, tattoos, swearing, fists, shaved heads. The guy has been registered with the juvenile affairs inspectorate for five years. It would seem that according to the rules, the kid should be given special attention. But in reality, everything is like in the proverb about seven nannies. Both the school and the police are now unanimously claiming that the teenager was monitored and his social media page was of interest. But they did not track the harmless account. Any teenager can now churn out such pages under fictitious "nicknames" in batches, and none of the controllers are in a hurry to get to the truth.

For psychologists, Alexey is a classic example of a lost child. His father did not live with the family, his mother was constantly in drunken company. Already in elementary school, the boy was hooked on drugs. The 12-year-old boy was sent for treatment, and his mother agreed to undergo rehabilitation, if only not to be deprived of parental rights. But she was never able to restore contact with the child. For her, Alexey is now like a distant light in the window, for the school – like a stone around the neck: for the third year he has not been able to move up to the ninth grade. According to the law on education, the school has no right to expel him, an undereducated man, so that he can earn money.

– As a rule, teenagers in crisis situations, from dysfunctional families, are easily led by the offers of recruiters. They are easy to manipulate. Moreover, the enemy side uses subtle approaches to establish contact. At first, they talk about abstract topics, try to interest him, show that they understand his mental suffering very well. They claim that he is a leader capable of action. And when trust is formed, they give an "interesting" task. For a start, for example, to draw graffiti and gradually involve him in criminal activity, promising a solid reward, – psychologist Anna explains the algorithm for drawing problem teenagers into the sabotage process.

However, as we have seen, there are no standards in recruitment. The enemies catch "lost souls" on the Internet en masse, without sorting them into Gaidar's "bad guys and boys." And the fact that a child lives in a seemingly prosperous family is no guarantee of inaccessibility. Of the entire Krasnouralsk group, only one, 15-year-old Nikolai, has a complete family, but he was the first to receive a message with an offer to earn money. Foreign customers never call their tasks sabotage. But Nikolai realized that something was wrong here, and even showed the message to his parents. They advised their son to cut off all ties with the dangerous contact. But for some reason they did not go further: they forgot to monitor whether the child followed the advice, and they did not report it to law enforcement agencies.

When the offer to make some easy money came the second time, Nikolai did not show it to his parents, but showed it to his friends in the yard. And the bait worked. At first, the yard gang painted the walls of the houses with provocative graffiti.

– At first I didn't even understand what we were writing on the wall, I thought it was some strange name: "Mobikov home". But it turned out that we were calling the guys who went to the SVO names, – Dima explained to us repentantly at the meeting.

That night, no one stopped or identified the boys. And then it got even worse: setting fire to a utility booth near a cell phone tower and, finally, going to a diesel locomotive with bottles of gasoline. According to Dima, he refused the last action – the sabotage was too obvious. He called his friends fools and went home to sleep. That night, his friends were caught red-handed near the diesel locomotive, and they came to arrest him at home at six in the morning.

On the hook

Rumors are still circulating around the city about the huge sums of money promised and received by teenagers for the fuse of the iron machine. Allegedly, more than 600 thousand rubles passed through the account of one of the boys. In reality, foreign recruiters of our children do not value our children so highly: the money promised was more modest – a little over a hundred thousand, and the total amount paid was a pittance. That same Dima, with whom we met in the pretrial detention center, received, according to him, only 6 thousand rubles. He wanted to show off this wealth to his girlfriend, but did not have time. Slava from Pervouralsk distributed the profit from setting fire to relay cabinets as follows: "With the 5 thousand rubles I received, I bought myself sneakers, an electronic cigarette, and a T-shirt…"

Teenagers are throwing away their fates on the cheap. According to operational data, the prices for arson start at about 10 thousand rubles (two years ago the figure was 5 thousand). The money is not just dirty, it is destructive. Recently in Noyabrsk, when a helicopter was set on fire, two schoolchildren aged 13 and 14 almost burned themselves. They wanted to beautifully, like in a James Bond movie, set fire to a car doused with flammable liquid with a cigarette. But the fire spread along the ignited path to the children.

– For foreign intelligence services, the fate of the recruited teenagers is indifferent. They are not interested in whether they will survive or what will happen when Russian intelligence services or law enforcement officers identify minors and arrest them. And we always find underage saboteurs. For recruiters, our children are expendable material, like a match: if they set their own on fire, they throw it away. And they start to process others, – explains the head of one of the divisions of the UFSB of the Russian Federation for the Sverdlovsk Region, Alexander P.

There is a whole system working to destabilize the situation inside Russia abroad. After all, sabotage is also a weapon that has no limitations on the range of destruction. And one should not expect that, having seen a wave of thwarted terrorist attacks, the enemy will stop and no longer dare to start a provocation in some remote small town.

Reference "RG"

How is a terrorist attack punished?

Criminal liability for terrorist crimes (Article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) begins at the age of 14, the maximum punishment for such crimes for minors is up to ten years of imprisonment. Even if a forensic psychiatric examination finds the person who committed the terrorist act insane, he is deprived of his freedom – sent for compulsory treatment. For a teenager who committed a terrorist act at the age of 14, administrative (Article 5.35 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation) or criminal liability (Article 156 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) are borne by the parents. The minor himself can be placed in a closed-type special boarding school.

Those convicted of terrorist crimes are included in the register of terrorists and extremists . Special control measures are applied to such citizens, primarily financial, which limits their ability to use banking services, transfer and withdraw money from accounts, and make prompt purchases. Information about a citizen may be contained in the register until death.

A person convicted of terrorist crimes deprives his children of the opportunity to work in law enforcement agencies or to be a state or municipal employee.

Competently

Alexander P., Head of the Department of the FSB Directorate for the Sverdlovsk Region:

– Teenagers are not recruited by their peers, but by specially trained adults. As a rule, they are employees of the Ukrainian special services: either the Main Intelligence Directorate or the Security Service of Ukraine. They are the ones who involve our children in illegal activities through social networks and instant messengers. The search for young candidates for recruitment is carried out in thematic anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels, as well as in the so-called sports Telegram channels. As a rule, they are the first to make contact, they themselves start the correspondence. For example, they offer to go on reconnaissance, take a photo of something and send a photo. The enemy even transfers money for photographing an object. The payment is received quite quickly: often within a few hours. And so the guys are involved in terrorist activities.

There have been cases when a schoolchild is first deceived in order to push him into action, and their tasks are not connected with the SVO, so as not to scare the teenager away. For example, they give the following legend: mobile operators are arguing over a cell tower, and in order to spite one of the competitors, they need to set the tower on fire. So what, just iron! No one will even look for anyone. The teenager does not understand that arson in itself is a crime, and commits it. They pay him, and then tell him that he acted in the interests of the armed forces of Ukraine, and they ideologically process him. One way or another, they convey to the teenager the main ideas and goals of Ukraine in the fight against Russia: we are not against, we are even for Russia! We are only against the president of the Russian Federation. He absorbs all this. He is given a new task, and he willingly agrees. And so on in an escalating manner. The teenager, remaining unpunished, decides that they will not find him in the future, willingly agrees, already understanding in whose interests he is acting.

Our teenagers are not deep-level agents. The enemy does not care about the fate of the kids – they are disposable expendable material. Like a match: you set it on fire – you throw it away. They do not track the fate of the kids they supervise. They set a task, completed it, received a report. If there is continued communication, it means the teenager is still at large. If the communication is over, well, so be it. They start looking for the next one.