UKRAINE CRISISUkraine: Russian Hand Behind Spate of Bomb Scares at Schools Nationwide

By Nina Bakhmach

Published 26 January 2022

As tensions mount between Ukraine and Russia amid an alarming buildup of Russian forces near the border, Ukraine’s schoolchildren, their families, and their communities have already found themselves on the front line of what Kyiv’s intelligence service, the SBU, describes as a “hybrid war.”

Shortly after noon on January 24, thousands of teachers and students at the schools of this city of some 285,000 people were hastily evacuated in the wake of an anonymous bomb threat.

The children at one downtown preschool were napping when the alarm was sounded.

We got the report and rushed all the children and employees out of the building,” Viktoria Oleksiyenko, director of preschool No. 26, told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. “It took about six minutes to get all the children out. They had been sleeping, and we quickly got them dressed and outside. Then we called all the parents, and they came to pick up their children.”

Similar scenes played out across the city, which is located less than 100 kilometers from Ukraine’s border with Russia.

I was really afraid,” a local retiree who asked to be identified only as Paraskeva said. “I heard later on television that it was a false alarm, but when I went out on the street and saw hundreds of children out there…. What were they doing? I didn’t know. I asked my neighbor, who was also standing there all afraid. She didn’t know anything.”

Imagining The Worst’

I ran out for my child and almost fell down,” said another Chernihiv resident, who asked to be identified only as Tetyana. “It was terrifying. The teacher called and said I had to come immediately to get my child. She didn’t explain anything, and my mind started imagining the worst.”

As tensions mount between Ukraine and Russia amid an alarming buildup of Russian forces near the border, Ukraine’s schoolchildren, their families, and their communities have already found themselves on the front line of what Kyiv’s intelligence service, the SBU, describes as a “hybrid war.”

In 2021, according to the SBU, there were just over 1,100 false bomb threats leveled against schools nationwide. In the first three weeks of 2022, the country has already seen more than 300, targeting schools in almost every city in the country of 44 million.

The spate of false alarms is an operation by Russia’s intelligence services, the SBU asserted in a report issued on January 21, saying that most of the threats have been traced to sources inside Russia or in the parts of eastern Ukraine that are held by Moscow-backed separatists. A small number of the threats have apparently been made by copycat pranksters inside Ukraine, the service added.