Russian Soldiers Are Revealing Their Locations To Ukrainian Fighters Posing as Lonely Women Online

Lycksele-Nord, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ukrainian resistance fighters are deploying CIA catfishing tactics to lure Russian soldiers into revealing strategic information, helping the military target drone strikes, according to a report by Ken Harbaugh for The Atlantic.

The drone warfare strategies of the Ukrainian military have drastically improved since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. The Ukrainians have been able to hit strategic targets hundreds of miles within Russian territory, including devastating strikes on oil refineries in Moscow earlier this month.

According to Harbaugh’s report, the Ukrainians have been engaging in elaborate “catfishing” tactics — assuming a false identity to lure someone who believes they’re communicating with a romantic interest — to gather intel on Russian soldiers, offering this colorful anecdote as an illustration of their exploits:

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

There is little “professional training” available for the resistance agents, Harbaugh notes, and digital networks are often vulnerable to being intercepted by Russians, but the resourceful Ukrainians “pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals,” and “one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War.”

“Your CIA was good at this,” one of the Ukrainians interviewed for the article told The Atlantic. “You bastards knew how to use sex.”

The Ukrainians told Harbaugh they found extra motivation in Russia’s well-documented horrific war crimes, describing murdered civilians and evidence of sexual assault they had witnessed. One doctor described treating sexual assault victims who ranged in age from 4 to 75, many so severely wounded her facility had “become a world leader in new methods for gynecological reconstructive surgery.”

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