Assassinations, railway sabotage and car bombs: inside Ukraine’s shadow war

At first glance, it looks like a lump of beige dough stuffed with metal nuts, bolts and bolts – a Frankenstein fruitcake.

But if you look closely at the police photo, you’ll find that this is a classic explosive device, which Ukrainian authorities say was intended to be planted at an army station in Kiev.

Canadian forces encountered a similar type of IED on roadsides or in the path of armored convoys during the war in Afghanistan. Except this bomb was found in the capital of Ukraine, and instead of the Taliban, a local teenager was involved in this bomb.

According to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). It was one Among several cases involved a civilian recruited online and tasked by Russian agents to “secretly plant the bomb under the walls of a military facility” in order to “detonate it remotely.” (The teen was arrested in May.)

“Russia is essentially exploiting vulnerable individuals who are in desperate need of some kind of money to carry out these attacks,” Stephen Wray, a digital research analyst at the US-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue who tracks global terrorism, told CBC News. “They don’t care if they’re teenagers, they don’t care if they’re homeless, they don’t really care about the background — they just want people to do this type of activity.”

With the front lines of the war in Ukraine still described as a “meat grinder,” the shadow wars between the Kremlin and Kiev have intensified and become increasingly ugly, as incidents such as IEDs in Kiev become more common.

Covert assassinations, railway sabotage, car bombs, and even the involvement of a specific terrorist group with a history in Canada – all make the largest ground war in Europe since World War II seem like the old times of the Global War on Terror.

In June, Ukrainian special forces stunned the world when they secretly flew suicide drones deep into Russia and into Siberia to destroy parts of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, in what is now known as Spider web process. Mysterious agents operating in Kiev have also placed Russian officers living in safety in Moscow On the edge.

But inside Ukraine, Russia was playing its own spy games. It has sought to arm Ukrainian civilians as agents and informants against their country. Using encrypted applications such as Telegram, agents of the Russian FSB – Russia’s main spy agency – blackmail Ukrainians or offer them financial rewards for real acts of rebellion.

Recruits are typically directed via the Telegram app to a bunker where they pick up bombs or weapons and are assigned a mission. For example, in a failed plot over the summer, the FSB He cheated on a Ukrainian man In an attempted assassination of a military officer in Kyiv, providing the target’s home address and the location of a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Raising awareness

The problem has become so common, especially among Ukrainian teenagers, that the Ukrainian Security Service created an educational advertising campaign called “Burning man FSB“, and sends officers to schools to lecture students on how not to be recruited.

Official advertisements featuring dramatic representations of betrayal and illustrations of a masked man are plastered on billboards across Ukraine and Played on YouTube.

Watch | Ukrainian educational video about Russian sabotage methods:

“The video informs citizens, especially young people,” the Ukrainian Security Service said in a post on its website. “Russian special services stalk minors online, offering them criminal jobs.” So far, the SBU has been thwarted Multiple attacks with explosive devices Throughout the country, as well as arson, assassinations and other violence by Kremlin spies.

But it is not possible to stop all of Russia’s conspiracies, and agents of the Ukrainian security service are also targets.

In July, as Colonel Ivan Voronych, a senior Ukrainian security service officer, was walking through a parking lot in broad daylight in a Kiev suburb, a masked gunman killed him with a silencer and fled to a waiting car. The SBU quickly tracked down. Two attackers As he put it, “liquidate them.” But not before he was American-born and international A neo-Nazi terrorist group The rule He claimed involvement.

In early 2025, Al Qaeda announced its new Ukrainian cell on a Telegram page, alarming counterterrorism experts who knew its leader, Reynaldo Nazzaro, was a terrorist. Accused Russian spy. The cell then began providing cryptocurrency for acts of sabotage and assassinations against the “Kiev regime.”

Ray said that after Voronich’s killing, “they immediately came out and said: ‘These are our activists who overthrew the great activist.'” He explained that the official version from the Ukrainian government attributed the killing to two Azerbaijani citizens who had ties to Russian organized crime.

But for Wray, that “mysterious image” did not stop Al Qaeda, which could have served as a vector for assassins to act on behalf of Russia.

There is also reason to believe that the base in Ukraine is dangerous. Her Telegram videos show what appears to be burning Ukrainian police and military vehicles, setting a government building on fire and setting electrical boxes on fire. In the United States, after a years-long investigation by the FBI, several al-Qaeda members were arrested on terrorism-related charges, including Canadian cell leader Patrick Matthews, who is currently serving a prison sentence. Imprisonment for nine years.

Wray noted that it matches a pattern of Russian espionage being carried out across Europe.

“We’ve seen this dozens of times, where individuals across Europe, who may or may not know the Russian government’s role in all of this, are taking these payments in cryptocurrencies just to make a quick profit carrying out arson and other types of criminality,” Ray said.

Russian hybrid warfare On the European continent it includes hiring local workers Criminals Or sponsor other agents not associated with the Russian government to do so Sabotage of cargo planesand critical infrastructure and energy facilities – providing the Kremlin with a thin veneer of deniability.

Ukrainian actions

For its part, Ukraine has responded in kind, employing some of its own civilian and paramilitary saboteurs who are currently under the yoke of Russian forces. They now control parts of the eastern Donbas region, Kharkiv, Kherson, the entire Crimean peninsula, and a piece of Dnipropetrovsk.

“We are trying to stop their activities in every possible way,” a Ukrainian special forces officer said. Rukh OboroIt is a state-sponsored resistance movement consisting of partisan paramilitaries, citizen spies and informants in occupied Ukrainian territories. He added: “We are trying to disrupt all convoys transporting ammunition, food and fuel.”

The officer, who was given the cover of anonymity because of the bounty Russia placed on his head, told CBC News that his clients range from spies reporting on Russian military movements to agents. Blowing up trains and Communication lines Assassinating Russian soldiers of every rank.

“They are afraid of us,” the officer said. “Because we often eliminate not only regular military personnel… but also mid-ranking officers, as well as high-ranking officers.”

The Federal Security Service is hunting Rukh Oboro and other resistance fighters. But the officer said his agents were hunting them: “We will also eliminate representatives of the special services of the Russian Federation who torture our citizens in Ukraine.”

Some of these top-secret activities extend beyond Ukraine to mainland Russia. For example, the Atesh, a Ukrainian partisan group with strong ties to ethnic Tatars in Crimea and coordinating with Ukrainian special forces and security services, has become particularly adept at Destruction of railway logistics. (Russia declared Atesh a terrorist entity.)

Within the Moscow region, where Russian President Vladimir Putin spends most of his time, Ukrainian security services allegedly used car bombs to kill Russian officers and Political figures, Including the general.

There is clearly no love lost between Russian and Ukrainian forces, but the Ukrainian officer hopes that this war – which is growing older and more brutal – will come to a just end in the near future.

“Today we are fighting not only for our country, but also for the whole of Europe, as well as for the opportunity to live in a free and peaceful world,” he said.

“Where people use the rules and live without encroaching on other people’s lives or other people’s lands.”