News24 | Ukraine police chief accuses Russia of using girls for ‘planned murders’

Chief of the National Police of Ukraine Ivan Vyhivskyi participates in a panel discussion during the ‘United for Justice: Accountability for Crimes against Civilians’ International Conference in Kyiv, Ukraine.

• Ukraine’s police chief accused Russia of recruiting girls to kill servicemen.
• He highlighted six cases of contract ⁠killings arranged via the Telegram messaging app.
• A strike cut off the external electricity supply to Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

Ukraine’s police chief has accused Russia of ‌recruiting teenage Ukrainian girls to kill Ukrainian military personnel, following the arrest of a 17-year-old suspected of murdering a serviceman on the instructions of a Russian operative.

In an interview published on Wednesday by Ukrainian media outlet Cenzor.NET, national police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi said there had been six cases of contract ⁠killings arranged via the Telegram messaging app this year, one of which was prevented.

“We are talking about planned murders organised by the special services of the aggressor state and carried out by Ukrainian citizens,” he said.

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.

READ | Ukraine’s Zelensky calls for Putin ‘direct engagement’ to end war with Russia

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.

AFP reported that a strike cut off the external electricity supply to Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, the UN nuclear watchdog said on Thursday.

No release of radioactivity was detected, and radiation levels remained normal, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement.

The plant “is currently relying on emergency diesel generators to power the cooling of its six shut-down reactors and maintain other essential nuclear safety functions”, it said.

The strike at 21:00 (18:00 GMT) on Wednesday hit an electrical substation that supplies the plant.

It was the 19th time the plant had lost its off-site power supply since the start of the war in February 2022, the agency said.

“The latest loss of off-site power once again highlights the extreme fragility of the electrical grid and the constant dangers to nuclear safety during the war,” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said.

The plant is currently preparing to repair its main power line, which has been offline since 24 March.

Zaporizhzhia is Europe’s largest atomic energy plant, lies close to the frontline in southern Ukraine, and Russian troops captured it in the early days of their 2022 invasion.