MINSK, January 16. /TASS/. Ukrainian special services have been actively recruiting "sympathizing" Belarusians through the Internet to gather intelligence, State Secretary of Belarus’s Security Council Alexander Volfovich said.
"Ukrainian special services are actively engaged in remotely recruiting ‘sympathizing’ Belarusians via the Internet in order to influence them to assist in collecting relevant information, as well as to actively commit unlawful acts. First, they are tasked with taking pictures of or filming deployment areas of the armed forces’ units and later handing the footage over to them," he said in an interview with the SB. Belarus Today media outlet.
According to the official, the recruited individuals are then used by Ukrainian special services and their Western handlers to establish arms, ammunition and explosive devices depots, which are intended to later be used in terrorist acts and sabotage in Belarus and Russia. "However, as evidenced in practice, despite all promises, Ukrainian special services could not be less concerned with the life and security of the recruited people and their families. For them, our people are expendable," he stressed. The state secretary urged the citizens, and the youth in particular, to not fall for "promises of such recruiters," which may destroy lives.
He reminded of how last year the media had reported on the State Security Committee and the FSB disrupting the activities of a group of Belarusian citizens, who had been instructed by Ukrainian security services to illegally transport weapons across the border and prepare stashes in Belarus to be used by third parties in order to carry out terrorist attacks in Russia. "Additionally, the operations of activists of the Belarusian cell of the Ukrainian ‘People's liberation army’ anarchist movement, who were plotting terrorist acts in the Internal Affairs Directorate buildings and the prosecutor's office of one of the major regional centers of Belarus," Volfovich said.
According to him, Belarusian citizens are exposed to intensive and destructive psychological influence on social media and messengers, spreading neo-Nazi ideas among young people. Cyberattacks on Belarusian state agencies' and other economic entities' information resources persist. Annually, over 300 million such attacks are conducted, he said. Virtually daily, numerous fraudulent messages about "mining" of railway stations, shopping malls, schools, hospitals and other social facilities, coming from foreign subscriber numbers and servers, located outside Belarus, are documented. "Their main task is to distract our forces, to sow panic among the public. Unfortunately, the West fails to realize that Belarusian people have already developed a certain immunity to attempts to put pressure on them," he emphasized.