The head of the Ukrainian police has accused Russia of recruiting Ukrainian teenage girls to kill Ukrainian servicemen, Reuters reported. This follows the arrest of a 17-year-old girl suspected of killing a serviceman on the instructions of a Russian agent, BTA reported.
In an interview published by the Ukrainian media outlet Cenzor.NET, the head of the national police, Ivan Vykhivsky, said that this year there had been six cases of contract killings organized through the Telegram messaging app, one of which was prevented.
"These are planned murders organized by the special services of the aggressor state and carried out by Ukrainian citizens," he said.
Reuters notes that it has not yet been able to contact the Russian security service, the FSB, for comment. Russian security services accuse Kiev of recruiting Russians for bombings in Russia, and Ukrainian military intelligence has claimed responsibility for the assassination of several senior Russian officers after the 2022 invasion of Moscow, the agency recalls.
Vykhivsky said that Russian recruiters found young women through messaging platforms, promising them easy money and coordinating their actions remotely.
The young women were instructed to look for Ukrainian servicemen on dating sites and were paid by their superiors to rent apartments where they could meet them, Vykhivsky said.
They were told where to get methadone, a synthetic opioid used as a painkiller that can be deadly in high doses when added to drinks.
More than 1,100 Ukrainians are accused of arson, terrorism or sabotage in treason to their country during the war, the National Security Service of Ukraine said.
Police detained a 17-year-old woman in the western Zhytomyr region last week after the poisoning of a serviceman and said she "had communicated via Telegram with a man who was probably an agent of the Russian security services."
She had received a parcel containing a crystalline substance that investigators believe was methadone, police said.