What’s behind the rise of teens spying for Russia? – mssv

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What’s behind the rise of teens spying for Russia?

August 13, 2026

27–41 minutes

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This is an adapted and fully-annotated blog post version of my latest video essay.

Last year, Ukraine’s SBU security service published a video warning teenagers against becoming unwitting spies for Russia’s FSB security agency. Teens would receive instructions from Russian handlers via Telegram, Discord, and other social media, offering rewards, including cash and cryptocurrency. In exchange, they’d complete an escalating series of tasks.

They’d start out spraying graffiti and putting up anti-government posters, then they’d move up to taking photos of military personnel and installations and planting GPS trackers. If they were successful, they’d move on to arson and even assassinations.

The video ends by saying that the SBU is watching and will definitely find you, and that if you’re approached by a Russian recruiter, you should contact a secure Telegram chatbot called “Burn the FSB agent”.

The reason Ukraine published this video is because in 2025, almost a quarter of the 800 people accused of sabotage and terrorism were under the age of 18. It goes without saying that this is almost unprecedented – usually spies are adults.

But what’s even more shocking is that some teens have said that they were recruited by the FSB through a fake “quest” game, which one western military official said was “like a game of Pokémon Go, but with air defence systems.”

So, I want to get into this. I’ve been designing location-based games and alternate reality games (ARGs) like Zombies, Run! and Perplex City for over twenty years, and it’s pretty wild and disturbing to see these ideas being used for real life espionage and terrorism. I want to look at just how teenagers are being recruited, not just in Ukraine but around the world, whether western spy agencies are doing the same thing, and how science fiction stories and ARGs might indicate where this is going next.

But first, let’s go back to the Pokémon Go for air defence systems. We usually don’t get a lot of details about these stories, for obvious reasons – these are teenagers and authorities don’t like sharing information about ongoing investigations and court cases. This is one of the exceptions.

Back in 2024, the SBU discovered that two groups of teenagers in Kharkhiv, all aged 15 to 16, were taking photos and videos of air defences protecting the city, which Russia then used to carry out airstrikes. It turned out that the teenagers were doing this under the guise of a scavenger hunt game run by an FSB handler who, we can assume, did not tell the teens he worked for the FSB:

An FSB handler relaying location information (source)

The handler gave location co-ordinates via anonymous chat, and also set them additional tasks like setting fire to military vehicles and electrical transformers used for the train network. In order to disguise their activity, the two groups operated completely independently. Like spy cells, each group didn’t know the other existed. It’s also possible that some of the teens in these groups were recruited by their peers, and not by the FSB handler directly, which makes things even more complicated.

Now, I feel obliged to point out that this isn’t really like Pokémon Go, even though that is a great headline. As far as I can tell, this was all done over existing social media with messages and images, it’s not like the FSB employed its own game designers to make a dedicated, sophisticated app. It really was more like a basic scavenger hunt game than anything else, the sort of thing school groups might get at a museum, but a lot edgier.

So we can definitely question whether the teens really thought they were playing a game, or whether that’s just an excuse – after all, just because they’re 15 doesn’t mean they’re stupid. But then we need to get into how this kind of recruitment works. Most of the cases we know about don’t involve explicit gamification like this one in Kharkhiv, but they do follow a very similar pattern that can make it difficult for some teens to figure out exactly what’s going on.

First, teens are approached through channels like Telegram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Discord, often in communities related to video games. Recruiters target teens who are looking for jobs or are expressing anti-war sentiments or just feel bored and unappreciated in their lives. And the important thing is that even when they’re contacting kids online, it’s not as if FSB agents are all working from a single playbook.

A recruiter offering cash for arson and sabotage in Kyiv (via Texty.org.ua)

Instead, they use an individualised approach. With one target, they’ll chat about games to try and make friends. With another person, they’ll try flirting. And so, with some, they’ll present what they’re doing as a game.

This...