Law enforcement has detained two women who, according to the investigation, were preparing to blow up a Ukrainian Armed Forces vehicle in central Kyiv. The terrorist attack was planned near a pedestrian zone at Maidan Nezalezhnosti. The Security Service of Ukraine reported this.
How It Was Supposed to Work
The scheme was divided into two independent chains — the perpetrators did not know each other. The first, an unemployed resident of Sumy region, came to Kyiv, settled in a hotel and made a homemade explosive device following video instructions from a curator in Russia. For secrecy, on the way to the cemetery, she disguised herself as an elderly woman — with a headscarf and flowers. The finished bomb was hidden in a cache at one of the capital's cemeteries.
The second figure — a former confectionery shop owner from Sevastopol — was supposed to retrieve the explosives and place them under the car. She was closer to the final point of the operation.
«The enemy recruited them through their acquaintances from the RF who cooperate with Russian intelligence services».
Security Service of Ukraine
What Stopped the Attack — And This Is Important
The SBU discovered a GPS tracker on the vehicle before the explosives were placed under the car. That is, the operation was stopped not through exposure of the agents, but through vehicle surveillance. One of the women was detained at the moment she came to retrieve the bomb from the cache. 6 kilograms of explosives were found in the other woman's home.
Not an Exception — A Trend
This case fits into a documented series. According to the National Police, since the beginning of 2026, law enforcement has detained 7 women who were preparing terrorist attacks. In 2025, 83 people were detained for preparing or committing terrorist acts — including 16 women and 5 underage girls.
The recruitment mechanism is uniform: Russian intelligence services search for perpetrators through Telegram and other messengers, offering «quick earnings» or «simple work from a phone». The target audience — unemployed people, people with financial difficulties, teenagers. They first give harmless «test» tasks — photograph an object, set up a cache with weapons, send geolocation. After the first step — blackmail and escalation.
As documented by the film «FSB Ballerinas» by Slidstvo.Info journalists, during their own experiment, the editorial team received an offer to kill a Ukrainian soldier for 5 thousand dollars — through the same Telegram chain.
Sentence — Life Imprisonment
Both women have been notified of suspicion. The article on preparing a terrorist attack in Ukraine provides for life imprisonment. Meanwhile, in 2025, the SBU prevented over a hundred similar crimes before implementation — and most of them, judging by public reports, were exposed at the stage of cache placement or surveillance, rather than through agent penetration into the recruitment network.
If recruiters remain in Russia and operate exclusively through messengers — will this statistics change without a mechanism to pressure platforms or operations outside Ukraine?
