Ukraine’s police chief has accused Russia of recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to carry out attacks against military personnel.
The claim comes after authorities arrested a 17-year-old suspect accused of killing a serviceman on the instructions of an alleged Russian operative.
In an interview published Wednesday by Ukrainian media outlet Cenzor.NET, national police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi said there had this year been six cases of contract killings arranged via the Telegram messaging app, one of which was prevented.
"We are talking about planned murders organized by the special services of the aggressor state and carried out by Ukrainian citizens," he said.
In intelligence and espionage circles, the tactic of using romantic or sexual attraction to lure a target into a compromising situation or assassination is often referred to as a honeypot trap or honey trap.
Russia's FSB security service was not immediately available for comment.
Russian security services accuse Kyiv of recruiting Russians for bombings in Russia, and Ukrainian military intelligence has claimed responsibility for assassinating several senior Russian officers since Moscow's 2022 invasion.
Vyhivskyi said Russian recruiters found young women via messaging platforms, promising them easy money and coordinating their actions remotely.
The young women were instructed to search for Ukrainian military personnel on dating websites and received money from their handlers to rent apartments to meet them, Vyhivskyi said.
They were told of places where they could obtain methadone, a synthetic opioid used as a painkiller that can be lethal in high doses, for lacing drinks, he said.
More than 1,100 Ukrainians have been accused of committing arson, terrorism, or sabotage in betrayal of their country during the war, Ukraine's security service has said.
Police detained a 17-year-old woman in the western region of Zhytomyr last week following the poisoning of a serviceman and said she had been communicating via Telegram with a man who was likely a Russian security services agent.
She had received a parcel containing a crystalline substance, which investigators presumed was methadone, police said.
