SSU: Since start of year, Russian special services increasingly involve teenagers in explosive terrorist attacks
This was stated by Artem Dekhtyarenko, a spokesman for the Security Service of Ukraine, in a commentary to Ukrinform.
“Russians recruit mainly minors, the unemployed and people with various types of addictions for their tasks. According to our statistics, 22% of the detected offenders are minors, 55% are unemployed and other persons with a criminal record for various crimes,” he said.
Dekhtyarenko explained that minors are more easily manipulated by psychological manipulations because young people are not able to fully assess the consequences of their actions.
The spokesperson noted that arson attacks on Ukrainian Armed Forces vehicles and sabotage on railways intensified in May 2024, but Russian special services began recruiting children to organize explosions in large numbers in early 2025.
“Since the beginning of 2025, the Russian special services have once again shown that they have no red lines, and they have moved on to terrorist attacks using explosives. And for such crimes, they recruit, in particular, teenagers,” he said and added that the youngest executors of Russian orders, whom the SSU exposed on the arson of Ukrzaliznytsia relay cabinets, were 13-year-olds.
Dekhtyarenko said that according to the Security Service, in 2025 alone, the SSU and the National Police exposed more than 50 minors who, on the orders of the Russian Federation, participated in terrorist attacks, arsons of cars, relay cabinets, etc.
The spokesperson recalled a recent case when two local minors aged 15 and 17 were recruited by the enemy via Telegram in Ivano-Frankivsk. According to the curator's instructions, they made homemade explosives and disguised them as thermoses. When they were heading to the designated location, the Russian special service, which remotely tracked their movement via GPS, activated the explosives in their package, killing one of them and amputating the other teenager's legs.
Dekhtyarenko emphasized that it is very important to remember that if you are offered to “just bring a package” to the shopping center, police station or other administrative building, you should know that they want to kill you. In order to avoid becoming a suicide bomber, you need to report recruitment attempts to the SSU chatbot “Spaly FSBeshnyka.”
As Ukrinform reported earlier, the SSU exposed seven underage arsonists who were acting on Russia's orders in the northern and central regions of Ukraine. The youngest of the suspects was only 12 years old, the oldest was 16.
