The head of the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said more than 100 minors have been detained this year for acts of sabotage that they have been recruited to do over social media platforms like Telegram.
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Russian forces sent instructions via Telegram to two teenagers from Lviv in western Ukraine, telling them to hide a bomb in a flower pot next to the entrance of a Ukrainian soldier’s home.
The two boys, aged 15 and 14, installed a smartphone with a camera enabled with remote access so handlers could detonate the bomb whenever they wanted. If their mission were successful, their contact would pay them, according to a statement from Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU).
The SBU said the boys were caught “red-handed” as they planted the bomb and face up to 12 years in prison.
Danielle Bell, head of mission for the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told Euronews that children being recruited online by alleged Russian actors is a problem that continues to grow, with a “surge” in the number of child detainees since 2024.
New figures from the Ukrainian UN Monitoring Mission shared with Euronews found that 103 children have been detained in connection with acts they’ve committed against Ukraine as of May 2025, which is up almost tenfold from the 11 detained children recorded last year by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General.
Recruitment of children online is part of a broader Russian strategy of targeting potential collaborators in its all-out war against Ukraine, now in its fourth year.
‘The double victimisation of children’
Police have so far convicted 42 minors, Bell said. Seven of them received prison sentences ranging from six months to 10 years, while the rest were given non-custodial sentences.
The missions being assigned to Ukraine’s youth are becoming increasingly dangerous, she said.
What started in 2022 as recruitment to do surveillance, spray paint or graffiti against military equipment has become “acts of sabotage,” like arson.
Now, minors are being “tasked with manufacturing, transporting or planting improvised explosive devices,” Bell said, noting that 23 children were asked to do this in the last six months.
The cases often follow a pattern, Bell said. Nefarious actors contact young boys and girls over social media platforms such as Telegram and offer some payment to complete a very specific task.
A 2024 report from the UN Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said these acts could include setting fire to military vehicles or railway equipment.
The actors promise to send the money over once they receive a video that shows the task has been completed, Bell said.
The OHCHR report also found that Russian actors can also pressure children to go through with the sabotage if they refuse the orders by threatening to harm their siblings or family members.
“We see it as the double victimisation of children,” she said.
“They’re being recruited and used to carry out acts that are unlawful … and they’re facing prosecutions for carrying out these acts, which essentially means that the lives of young people are being severely impacted”.
The UN says there is proof that Russian actors initiate these cases because the children are sometimes contacted in Russian or by accounts with Russian phone numbers.
In another example from the OHCHR report, the actions requested of the recruits on social media match the movements or locations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that the UN can detect over radio waves.
What is Ukraine doing to stop it?
In August, the SBU and the country’s national police launched a new campaign to combat this problem by teaching young people about Russian recruitment efforts.
“Collaboration with the enemy can end in tragedy: death or mutilation of children from an explosion and imprisonment because the SBU and the national police find all the perpetrators of crimes,” the press release said.
Part of the campaign is to get children or their parents to report a recruitment attempt to a Telegram chatbot, called “Burn the FSB guy,” which launched at the end of 2024. FSB is Russia's main intelligence agency tasked with, among other things, acts of sabotage and other malign activities.
The SBU said they’ve received over 10,000 messages from citizens about thwarted recruitment attacks on social media in the last year.
The online campaign followed a series of online and in-person lessons that the SBU provided to classrooms throughout Ukraine in 2025, offering students practical advice on recognising threats and what to do if Russia attempts to recruit them.
The lessons are “needed primarily to protect you,” SBU spokesperson Artem Dekhtyarenko said in a press release about the classroom campaign. “It is not in the school curriculum, but it is vital. Not only your life but also the lives of those around you may depend on it.”
Telegram ‘normalises extreme views,’ expert says
Messaging app Telegram is one of the top five most downloaded apps worldwide with over 1 billion active monthly users, according to the company.
In Ukraine, 44% of its citizens reportedly get their news from Telegram from “hundreds or thousands of different channels,” according to a 2023 survey from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
The “relative anonymity, large group and channel sizes (along with) low content moderation” of Telegram makes it easier to seed and spread material, Tim Weninger, director of graduate studies in computer science at the University of Notre Dame in the United States, told Euronews.
Telegram is particularly good for amplifying political or emotionally-charged content, which Weninger calls “meme warfare”.
“These images aren’t polished or formally persuasive, instead, they’re meant to be shareable and to shift the narrative through humour,” he said.
Many of the messages perform well with “disaffected teenage boys, playing on their desire for belonging, edgy humour and identity formation," Weninger explained.
Of the 103 minors detained by Ukrainian authorities in 2025, 91 are young boys and 12 young girls, Bell said.
Teenagers are drawn to “exclusive communities” on Telegram that parents or authority figures don’t necessarily understand, Weninger said. Meme use, coded language and inside jokes “create a powerful in-group feeling that recruiters exploit to build loyalty and normalise extreme views”.
The social media platform said on its moderation page that it has blocked over 27 million groups and channels so far in 2025 and removes millions of pieces of content that violate the app’s terms of service, which includes “incitement to violence".
Telegram stated that it utilises user reports and AI moderation tools to monitor the content posted on the platform.
However, Weninger said that publicly, the messaging platform “does very little proactive moderation,” compared to other platforms, and they could “tighten moderation,” if they want to intervene.
Weninger also suggests the company limit large broadcast channels and invest more in automated detection of extremist material.