Ukrainian teens are committing acts of betrayal. How should they be judged?

Chernihiv: As dusk fell on a crisp September evening in 2024, a group of Ukrainian teenagers huddled beside train tracks near a ​village in Chernihiv. The region was under near-constant attack by Russian drones and missiles. Just two days before, Russia had struck a hospital.

Fifteen-year-old Vitalii pried open the doors of cabinets containing Ukrainian railroad communication and signaling equipment. According to an indictment filed last March by Chernihiv prosecutors, the boys poured flammable liquid over the cabinets and set them on fire.

They paused to film, doused the flames with water from plastic bottles they had packed, then shared the video clip of the flames with another boy, who forwarded it to a man called “Sania,” according to prosecutors and the boys’ lawyer. The man had offered hundreds of dollars online to perform specific tasks – tasks that, Sania neglected to mention, amounted to sabotage against the Ukrainian state.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, more than 1,100 Ukrainians have been accused of committing arson, terrorism or sabotage in betrayal of their country, according to Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. One in five have been minors. Since the war’s start, roughly half of the minors accused of betraying their country have been convicted, while half have been acquitted, freed on bail or sentenced to community service, according to Ukraine’s justice ministry. The minors are usually recruited online by strangers using aliases, mostly assumed by Ukrainian investigators to be working for Russia’s special services.

Reuters followed the case of Vitalii ⁠and his friends for a year and reviewed nearly a hundred pages of court documents to understand how Ukrainian authorities contend with the larger questions posed by this growing group of young people: What does justice look like for minors induced to betray their country? Can they return to a society battered by four years of war? And what does Ukraine owe these children who grew up in wartime?

Vitalii pocketed the equivalent of $23 for his role in the fire. More than a year later, huddled in a cold office in a Chernihiv detention center, about two hours north of Kyiv, ⁠he barely remembered how he spent the money. He might have bought a gift for his brother, or maybe he bought himself school supplies.

“You could say I was duped,” Vitalii said, describing his situation. His lawyer is trying to get the charges downgraded to intentional property damage from the more serious charge of sabotage, saying the boys never had any intent to harm Ukraine.

MONEY AS MOTIVATION

Sometimes when teens are arrested and ‌accused of sabotage, the SBU posts images of them on Telegram and Facebook, with their faces blurred.

The posts incite immediate outrage: “It’s terrible Ukrainian teenagers are ready to destroy their own country,” reads one comment ​under a January post. “These idiots! When he gets out of prison he won’t be able to live here, people won’t forgive!” says another. In most cases, those charged with arson or sabotage tend to be motivated by money rather than pro-Russian sympathies. A surge in “credible allegations” that Russia had used Ukrainian children to conduct surveillance and commit sabotage targeting the Ukrainian military was noted by a March 2025 report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Last year, a 17-year-old died and a 15-year-old was badly injured when an explosive device they had been instructed to build and take to a drop-off point in western Ukraine exploded. In March, two police officers were injured after explosions on the outskirts of Kyiv, which the SBU called a terrorist attack orchestrated by Russia. Authorities arrested a 21-year-old who was recruited online by Russia’s intelligence services to build an improvised explosive device, the SBU said.

“Should these incidents be linked to the armed conflict, such use of children would be in violation of the prohibition in international law on the recruitment or use of children in hostilities,” the UN report said.

Russia’s Federal Security Service did not reply to a request for comment about the online recruitment of minors. A Russian official said Ukraine had repeatedly used Telegram to recruit people for attacks inside Russia. The SBU did not respond to a request for comment on the Russian allegation, but there have been numerous reports of sabotage within Russia as well.

The office of Ukraine’s president did not respond to questions from Reuters.

Recruitment of teen spies is not limited to Ukraine. As reported cases of suspected incidents of Russian sabotage rose all across Europe last year, at least a dozen teens – in Germany, Poland, Britain and Lithuania – have been arrested in Russia-linked cases of sabotage and spying. The SBU and Ukraine’s National Police last ​year launched an ad campaign to discourage young Ukrainians from working on behalf of Russia. A video promoted in January 2025 features a young teenage boy in a cap and black ⁠hoodie following a Ukrainian soldier returning home from the front, and another girl torching a military vehicle. At the end of the video, the two teenagers are arrested and put behind bars.

“These crimes are subject to severe criminal liability, even for minors,” reads the text posted on YouTube below the video.

The SBU also created a Telegram bot that lets anyone report an acquaintance who has been offered money in exchange for committing sabotage or arson against the state.

As of February 2026, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office said 240 minors were involved in crimes against national security, arson, and terrorist acts related to the possible involvement of Russia’s special services or others working in Russia’s interest. Of those, 102 have been detained.

CLASSES IN WARTIME

Hennadiy Yachnyi, a physics teacher from a high school in Chernihiv, contends with children behind bars nearly every day.

On one of the first cold days of autumn last year, Yachnyi passed through five heavy metal prison doors of the pre-trial detention center in the city, walked up a staircase covered in peeling green paint, and stepped into a small library.

Vitalii, who is now 17, soon filed into the room with a group of other teenage detainees. All are minors awaiting trial and sentencing. Only Vitalii and a teen girl are accused of sabotage. The others face regular criminal charges. Yachnyi commutes to the detention center several times a week to teach classes behind bars.

“I don’t see them as criminals,” Yachnyi told Reuters later. “These are students, just students.”

Yachnyi is part of a program that pairs school teachers with minors in detention centers. The growing number of ⁠minors accused of sabotage has led to an extension of the program for one area high school ‌in particular, which sends a rotating group of teachers to the detention center to teach lessons ranging from history to mathematics.

Antonina Kharchenko, the director of the school, began sending her teachers to the Chernihiv detention center in 2023. They were meant to be part of the program for two years, but she said the local education department asked her to extend for an additional two years. None of the teachers are required to go, she said. Though none of the teachers at Kharchenko’s school have declined, some teachers at other schools have refused, viewing the children’s crimes as unforgivable.

Children looking to make easy money are duped into accepting questionable offers from strangers online, Kharchenko said. She said parents largely have no idea.

“They all come from Ukrainian families. They decide to earn a penny but they’re still children,” she said. “And look around – this is a place with ‌poverty, with war, fathers being away on the front, this is fertile recruiting ground for Russians.”

At Chernihiv’s regular high school, Kharchenko and her teachers do their best to educate other students and warn them against falling into a similar trap. A police officer is stationed at the entrance of the school at all times and the SBU regularly speaks to its more than 1,000 students about the dangers of interacting with strangers on social media.

“Children, of course, see war every day,” Kharchenko said. “A lot of our children’s parents are at the front. There are those who died, there are those whose mother and father died.”

Kharchenko’s own relatives are serving at the front.

During the first months of the full-scale war, Kharchenko transformed ⁠the school’s large basement into a bomb shelter. After Russian troops were pushed back, the school served as a hub for locals to receive medical care and food. Then the basement was converted again into makeshift classrooms. Over the winter, during daily Russian attacks, the city saw some of Ukraine’s worst blackouts, with families going without electricity and heating for weeks in subzero temperatures.

Asked if she feels uncomfortable teaching accused saboteurs when her own graduates are serving and dying at the front line, Kharchenko impatiently pulled a well-worn book from the cupboard of her office.

“This, as you must know, is the constitution of Ukraine,” she said, pointing her manicured finger at the blue cover bearing an embossed gold trident, Ukraine’s national symbol. Flipping to a dog-eared page, she pointed to Article 53.

“And this clearly states ‌that everyone has the right to an education. What we do is create a possibility for this to be upheld. We’re educating children at a time of war. We’re educating them in shelters, we’re educating those online who are abroad, and we’re educating the children in the jail as well.”

Yachnyi, the physics teacher, was sympathetic towards the young people he teaches at the detention center and believed they regretted what they’d done.

“I can tell from their communication, how they ‌talk to me, how they wait for me to go to them and talk to them,” Yachnyi said in his classroom in the regular Chernihiv high school. Then he ushered his students to their seats to wait out an air raid.

NO EASY MONEY

Vitalii grew up on the edge of a small town in Chernihiv region, which borders both Belarus and Russia to the north and was briefly overrun by Russian soldiers early in the war.

Before ‌the fire, Vitalii mostly stayed inside the family’s wooden home, which is on a gravel road near the town cemetery.

“He’s a homebody, my son, he doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink … He’s never even been in a fight before,” said Vitalii’s mother Nataliia, hugging her arms against the cold outside the house, just a few minutes’ walk from the flags that mark the graves of fallen Ukrainian soldiers.

Nataliia picks up odd cleaning jobs around the village and in Kyiv whenever possible. She said her son also started working for a dentist after ‌his father died of kidney cancer six years ago. Vitalii’s youngest brother was often sick, and he wanted to help support his family. She asked that the family name be withheld to avoid being targeted with attacks or harassment.

“We had tried all the work that was available but money had run out,” Vitalii said.

In late summer 2024, one of Vitalii’s school friends approached him with a job.

According to the indictment filed last March by Chernihiv prosecutors, Vitalii’s friend, who is among the boys now charged, had been in touch online with a person offering to pay for specific tasks.

At first, one of the boys was asked to set fire to Ukrainian military vehicles, which the boy’s lawyer said he did not do. Later, the lawyer said, the request from someone identifying himself as a man named Sania was to vandalize rail equipment.

Before Sania would pay, he wanted proof – timestamped and geolocated video and photos sent through an app called Timemark. Vitalii’s friend recruited him and his friends, giving them detailed instructions.

A few weeks later, in October 2024, some of the boys got caught by a railway worker as they were trying to set another fire. They quickly confessed and gave the police the names of everyone in the group, including Vitalii.

Vitalii and four other boys ⁠were arrested and charged. Vitalii’s family was the only one unable to post bond, which equaled around $6,000. A ⁠year later, he was still in the Chernihiv detention center while the others were free on bail.

“If I could talk to someone thinking of doing anything like I did, I’d tell them not to,” he said quietly, looking at his hands. A guard stood within earshot. “I’d say there’s no easy way to make easy money like that.”

None of the other boys or their families agreed to speak to Reuters when contacted through their lawyer. Judges in charge of Vitalii’s case also declined to speak to Reuters, citing the ongoing trial process.

That day in the center, Vitalii’s face was pale, and there were shadows under his eyes. His hair buzzed short, dressed in black track pants and sliders, he looked small for his age. If convicted, Vitalii and the other boys face up to a decade in prison, the maximum sentence for their crime. Adults who commit similar crimes can face life terms. In the detention center, between classes, Vitalii began reading a memoir of a man who spent several years in an American prison, which taught him the basics of how to survive incarceration including staying fit and keeping the mind occupied.

‘THEY’VE MADE A MISTAKE’

Yevheniy Muzychuk, Vitalii’s lawyer who also represents two other boys in the case, said Vitalii was never in touch directly with the man called Sania, who pretended to be a Ukrainian patriot on various Telegram groups. None of the boys – who were 14 and 15 at the time of the alleged crime – could have known they were potentially working for the Russian security services, Muzychuk said. Identifying an actual Russian recruiter is difficult, and Ukraine’s law enforcement sometimes focuses instead on accusing vulnerable teenagers, he said.

Prosecutors and judges should be required to build stronger cases to prove that these teens were knowingly betraying their country, Muzychuk says. It’s not obvious to a civilian, for example, much less a minor, that damaging rail equipment could be tantamount to gravely damaging Ukraine, he says. The boys have formally made a “partial admission of guilt” for setting the fire, and Muzychuk hopes the judge will accept that they didn’t realize that it was sabotage.

“They themselves understand they’ve made a mistake,” he said.

In a written response to Reuters questions, the regional prosecutor’s office in Chernihiv said that the prosecution took into account the “totality of evidence” and all of the circumstances of the case, including the fact that the defendants were repeatedly educated on Russia’s use of social media to recruit saboteurs before setting the fire. The prosecutors said the minors were warned, in particular, of Russia’s recruitment of teens to carry out sabotage on critical infrastructure in the railway sector. A separate investigation is underway on “Sania,” the individual who recruited the minors, the prosecutor’s office said.

In Kyiv, Yevhen Pikalov, Ukraine’s deputy justice minister, has the unenviable task of contending with the issue of such young offenders while also reforming a wider ​prison system. Pikalov, who was previously part of Ukraine’s delegation to the European Union, said the country’s penitentiary system had remained “forgotten” for decades.

The detention center in Chernihiv is a collection of dilapidated concrete blocks, with chipped-paint corridors leading to small, barred cells that detainees share.

Minors like Vitalii are separated from adult detainees until they’re convicted, but could serve alongside older inmates after conviction.

Pikalov would not give an opinion about the wartime sentencing of minors, but said Ukrainian society would welcome them back once they have served their time. ​He himself is the father of two teenagers.

“I think that Ukrainian society understands that when a child is 15 years old, he doesn’t understand what he has done. And that matters,” he said.

‘HE’S FINALLY FREE’

At the end ​of November, after he’d spent more than a year in the Chernihiv pre-trial detention center, Vitalii’s mother gathered enough money to bail out her son. On the day of his release, Nataliia stood nervously in front of the massive metal gates.

When Vitalii, dressed in black, emerged, Nataliia rushed to the lanky boy and embraced him with a smile: “He’s finally free.”

Later, back home, Nataliia and her sister stood over bubbling pots, preparing a celebratory feast for Vitalii. A large Ukrainian flag with signatures and messages from soldiers covers one wall of the kitchen. The flag belonged to Nataliia’s partner, who fought against Russian-backed separatist forces in 2014.

“A year and a month,” Nataliia says, taking a break from cooking to stand outside in the muddy garden. To cover bail, ​she took out a bank loan and begged her relatives and friends to pitch in, she says.

Coming up with $6,000 took up every moment of her days. When she wasn’t worried about her son, she worried about money.

“This year was probably the most terrible in my life,” she said.

Vitalii’s trial is ongoing. His lawyer says he will appeal any conviction, but that process may take months, maybe years. Vitalii’s stay at home may be a short reprieve from what comes next.

“I think these boys, they also didn’t understand what they were doing,” Nataliia said, still defending her son.

Vitalii stood outside in his black sliders with the dog, listening to his mother in silence. With his hands in his pockets, he bowed his head.