Extortion, threats, fear, traitors: How Russia recruits Ukrainian spies

The Ukrainian soldier had been fighting the Russians on the battlefield when they came for his parents in occupied eastern Ukraine. They were taken from their home and tortured, according to Ukraine’s security service. Then, a Russian agent contacted the soldier with an ultimatum: Switch sides and spy for Russia, or his family would suffer more harm.

The soldier eventually agreed to help Russia, according to the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU. Acting on instructions from his Russian handler, the SBU said in a press release, the soldier planned to add a poisonous substance to the water supply of the laundry complex used by senior officers.

The agency said it had thwarted the soldier’s plot to poison the Ukrainian military command in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region after the Russians had threatened his family. He has been charged with treason and faces life imprisonment.

The incident sheds light on a tactic Russia’s security services are using to recruit Ukrainians.

Moscow’s initial plan was to have its agents infiltrate the highest levels of Ukrainian society ahead of its invasion and then seize power from within. But most of those people were either weeded out by Ukrainian law enforcement or fled on their own in the first months after Russia’s invasion.

Now, more than two years into the war, there are fewer Ukrainians with pro-Russian sympathies, especially in positions of influence, willing to help Moscow.

Videos, documents and text message exchanges provided to The Washington Post by SBU officials and Ukrainians contacted by individuals claiming to represent Russia’s special services revealed that in many cases the Russians used extortion to force Ukrainians to work for them — by threatening family members who still live under Russian occupation or who have been taken prisoner.

The Post is not fully identifying the SBU officials or the other individuals because publishing their names could put them in danger, and would also risk the safety of family members in Russian captivity or living under Russian occupation.

While some Ukrainians have access to top officials and valuable information, such as the soldier in Zaporizhzhia, many are just everyday people with no training or experience in espionage. Instructions from the Russian handlers have included reporting on the movement of military equipment or confirming that a missile struck its target.

In a war in which the battle lines have moved little in the past year, any kernel of information can provide an edge.

The Ukrainian soldier — the SBU has not disclosed his identity — communicated with someone from the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, through the Telegram encrypted messaging app. In text messages that the SBU has made public, the FSB agent asked the soldier to provide information on his military unit — what its tasks were, who was part of the command structure and photos of their positions.

“We don’t ask the sort of information we don’t have to know,” the soldier replied in one message. “It can cause suspicion.”

“You don’t have to ask anything,” the FSB handler replied. “Take photos of the materiel your unit has.”

Extortion isn’t a new method used by Russian security services, but it has become more widespread as Russia has occupied roughly 20 percent of Ukraine and taken thousands of prisoners. SBU officials said the Russians will send photos and videos to family members of prisoners of war, sometimes showing the prisoner with a gun to their head.

One victim of such threats was Yana, whose mother was a Ukrainian border guard in the northeast Kharkiv region when Russia invaded. The mother was immediately taken prisoner, but months later, Yana received strange messages from her mother’s phone. At first, the person on the other end was polite, Yana said, promising that her mother would not be harmed. But in exchange they wanted information, and asked if Yana saw any military equipment in her Kharkiv neighborhood.

The tone changed after Yana refused to answer.

“The Russians are angry,” one message said. “There’s one woman, many men,” another said.

Yana then received a call from her mother. She told Yana that she needed to respond to the messages.

“She said her life depended on it,” Yana said.

Yana’s mother was eventually released and no longer lives under Russian occupation after Ukraine recaptured most of the Kharkiv region in September 2022.

In other cases, however, the Russians took Ukrainian prisoners with them as they retreated. One was an elderly man. Months after he was taken captive, his son received a Telegram message from an unknown number with a picture of the old man. The sender deleted the message seconds later. The Post is not identifying the son because his father remains a Russian prisoner.

“He looked so thin, like he’d been in a concentration camp,” he said. “The next message was, ‘If you want your father to live, you’ll work for us.’”

The son stalled, asking for more time to think. But the SBU caught wind of what the Russians were attempting and contacted the man before he could pass any information, a counterintelligence official said. Now, the SBU monitors the son’s communications with the Russians and directs his replies so it seems like he is cooperating.

Had the SBU not intervened, the son said, he would have done what the Russians asked. He lives in fear now, worried that he is being watched and that the Russians will find out that he spoke to Ukrainian law enforcement.

“It was all a shock,” he said. “I didn’t know what to tell them so that they wouldn’t hurt him.”