MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — She’d applied for job after job, but none of them had worked out. Not the gig in her uncle’s restaurant. Not the bakery internship. Not waitressing. Now Vika was 18 and still unemployed, her life seemingly dead-ending before it ever even began.
She lay back on the couch, scrolling through more job listings on her cellphone. It was March 2025, and for the past few weeks, she’d been crashing at her brother’s apartment in this southern Ukrainian port city. Her mom, Lesia, kept urging her to move home, but the last thing Vika wanted was to return to her tiny village, with its shrapnel-pocked homes and caved-in school, where the only opportunity was seasonal work picking tomatoes.
Just then, a Telegram message pinged in her inbox: “Do you still need a job?”
She thumbed over it and paused. The man, who said his name was Danylo, was offering $2,500 if she agreed to pick up a package on the city’s outskirts and drop it off at a police station the next morning.
Vika, who agreed to speak on the condition that the last names of her and her family not be used because of pending legal action against her, didn’t consider similar cases that had recently appeared on the local news. There were the four Ukrainian boys who’d built a bomb that killed three at a cafe a few miles away on Valentine’s Day. The 17-year-old who died when a bomb disguised as a thermos exploded on his way to a train station. The two 14-year-olds who lit an explosive next to a police station near Kyiv.
All had been recruited through messages on Telegram or other social media channels. Behind the screen: Russian intelligence agents.
These sabotage operations are a dangerous new form of hybrid warfare, with both Russia and Ukraine accusing the other side of manipulating vulnerable populations — including children and the elderly — into committing acts of violence for a quick paycheck. Since 2022, the Russian Supreme Court alleged, every fourth person convicted of sabotage fell between the ages of 16 and 17. Ukrainian officials said they have identified about 1,400 sabotage operations over the past two years, including 800 in 2025, with a quarter of those arrested below the age of 18. Neither figure could be independently verified, and both countries deny their roles in such operations.
Vika hadn’t seen the new campaign from Ukraine’s internal security agency, the SBU, which explained “if someone offers you ‘a simple delivery’ to a military enlistment office, police station, or government building, know that they are trying to kill you,” or the Telegram bot where suspicious messages could be flagged. All she knew was that $2,500 was enough to give her life direction — the launching pad to a new future.
Writing back, she immediately agreed.
‘Vulnerable’
The next morning, Vika woke before her brother and stepped outside to call Danylo.
He picked up on the second try, giving her an address out by the city’s train station where he said the package was waiting. Vika considered asking him what was inside, then thought better of it and called a taxi. She needed the money.
By that point, she’d been to more than 10 job interviews and had invested dozens of hours looking for open positions. Her brother Ihor promised that she could stay with him and his girlfriend for as long as she needed, but Vika wanted independence.
“She was definitely in a vulnerable state at that time,” Ihor said later. “We were explaining to her that everyone goes through this. She didn’t believe us.”
They came from a family that talked over each other, with Ihor often getting the last word. He was seven years older, a soldier who nearly lost his leg fighting in the Donetsk region in 2023. Chronic pain and disability forced his resignation from the army. Where Ihor was open and driven, Vika was quiet and closed-off, struggling to find her way. She hid behind a curtain of straight, dark hair and chipped away at her nail polish when nervous.
She was 16 when the full-scale war started, evacuating to western Ukraine with her mother while her father stayed behind. Russian troops rolled past their village, not far from the front line in Kherson. When it was safe enough, her family returned home. The past painful, they fixated on her future. Perhaps in the food industry, building on her degree in food science.
They hoped she’d land on her feet.
‘A fatal mistake’
Vika slid out of the back seat of the taxi with a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. Wanting to back out, she texted her boyfriend, a soldier fighting in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region.
“I almost made a fatal mistake. I’ll tell you when we’re together.”
“At least hint,” he replied.
“I’ll tell you everything, but not like this,” she said.
Then the threats started rolling in.
Danylo demanded to know where she was. He told her to call him, then promised that no one would hurt her — if she followed through.
“It was sort of like I was under some hypnosis,” she said later. “I wasn’t thinking. I was just doing what the man was telling me to.”
So she set aside her fear and carried on with the plan. She picked up the package, which consisted of two reusable shopping bags. One was heavy with a five-liter jug that sloshed with a milky substance. The other contained two cellphones. She carried the bags across the street and called Danylo. He instructed her to tape one of the phones to an orange fuse snaking out of the bottle top of the jug. On the other, he told her to activate an app.
Vika didn’t know it yet, but a counterintelligence agent from the SBU was watching. He’d worked a growing number of cases like hers, largely driven by financial insecurity. The plot often started small, a few bills offered for a menial task. As trust grew, the severity of the assignment increased, then turned toward violence. At that point, the agent said, “they can just threaten the victim with exposure” if they refused to follow through.
“It’s easier to work with teenagers who are not psychologically ready to deal with stuff like that,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in keeping with security service protocols.
His job was to stop an attack before it happened. The SBU was 90 percent effective, he said. But the number of cases was rising, and agents couldn’t be everywhere at once. In one case, a teenager near Vinnytsia in central Ukraine had already thrown two molotov cocktails at a government building, engulfing it in flames, when the SBU arrested him a few days later. He had received more than $1,300 — money he said he planned to use, in part, to pay his grandmother’s hospital bills.
“Every person has their own reasoning for why they do this,” the agent said later, declining to specify how Vika’s case came onto his radar. “To me, it’s hard to understand.”
He watched as she settled onto a bench near a playground and peered into the shopping bags, fiddling with what was inside. Nearby, a mother pushed her young son and daughter on the swings.
He video-recorded the scene as evidence. “Kids are playing, this girl is making a bomb,” he said, his radio crackling in the background.
In a trance
Vika left the playground in what felt like a trance and hailed a cab toward the police station. As the city whipped by, a blur of winter blue and gray, messages from Danylo pinged on her cellphone. He praised her, calling her a “good girl,” and implored that she keep him updated on timing.
“I’ll call when I’m close to the place,” she replied.
“If everything goes well, $3,000,” he said, upping the initial price. “I’ll send it to you! I give you my word! … Make sure you place the bag carefully without shaking it.”
She was now only a few minutes away.
“The bag seems large,” she said. “Or is it okay?”
“It’s just the right size!” he said. “It doesn’t raise suspicion.”
She got out of the taxi.
A few minutes later, three SBU agents disguised as civilians approached. They asked what she was carrying. Vika panicked. She didn’t want to lie. When she finally spoke, it felt like someone else was answering.
“I think,” she admitted, “this might be an explosive.”
The trial
No lawyer would touch Vika’s case.
Charged with terrorism, she faces up to 10 years in prison, though the prosecutor is willing to lessen her sentence if she cooperates with investigators. After multiple consultations with private attorneys failed, Vika’s mom recommended she accept a court-appointed lawyer. Vika was surprised to learn the tall and burly man was a retired SBU member — once assigned to investigate the type of clients he now defends.
For seven months, Vika remained in custody as the SBU raided her brother’s apartment and her parents’ home for evidence. Lesia, her mother, mailed care packages of Vika’s favorite snacks. They caught up over the facility’s allotted 15-minute phone calls. Vika didn’t say much about the bunk room she shared with 13 other inmates or how they tried not to discuss their cases, some of them violent.
Vika cycled through three judges before the final one, Volodymyr Aleynikov, released her this fall on a $6,000 bail, which Lesia scraped together with donations from multiple family members. Now under court supervision as the beginning of her trial approaches, Vika is back to where she started: sleeping in the twin-size bed of her childhood bedroom, stuck in her home village.
She felt “stupid” to have been tricked into such a plot, she said in an interview with The Washington Post last fall.
On a brisk November morning, Vika and Lesia entered the courthouse, walking through a broken metal detector and down a dimly lit hallway to Courtroom 2. Aleynikov shuffled in soon after. At 53, he’d presided over this room for decades, his caseload increasing as the war slogged on.
The facts of Vika’s case didn’t shock him. Not that investigators discovered that the bomb she’d been carrying was built by four local boys between the ages of 14 and 16. Not that she’d ignored so many red flags. Not that it would probably take two years to sift through all the evidence. Aleynikov had nine similar cases on his docket, enough for him to ban smartphones at home, where he had a 15-year-old son.
Now he turned to Vika.
“Do you understand your rights?” he asked.
She nodded. Glancing at her mom for reassurance, she asked the judge if it would be possible to move back in with her brother in Mykolaiv. She’d gotten a new cellphone for her 19th birthday, she offered, and he could contact her there.
“Just don’t look for a job with that phone,” Aleynikov said.
He set the date of her next hearing and the court adjourned for the day. Vika and her mom walked back outside, her fate yet undecided.
Serhiy Morgunov in Potsdam, Germany, contributed to this report.
The post Inside the shadow war between Russia and Ukraine that exploits teens appeared first on Washington Post.
