Poland has transferred to Ukraine a 16-year-old Ukrainian who was allegedly involved in organising terrorist attacks for Russia.
According to the Ukrainian security service’s (SBU) statement on October 7, Poland has handed over the teenager from Kharkiv, in north-eastern Ukraine, after he allegedly helped Russian operatives recruit attackers for strikes in Ukraine while based in the European Union.
The youth, who faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted, was recruited through the Telegram messaging platform to target other adolescents seeking easy money, including two 15-year-olds from Kharkiv.
Once candidates were identified, the teenager allegedly put them in touch with Russian agents, who provided further instructions. In December 2024, some of the teens recruited detonated two explosive devices in Kharkiv, and a 21-year-old woman planted a bomb in the city of Odessa.
Jacek Dobrzyński, spokesman for Poland’s security services, told reporters that “the boy had been located in Poland” after the Polish authorities were made aware by Ukraine that he “had been working for the Russian intelligence services for some time”.
“It’s terrifying that the Russian security services are already recruiting teenagers for sabotage and espionage purposes,” he added. “A 16-year-old boy – some might say still a child – is already serving Putin’s regime.”
According to the Polish authorities, in recent years Russia has sought to recruit from among members of Poland’s growing Ukrainian and Belarusian migrant communities to carry out various acts of disinformation, sabotage and espionage.
This is not the first time Poland has detained a Ukrainian teenager for acting on behalf of the Russians. In August it detained a 17-year-old Ukrainian was accused of carrying out acts of vandalism for Russia, including painting Ukrainian nationalist graffiti on a monument to Poles massacred in Ukraine during the Second World War.
There has also been tension between Poland and the Ukrainian Government, though, with regard to past events. Ukraine denies that the slaughter of over 100,000 civilian Poles during the Second World War was genocide and it still celebrates the Ukrainian nationalist political movement that collaborated with Nazi Germany in the ethnic cleansing of Poland.
The Polish centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has also detained a Ukrainian for allegedly blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia to Germany. A Polish court will now decide if he is to be handed over to Germany, the country that issued the arrest warrant for him.
His arrest has been heavily criticised by Poland’s Conservative (PiS) opposition and the Polish media for being too accommodating to Germany, given the fact that the Nord Stream pipelines had always been opposed by Poland. The present foreign minister Radosław Sikorski in 2006 compared the pipelines to the Ribentrop-Molotov pact, which saw Germany and Soviet Russia carving up Poland between them in 1939.
