Russian Intelligence Is Recruiting UK Teenagers Through Violent Online Chat Groups

Russian-linked actors are offering money, guns, and training in making explosives and poisons to violence-obsessed British teenagers through online chat groups, according to an analysis shared exclusively with The i Paper's security correspondent Lizzie Dearden and published September 15.

See also: English national Joshua Cammidge has been charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service and preparing an act of sabotage.

What the "Com Networks" Are

The groups being targeted are so-called "Com networks" - online communities, mostly of teenagers and young adults, where members compete and collaborate to inflict or record extreme harm, ranging from vandalism to animal torture, sexual abuse, and murder. Law enforcement in the UK, US, and Europe has already raised the alarm about these groups. The analysis, carried out by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), found "multiple indicators suggesting possible Russian state-linked support" for part of the movement, using tactics that "mirror established Russian methods for recruiting 'disposable agents' for violence abroad."

Two Incidents in Britain

The i Paper says it has confirmed at least two incidents in the UK connected to one of the Russia-linked groups, which it is not naming to avoid signposting its online presence. Both were acts of vandalism filmed by a person who declared allegiance to the group by holding up a piece of paper bearing its name. In the first, posted to the group's Telegram channel, someone smashed the windscreens of a car in Bedford on April 14 with a brick; the car belonged to a home-care company visiting elderly clients, who said they had no idea why they'd been targeted and that police initially took no action until the footage was shared.

A second video posted in May appeared to show the same person throwing a brick through a house window, though the location and date couldn't be confirmed. Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) has identified the group behind both videos as a Russian intelligence operation.

An Umbrella Group Selling "Chaos"

The organisation behind the two UK incidents is one of eight groups in a new umbrella network that launched on Telegram in April, uniting factions with "different religions, different views, different actions [but] one goal," as it put it in a post written in both Russian and English: "We help each other because we are all interested in only one result - chaos." The umbrella group has since advertised paid "contracts... in various countries around the world" for those "willing to take risks," and opened what it calls a marketplace offering guns and instructions for making explosives and poisons and launching cyberattacks.

Payment Is a New, "More Damaging" Twist

ISD researcher Steven Rai, who led the analysis, said offering payment for violent acts is "completely new" within Com networks, which were previously driven by ideology - including neo-Nazism and Satanism - and the pursuit of notoriety among peers; one group has advertised roughly $3,000 (about £2,224) in cryptocurrency for a vehicle arson. He said the umbrella group's leaders, masked Russian-speaking men who appear more "sophisticated" than the teenagers who typically run these networks, seem to be steering a group of mostly kids "seeking notoriety" toward attacks "a lot more damaging than they already have been." "This is a very new development we're seeing, where we suspect a state actor is hijacking and exploiting the Com network because they're a convenient pool of recruits to engage in acts of violence all over the world," Rai said.

The UK's National Crime Agency said it is working with Counter Terrorism Policing in a "cross-departmental taskforce" to counter the threat, adding that the groups involved "don't fit neatly into boxes or fall under the scope of one individual organisation."

Part of a Broader Push Into the UK

The recruitment of teenagers through Com networks adds a new front to a pattern of Russia-linked sabotage recruitment targeting Britain that we've covered before, including Joshua Cammidge, the Swindon man charged under the UK's National Security Act over an alleged sabotage plot linked to the GRU Volunteer Corps. Where that case involved an adult allegedly acting on ideological or financial motives, this one shows the same intelligence apparatus reaching for children already active in some of the internet's most extreme corners.

If you believe a young person you know may have been contacted by one of these groups or asked to carry out an act of violence or vandalism, UK guidance is to report it to the police or the National Crime Agency rather than confront it directly.