Last week, the Russian Duma introduced new, longer prison terms of up to six years for those using the internet to lure children into “criminal and antisocial activity.”
The reason for the new legislation is the war in Ukraine, as was made clear by the head of the Duma committee on security, Vasily Piskarev: “There have been cases of children, even elementary school students, being involved in sabotage. And very often communication with the child is carried out via the internet,” he said.
This is true. Russian kids have routinely been caught attempting acts of sabotage since the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In the first nine months of this year, the Russian financial intelligence agency Rosfinmonitoring added 93 minors to the list of terrorists and extremists — an all-time record.
One of the youngest was 14-year-old Yegor Lauskis, who was convicted to two years in a penal colony for setting fire to a rail relay box last year. The damage amounted to less than $10.
According to the Russian investigation, the teenager, who along with his friend was recruited by the Ukrainians via Telegram, threw a bottle of inflammable liquid at the rail box, videotaped the act, and sent the video to their Ukrainian handlers.
It seems that more and more minors have recently become the victims of the new intelligence approach.
In September, the FSB arrested two 16-year-olds for setting fire to a helicopter at a military airbase in Omsk, Western Siberia. They admitted they had been offered $20,000 by an unknown man who contacted them on Telegram and provided instructions. Two weeks previously, two other boys, 13 and 14, set fire to another helicopter at a helipad in a city in Siberia. The fire not only destroyed the aircraft but also seriously burned their faces and hands. They were caught and taken to hospital.
The FSB responded with more repression, treating kids much as they do hardened criminals: the names of the minors were put next to real terrorists on the Rosfinmonitoring, alongside the Islamist extremists accused of a mass shooting at a concert venue in Moscow in March that left 145 people dead.
The war in Ukraine, it appears, has dramatically changed the idea of how an asset recruited by a foreign intelligence agency or a terrorist organization might look and act.
The Cold War introduced the concept of an intelligence asset as a grown person driven by ideology or money. That individual needed a period of development before their successful recruitment, and after that, a period of training and then support. That essentially made him (in most cases, it was him) a member of a group with a fixed division of responsibilities led by a handler — whether it was a militant of the underground resistance group in the Soviet Baltics in the 1950s or a member of the RAF (Red Army Faction) in the 1980s West Germany, or a famous terrorist like Carlos the Jackal.
At the peak of the Cold War’s intelligence battles in the 1980s, human assets recruited by Western agencies in the Soviet Union were never part of a group but always had a long-term handler with whom they exchanged messages after a crash course in secure communications. Soviet spy agencies used the same techniques and usually went to great lengths to train their assets in the West to work with their handlers in a very rigid manner, according to the plans developed and approved in Moscow.
As a result, the number of potential assets available for recruitment for the intelligence agencies was never numerous. At some point, Western spies tacitly accepted that the people most likely to be recruited were the so-called walk-ins — those who first decided to work for the West and then found a way to approach the Western agencies. That was how the CIA got Adolf Tolkachev — the so-called billion-dollar spy — who had revealed high-tech secrets between 1979 and 1985.
In the same manner, the KGB took on Aldrich Ames and Robert Hannsen – two of the most valuable Soviet agents in the CIA and FBI, respectively: both had volunteered to spy for Soviet intelligence in return for huge financial rewards.
The war in Ukraine changed that perception into something much less glamorous. Among the Russian assets recruited by Ukrainian intelligence — those anyway who have been caught so far — were young activist idealists, but also kids approached via Telegram and offered money.
Russian intelligence has also turned to a different kind of recruit — petty criminals, recent migrants, lost souls, and all kinds of mavericks eager to make a quick buck by joining Russian sabotage or propaganda ops in Europe.
It’s partly the development of telecommunications technologies to blame for that fundamental shift.
But the main reason is the fact that what we have in Europe now is not a second Cold War but a very real hot war, where ethical restraints, including those for the intelligence agencies, become the first casualty. The gloves are off.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists, and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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