“How did you do it? With petrol? Your head isn’t fucking screwed on!” A man with a tanned face hovers over a skinny teenager in shorts and a t-shirt. Nearby, a dark-haired woman, the teenager’s mother, rests her cheek in the palm of her hand. She seems even more perplexed than her son. The kitchen they are in is spotless. A Kremlin calendar hangs on the wall.  

This is a scene from state-owned propaganda channel Russia-1’s documentary Betrayal, in which propagandist Andrey Medvedev holds forth on the danger posed to Russian by young homegrown terrorists. “Your son is involved in a crime, an attempt to commit a terrorist act by setting fire to a railway relay cabinet,” a red-haired investigator, whose face is not shown, explains to the boy’s parents. 

The camera shows 15-year-old Vadim and his father Valery, who asked not to disclose their surname, and the mother of the family, Margarita. Margarita told Veter that she had not given her permission to be filmed, or for footage of her young son to be broadcast, but everything happened so quickly that day, 30 July, when a film crew and Federal Security Service (FSB) officers broke into her house in Krasnodar and handcuffed her son Vadim. The parents were told that Vadim was a terrorist. 

Moped money

Vadim’s family moved from Kazakhstan to Krasnodar in 2019. Vadim’s life, like that of many local teenagers, revolved principally around his moped. Though he wasn’t interested in politics, he did take part in school donation drives for Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

To make some money, Vadim worked at a tree nursery close to his home, where he was paid 2,200 rubles (€24) for 12-hour shifts that started at 4am, from which he’d come home sunburnt, dehydrated and hungry. 

Last year, however, he came across a far more lucrative offer being made on a local Telegram forum. “They wrote that the job was to set fire to a certain object for 25,000 rubles, [€275],” Vadim says in the video. Though he was keen to make some easy money, he was hesitant about committing a crime. However, he ultimately decided he would start the fire, then send video evidence that he had done so to the customer, before quickly putting out the flames. 

Burnt grass

Vadim was joined in the venture by his friend, 17-year-old Ilya. The boys took gasoline, antifreeze and sand. Vadim planned to put antifreeze on the relay cabinet before setting fire to it, thinking that it would prevent it from burning. 

“There are messages between Vadim and his friend where he writes: ‘I know how to do it so that there are no consequences and no one gets hurt.’ First they doused the cabinet with antifreeze, because it shouldn’t burn and acts as a coolant. So they understood not to burn the cabinet. They set fire to some dry grass. They recorded it all on video. It’s literally six to eight seconds long. Then they threw on sand to put it all out,” says Margarita. 

Only the paint suffered slight burn damage. Russian Railways subsequently estimated the damage from the fire at 1,149 rubles (€13). Vadim sent the video to the customer, who transferred the agreed sum to him. Three days later he was arrested.  

“Journalists showed up. I asked them what they were filming,” Margarita says. “‘This is for the police. Don’t worry, it won’t go anywhere else.’ Then the FSB all burst in with guns, in masks. My son’s eyes almost popped out of his head. ‘Did you set a fire?’ ‘I did.’ He owned up immediately. The house was searched, everything was recorded, all our phones were seized. They looked at the antifreeze and asked what it was. ‘I poured on antifreeze.’ That was a mitigating circumstance. The case materials do feature expert analysis proving the presence of antifreeze and sand, but that wasn’t taken into account. They asked us if an act of arson had been committed. ‘That means you’re a terrorist,’” Margarita continued. 

Vadim’s accomplice, Ilya, was placed in a juvenile pretrial detention centre with him, however, when he turned 18 in January, he was moved to a normal pretrial detention centre. Another Russia-1 documentary, Playing with Fire, shows him in detention, while detectives tell his mother he was following orders from the Ukrainians, to which she replies: “I’ll kill him myself, give me 5 minutes with him.”

Margarita was told that her son had been contacted by a Ukrainian handler, though in the course of the investigation it turned out that the person who ordered the attack had been texting from Canada. The case file provides only a nickname, Cactus, with an avatar depicting a grave. He transferred money to the teenagers’ account using cryptocurrency. 

Packing heat

There are at least 10 teenagers awaiting trial for terrorism and sabotage in Krasnodar’s Detention Centre No. 1, where they are known as “politicals”. Otherwise, the juvenile facility holds young drug addicts and minors accused of theft, as Margarita discovered when she attempted to visit her son, despite being forbidden to do so by investigators due to the severity of the charges against him.

One of the other detainees is 15-year-old Timofey Slipchenko, whose story is strikingly similar to Vadim’s. Last May, Timofey, who was then 14, got a call from his 16-year-old friend Yaroslav offering him some work on a building site, which he gladly accepted. 

“We let our boy go to work. He’d started earning pocket money from the age of 10, handing out leaflets, or washing up. It’s what he wanted. I think that’s normal in boys. … I asked how late he’d be working and he said it was just a couple of hours. I said OK,” his mother, Natalia Slipchenko, said.  

The boys went to the railway line, where Yaroslav told Timofey that there had never been any construction job, and that they were going to set fire to what he said was a decommissioned transformer shed instead.  

“Yaroslav had been lied to. He said, ‘Don’t piss yourself. It doesn’t work, nothing will happen.’ Yaroslav was tough and Timofey was afraid of him, and he had a rubber-bullet pistol with him. Timofey was frightened and stayed for the filming. And now he’s classed as a terrorist,” Natalia says. 

The transformer shed burnt up completely when the boys set it alight. 

Caught in a trap

The following day, Timofey went with his family to his grandmother’s village to celebrate 9 May, when Russians celebrate the Soviet victory in WWII. He hadn’t told his family about the incident.  

“That evening, the FSB came to see us in the village. The officer said: ‘Fuck him up.’ I screamed: ‘Don’t touch him!’ I didn’t let them touch my child. They brought us back home to Krasnodar, conducted a search, found nothing, took his phone, and the things he wore to work. And his computer,” Natalia recalls.  

By the evening, Yaroslav had also been detained. Two months later, both boys had their names added to the Russian government’s list of terrorists and extremists. 

Timofey’s mother thinks her son was found so quickly due to camera traps on the railway and mobile phone data. “I saw the messages on Telegram. There was nothing about relay cabinets in it at all. It just said, let’s go and work. The only thing Timofey wrote was ‘Where’s my money?’ At that point, Yaroslav transferred him the cash,” she says.

Though Timofey wasn’t academically gifted, he took an active part in extracurricular activities, signing up for the cadets and collecting aid for the Russian military. He also took Thai boxing lessons, but was still unable to defend himself from his classmates, his mother says. Constant bullying made him lose interest in studying. 

He worked part time after school and eventually managed to buy a moped, something Natalia says she could never have bought for him, as the family had no disposable income.  

Natalia is wary of journalists in general, not least as Betrayal portrayed the boys being recruited by Ukrainian intelligence operatives, and omitting the fact that they were tricked into committing arson. “They won’t tell the truth about us on TV,” she says, adding: “These are good kids! Mine is a cadet, an athlete and a patriot. But for some reason he’s now also a terrorist.”

Children’s day

Margarita, Natalia and other relatives of the young Krasnodar “terrorists” have a group chat consisting of 10 families in total. The group also went to see Tatyana Kovalyova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Krasnodar region, and asked her to ease the conditions in which their children are being kept and allow them family visits. 

“They finally let us see our children after we started going to the authorities as a group. The first time we went, the woman at reception came out and said, ‘What’s this? Children’s day?’ We had tears in our eyes at finally getting to see our children after so many months,” Margarita recalls. 

“All the heads of the facility were there. We complained about the state of the place — there are cockroaches and bedbugs, the food is awful, they’re not given yard time … and due to the unsanitary conditions, they all have herpes. There’s also no air conditioning, and in Krasnodar it can get up to 40C in the summer.” 

The cells have eight beds, and reveille is at 6am. If you sleep through it, you forfeit your sole chance to take a walk outside. Once a month, a schoolteacher comes in to hand out study assignments, though, as Margarita puts it, it’s impossible to actually learn anything in such conditions.

“They’re just wasting away in there,” Natalia says, “If they were given house arrest, they could at least be home-schooled.” She makes no bones about who is to blame, however, and accuses the Ukrainians of “deliberately criminalising” her son’s generation.

Indeed, Natalia had no qualms when Russian legislators voted last year to lower the age of criminal responsibility for sabotage from 16 to 14. “That’s the only way our government can punish children so that they don’t get involved. There was no deterrent before.”

Writing wrongs

Margarita and the other Krasnodar families wrote a petition demanding their children be charged with something other than terrorism, for which they could face prison terms ranging from 10 years to life. The crimes committed could also be classified as destruction or damage to property and damage to transport equipment, punishable by a fine or community service. 

“They are neither terrorists nor criminals, just victims of circumstance and deceit. No one is asking for them not to be held liable for their offences. We just ask they be judged for the crime they actually committed,” the petition says. 

“Destabilising the state authorities! They don’t even know what those words mean. We didn’t want to harm the motherland!” Margarita says. “We don’t see our children as traitors. They didn’t set out to betray their country. Ilya wanted to fight in the ‘special military operation’. His father died in it.” 

None of the mothers believes that any of the children deliberately wanted to commit sabotage. 

“Judging by the documentary, there are some who do it out of conviction, but not the minors. The ones nearing 20 might be against the state, they may feel like revolutionaries. They acted deliberately. But those aged 14–16 are still far removed from politics. If a person has no ideology, how can they be a terrorist? This is arson for mercenary reasons,” Margarita insists. 

She says she regrets her reaction when TV crews appeared at her house, when her child most needed her support. “I said: ‘What have you done? There’s a ‘special military operation’ going on. Didn’t you know you can’t do that sort of thing?’” she recalls. 

“There was a crowd of people, witnesses. It was scary, of course. You don’t know what to say when a camera is shoved in your face. And now I think, why did I do that to my child? You can’t speak to children that way.”