(KYIV) – Russian intelligence services are using fake dating profiles to lure Ukrainian servicemen into assassination attempts, with more than 50 such operations disrupted since the beginning of 2026, according to Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU).
The tactic represents a digital adaptation of the Cold War honey trap, combining Soviet era intelligence tradecraft with modern dating platforms and messaging applications. Ukrainian soldiers are contacted by individuals posing as romantic interests, with conversations developing over weeks before the target is encouraged to meet at a specific location.
According to the SBU, those meetings can lead to explosive traps, poisonings or physical attacks. In one case in Zaporizhzhia in January, a Ukrainian serviceman arranged to meet a woman he had encountered online. When he arrived at an industrial area, a masked man allegedly attacked him from behind and stabbed him six times. The soldier survived. Authorities detained the suspected attacker and identified the woman accused of operating the fake account.
Other operations have relied on poison rather than ambush. In the Kharkiv region, the SBU detained a suspected FSB agent accused of posing as a volunteer and delivering poisoned food and medicine to a serviceman. In another case, a soldier was sent a bottle containing a drink mixed with what Ukrainian investigators said was a lethal dose of methadone. The woman communicating with the soldier suggested they drink together during an online video chat. Ukrainian security officers intercepted the package first.
Rasmus Nilsson, Lecturer of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, said the tactic is not new but has been adapted for the digital age.
“This has been used historically. I mean, suddenly I’m beginning to think about Samson and Delilah and all that. So the Russians are not the first to have done it, nor will they be the last, but it is certainly a tactic used to spread uncertainty, even fear, among the Ukrainians,” Nilsson told TVP World’s Eastern Express.
During the Cold War, Soviet KGB operatives systematically sought personal vulnerabilities among foreign diplomats, journalists and officials. Sexual relationships were particularly useful because they could produce compromising material for blackmail or recruitment. Western intelligence records described the women used in these operations as “swallows” and the men as “ravens.”
One famous target was British civil servant John Vassall, who was photographed during encounters with other men while working at the British embassy in Moscow in the 1950s. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain at the time. Soviet intelligence used the photographs to blackmail him, and Vassall subsequently supplied information to the KGB.
American journalist Joseph Alsop was targeted in a similar operation during a visit to Moscow in 1957. The KGB secretly photographed him with another man and later attempted to use the material against him.
Nilsson said the digital world allows intelligence services to industrialise the process. “One operator can maintain several identities. Photographs can be stolen. Entire personalities can be fabricated. Contact can begin hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Nobody has to actually loiter in a hotel bar wearing sunglasses and pretending to read the Pravda anymore,” he said.
The academic noted that the psychological objective extends beyond individual attacks. “Once soldiers know such operations exist, every unfamiliar message becomes suspicious. Security warnings therefore have to compete with something militaries cannot completely eliminate: the basic human desire to simply trust someone,” Nilsson said.
He argued that creating an atmosphere of trust within the Ukrainian military is essential to countering the threat. “If you have ordinary soldiers fearing retribution from their commanders if they, for instance, say ‘whoops, I broke the telephone code,’ if they fear reprimands or worse, they may stop sharing information and that will be very dangerous,” Nilsson said.
The problem extends beyond the military. There have been reports of a woman posing as a member of the anti-Lukashenko opposition who made acquaintances within Belarusian diaspora circles and extracted information through relationships of various kinds.
Nilsson acknowledged the challenge this poses for open societies. “This is the price we pay for the open society. This is the price we pay for trust between members of civil society,” he said. “If the alternative is that dissident groups simply stop talking together and stop trusting each other, fall out with each other, everybody accusing everybody else of being a potential spy, well then the Kremlin, then Minsk, have won.”
The SBU describes the assassination attempts as part of a wider Russian campaign involving recruited agents and covert attacks against Ukrainian military personnel.
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