Ukraine Shadow War: Sabotage & Assassinations

As the front lines of the war in Ukraine continue to be described as a veritable “meat grinder,” the shadow wars between the Kremlin and kyiv are intensifying. Secret assassinations, railway sabotage and car bombings are reminiscent of the ruses used by the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan.

In June, Ukrainian special forces stunned the world by secretly flying kamikaze drones into the heart of Russia and into Siberia to destroy part of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet as part of Operation Spiderweb.

But in Ukraine, Russia is playing its own spy games. It seeks to use Ukrainian civilians to become agents and informers against their own nation. Using encrypted apps like Telegram, agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) – Russia’s main spy agency – extort funds or offer financial rewards from Ukrainians for actual acts of insurgency.

Russian tactics

Recruits are usually directed with the Telegram app to a cache where they collect bombs or weapons and are given a mission. For example, during a failed plot this summer, the FSB duped a Ukrainian into attempting to assassinate a military officer in kyiv, providing him with the target’s home address and the location of a Kalashnikov.

In other cases, civilians are tasked by Russian agents with secretly plant a bomb under the walls of a military installation for the detonate remotely.

At first glance, the explosive device looks like a mass of beige goo filled with metal nuts, bolts and nails – a veritable “Frankenstein-style” fruitcake. But a closer look at the Ukrainian police photo reveals that it is a classic homemade explosive device that authorities believe was intended to be planted in an armed forces building in kyiv.

Russia mainly exploits vulnerable individuals in search of money to carry out these attacksdeclared to CBC News Steven Rai, a digital research analyst atInstitute for Strategic Dialogue in the United States, a think tank that monitors global terrorism.

Whether they’re teenagers, homeless, or from a lower social class, they just want people to commit these kinds of activitieshe adds.

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The problem has become so common, especially among Ukrainian teenagers, that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) created an educational advertising campaign, called Burn the man FSBand that he sends agents to schools to make students aware of the issue of recruitment.

Official advertisements depicting staged betrayal are plastered on billboards across Ukraine and broadcast on YouTube (new window).

In early 2025, the neo-Nazi terrorist group of American origin The Base had announced the creation of its new Ukrainian cell, causing concern among counterterrorism experts, who were well aware that its leader Rinaldo Nazzaro was a Russian spy.

Videos from the cell posted on Telegram also show what appear to be Ukrainian police and army vehicles on fire or even a government building set on fire. The cell also offers to pay in cryptocurrencies for acts of sabotage and assassinations against the kyiv regime.

Steven Rai indicates that this approach corresponds to a model of Russian espionage carried out in Europe. We’ve seen this dozens of times: individuals across Europe, whether or not aware of the Russian government’s involvement, are accepting cryptocurrency payments to make quick moneyexplains Mr. Rai.

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Ukrainian tricks

For its part, Ukraine has responded in similar fashion, using some of its own civilian and paramilitary fighters currently under the control of Russian forces. The latter now control part of the eastern region of Donbass, Kharkiv, Kherson, the entire Crimean peninsula and part of Dnipropetrovsk.

We strive to terminate their activities by any means possiblesaid a Ukrainian special forces officer who commands the Rukh Oporua state-backed resistance movement composed of partisan paramilitaries, citizen spies, and informants in occupied Ukrainian territories.

We are working to disrupt all ammunition, food and fuel convoys.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the bounty Russia placed on his head, told CBC News that his collaborators are both spies who provide information on Russian military movements and agents who blow up trains and communication lines and assassinate Russian soldiers of all ranks.

They are afraid of us, the officer says, because we often eliminate not only regular military personnel, but also mid- and senior-ranking officers. The FSB tracks down the Rukh Oporu and other resistance fighters, he says, but his agents fight back.

We will also eliminate representatives of the special services of the Russian Federation who torture our Ukrainian citizens.

Some of these highly classified activities extend beyond Ukraine’s borders and reach mainland Russia.

For example, Atesh – a Ukrainian partisan group closely linked to the Crimean Tatars and declared a terrorist entity by Russia – cooperates with Ukrainian special forces and security services. He became particularly adept at destroying strategic railways.

In the Moscow region, Ukrainian security services notably use car bombs to kill Russian officers and political figures. A general of the General Staff of the Russian army was killed in April near Moscow in a car explosion caused by an improvised explosive devicethen announced the National Investigative Committee before opening an investigation for “murder”.

With reporting from CBC’s Ben Makuch News