Ukraine's National Police Thwart Russian Sabotage Campaign

Russian intelligence services are recruiting Ukrainian civilians online to carry out arson, sabotage, and terrorist attacks far behind the front lines. The National Police of Ukraine stopped half of all planned Russian attacks in 2025 by shifting its focus to dismantling the digital recruitment networks behind them.

This campaign represents a second front in the war, waged since spring 2024 with the goal of spreading fear and destabilizing Ukraine from within. Russian operatives use anonymous accounts on dating apps, job boards, social networks, and messaging platforms like Telegram, often posing as patriotic or opposition groups to target individuals in difficult circumstances.

The Recruitment and Deception Model

Recruits are lured with promises of quick money but are treated as expendable assets. In a particularly ruthless tactic, Russian handlers remotely detonate explosives carried by recruits, turning them into unwitting suicide bombers when they reach assigned locations. The police emphasize that public awareness is key because the scheme depends on a lack of it.

The scale of the campaign is documented in police statistics. The following table compares key figures from 2024 and 2025:

In 2024, police detained 288 people for arson, including 65 minors. Nearly all had been recruited online.

Police Countermeasures and Results

The Ukrainian police, working with the Security Service, stopped treating each incident as an isolated crime and began targeting the recruiters, handlers, and logistics networks. Their work focused on the digital environment where recruitment happens, allowing plots to be identified at the planning stage. A parallel public information campaign explicitly warned that offers of "easy money" were bait.

This integrated approach yielded measurable results. Beyond halving the number of planned attacks in 2025, it led to a significant drop in arson cases. Most tellingly, more than 250 Ukrainian children voluntarily approached police to report recruitment attempts. "The population itself has become part of the sensor network," the report notes.

Police as Direct Targets

Russian operatives have directly targeted police personnel and facilities because they stand as the primary obstacle to the sabotage campaign. In 2025, twelve crimes against police were documented. These included a taxi rigged with explosives directed at a station in the Rivne region and a woman who carried an improvised explosive device into a police building in Odesa, killing herself and injuring three officers. False emergency calls are now treated as potential ambush weapons.

The Disturbing Role of Minors

The most alarming aspect is the recruitment of children. Russian agents first contacted a teenage daughter through Telegram in one Odesa case, and when her attempt to ignite railway infrastructure failed, she drew her mother into the scheme. Together, they burned a Ukrainian soldier's vehicle. Police detained 69 minors for sabotage-related activity in 2025 alone.

The Atlantic Council report argues that the digital playbook used in Ukraine is a repeatable model that could be deployed elsewhere, as it relies on common online platforms and cheap, anonymous recruitment. It concludes that Russia's internal campaign has failed to break public order or turn Ukrainians against their state, largely due to the police's preventative efforts and the resulting community trust.