Front Burner - Inside the shadow war in Ukraine

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Beyond the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, a shadow war between the Kremlin and Kyiv is escalating -- with covert assassinations, car bombs, civilian recruitment, and even the involvement of a terrorist group with a history in Canada. Today, national security reporter Ben Makuch examines how it’s transforming the character of the biggest land war since the Second World War -- and who might be winning.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. I wanted to take some time to give a shout out to people who've been writing in to let us know their thoughts about the show. We got a beautiful note from Murray in Calgary, who really appreciated our episode on Robert Munch's decision to die through medically assisted death. He wrote about how it brought up memories of his own father, who he lost a few years ago, who used to read Munch's stories to him, particularly I Love You Forever. Thanks so much for that note, Murray. really appreciate it. We love to get this feedback from all of you, and you can reach the show anytime at front burner at cbc.ca to tell us about the kinds of stories that you want to hear, and make sure you're following us on your podcasting app of choice. It's the best way to make sure

you catch every episode. Hey, everybody. I'm just everybody. I'm Jamie Poisson, and I'm here with Ben Makou. Hey, Ben. Hi, how you doing? Good. It is great to have you here. Ben is a reporter who covers national security. He's brought us a number of stories on the war in Ukraine over the years. He's back from his latest reporting trip to Ukraine. And Ben, I'm looking at a photo of something here. It looks kind of like a big ball of clay, but mixed into it are like some bolts and screws and nails and washers and something that looks like a syringe. You're looking at what? But, I mean, I describe it as a Frankenstein fruitcake, but it is otherwise known as an improvised explosive device.

This is something that was very common in the war on terror. It's made up usually of plastic or plaster. This bomb is meant to explode. And then those little bits and bombs are meant to be shrapnel that embed themselves into human beings. And what do we know about who made this thing? From what we know or what the Ukrainian government says, this was made by Russian intelligence, who then provided this bomb to a Ukrainian teenager in Kiev to plant at a recruitment center in the Ukrainian capital.

Okay. And so the reason that we're talking about this today is that it is part of a bigger trend, right, in how the Russia-Ukraine war is unfolding a war that's not only being fought on the front lines, but also increasingly in the shadows. And we were talking about improvised explosives like the one we just talked about, but also assassinations, sabotaging infrastructure, and recruiting civilians,

many of them, as you just said, teenagers. So today, we were going to talk about that shadow war and the kind of impact it's having on conflict more widely.

Let's get straight to it. And let's start with the Kremlin and some of the operations that they have been undertaking inside of Ukraine. We're going to flip this in a couple of minutes, but give me some examples

of what they've been able to pull off inside the country. So one of the big things that kind of got people's attention about this covert war, covert operations that the Russian government is deploying using its special forces, its spies in the FSB, which is sort of its main spy agency. Within July, a colonel in the Ukrainian intelligence SBU, which is the security service is there, he was walking in broad daylight in Kiev in kind of a suburb holding bags. There's like a CCTV

video of it. And as he's walking into his car, a guy comes out kind of like haphazardly in a baklava, wearing shorts, and shoots them in this kind of very unprofessional, amateur way, but kills him right in broad daylight. Now, it turns out that this killing was linked to Russian intelligence, but it also fits more broadly into what the FSB has been doing, which is basically advertising that they'll pay people for sabotage operations. This includes, you know, bombing and derailing trains or logistics to, like you mentioned earlier, providing somebody with an improvised explosive device and telling them the location

to pick it up and where to target it. So putting it at a Ukrainian recruitment base in the case of the teen in May. But there's also been examples of this all over the country in places like Zaporizia in public squares. A lot of them have been foiled, but there's also been cases where Russia's pulled it off. Can you tell me more about how they're recruiting these people? So it's happening basically in one of two ways. They're using these online telegrams. The telegram app is this kind of encrypted. I mean, it is used here in North America, but it's also used broadly around the world as both a communication and social media app. And what they're doing is they're advertising either through militant terrorist organizations or criminal groups saying stuff like, if you want to contact us, you could look at this bank, this bank account, this cryptocurrency wallet. We will provide you with X amount of money to You know, burn down a car, a police vehicle, burn down a military vehicle, burn down a political center or headquarters, kill people, and we'll provide you the money for it. They'll be doing it that way.

The other function of telegram that's interesting that a lot of people don't know is that if you just get someone's contact, you can call them very easily if your settings aren't against it. And what they're doing is they'll just cold call someone, either masquerading themselves as the SPU of Ukraine, saying you need to do this, you need to kill someone who is, a traitor to the country, as was the case with a guy in the east of Ukraine recently who was sort of duped into pulling off this operation or attempting to, where they gave him the name and the address of a Ukrainian security services and military target where he lived, gave him the

locations of a Kalashikov rifle to pick up that rifle and to kill the man, but also they did it by masquerading as the SPU or as a Ukrainian authority. It's been this. It's been this kind of spy game, but it also shows just how kind of nasty this is getting and how much of a psychological war it's becoming. Because I think when you're able to kill people inside of Ukraine in this way, it's meant to scare soldiers or top soldiers and also preoccupied the authorities in Ukraine. So is it fair for me to say that some people are signing up for this for the money? Some people are being tricked into it. And then maybe some people are sort of predisposed to have like a pro-Russia stance?

Yes, some of them are. I think they're kind of taken advantage of all of those things. There is still, and I would put this very much in the minority, there is still pro-Russian people who live in Ukraine. And this is something as the war is dragged on, they've tried to take advantage of. So it's people who are disgruntled. It shows you very much so how, let's say, in Afghanistan or in Iraq, how terrorist groups would do similar things to people who might not be suspected of

being terrorists themselves or being a part of an organization, like, let's say, al-Qaeda or ISIS. But, you know, under the occupation of the U.S. military or a NATO military, they could be disgruntled. And these are the types of people or the hearts and minds are trying to take advantage of to perform an attack. assassination in July of the colonel. I remember it at the time. Am I right to say that it was linked to the base, which is a group that I think I've talked about on the show with you before. They're this militant neo-Nazi group with ties to Canada, but the U.S., like how did they become involved with these Russian covert ops in Ukraine? I found this quite surprising. Yeah, so the base is an internationally designated terrorist organization. So it's been prescribed,

designated in places like the UK, across the EU, Australia, New Zealand. The base is believed to have started in 2018. Since then, it's been associated with plans to attack Jews and other minority groups overseas. Court documents describing them as a racially motivated violent extremist organization. Patrick Matthews recorded this video as he made plans to trigger a violent race war in the United States. Derail some trains, kill some people, and poison some water supplies. Matthews is a former Manitoba reservist with explosives training. He was exposed in 2019 by the Winnipeg Free Press as a recruiter for the neo-Nazi group, The Base.

Its leader is a man named Ronaldo Nazero, who I actually was the one to uncover that he had worked for U.S. Special Forces and had a top-secret clearance at one point. He now lives in Russia, and he's very much suspected of being a Russian agent himself. Nizarro, the report says, has long spoken of a dream of overthrowing the government and creating an all-white ethno state in the Pacific Northwest. Now, something else I uncovered was in the spring, the base suddenly created a Ukrainian cell, like a Ukrainian wing. And they started doing things that fit into sort of this Russian sabotage effort or hybrid war that you see across Europe and the world more largely, where they're tapping into criminal and terrorist organizations, masquerading as them, offering people money to carry out attacks. against Western interests. And in this case, it was in Ukraine. And I saw that they had offered money for sabotage, but then also very clearly said, if you kill some people, we'll give you money as well. Now, right after that killing in July, the Ukrainian wing had come out and said,

one of our activists carried this out. Suffice to say, do we know if those people were neo-Nazis that were killed? The Ukrainian government said there were foreign nationals that were linked to Russian organized crime. But very much so, the vector could have been the base or something like it where you have a telegram app or posting where they're offering the money. So the fact that the base was doing that and they had and there's reason to take them seriously as well because we saw that a lot of their propaganda showed burning vehicles and burning locations inside of Ukraine. So it was a startling development, but I would also say that it was clearly fitting into the Russian propagandists running the war in Ukraine and they

were tapping into a moment because you started seeing the rise of the same. types of attacks in Ukraine that didn't involve a group like the base. So it's just another tentacle in the Kremlin's sort of toolbox. The Ukrainian spy agency that you mentioned the SPU, what have they been doing to try to fight these recruitment efforts? So one of the things they've been doing is because it's gotten, the problem has gotten at least bad enough that they've created a program called Burn the FSB Man, or I think that's just sort of a rough translation of it, where they have these national campaigns. I've seen them on. billboards, you know, as far west as Leviv and, you know, as far east as Kiev.

There's also YouTube videos where, you know, you show sort of these moments of treason where someone gives a location to a Russian agent and then is arrested by SBU agents. But they created this campaign where they go to schools and try to preach against just teens being recruited by the FSB and how you could be a targeted recruitment, what they might sound like. So it just sort of illustrates just exactly how prominent the problem become. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in Canada, and Google is helping Canadians innovate in ways both big and small, from mapping accessible spaces so the disabled community

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shadow war, right? And what sorts of things have they been able to pull off inside Russia? Ukraine's also been kind of incredibly successful in their own right going after Russia. In some ways, I think their successes in Russia forced Russia to kind of do some of their own operations inside of Ukraine that were in a similar vein. So one thing they've done is they killed countless Russian officers. They've killed generals via car bombs in Moscow. Authorities in Moscow say a senior Russian general, Yaroslav Muskalik, has been killed in a car bomb close to the capital. Igor Kirillov and his assistant were blown up as the left an apartment building around

six kilometers southeast of the Kremlin. On Monday, Ukrainian prosecutors charged Lieutenant General Kirillov with using banned chemical weapons. They just released a video last week where a wing of the Ukraine's special forces tailed and video surveilled him as he was getting into a car and bombing him of a Russian officer inside of Caucasus, the North Caucasus, which is like a pretty far-flung area of Russia near Chechnya. And they've done a number of these. They killed Alexander Dugan's daughter, Alexander Dugan, who's kind of this shadow advisor to Putin.

Some say it was a bomb meant for him, but another video of it also emerged where she was killed in a car bombing. The daughter of one of President Putin's close ideological allies, Alexander Dugin, has been killed in a bomb attack. Mr. Dugin, seen on the right in this video, witnessed the aftermath of the explosion. The pair were reportedly set to travel back from an event in the same car, but at the last moment, Mr. Dugan decided to travel separately. In July, they did something called Operation Spiders Web, which was they deployed FPB drones, these sort of cheap

explosive drones, deep inside Russia in some cases, like as far flung as Siberia, and bombs strategic bombers of the Russian fleet, which is some of the most useful and, you know, expensive aircraft used to launch cruise missiles against Ukraine. Ukrainian drones and missiles targeting four Russian military airfields across the country destroying some of its nuclear-capable bomber fleet on the ground. So they've been doing their own operations inside of Russia, both in the mainland of Russia and in the occupied regions of Ukraine, where the Russian military is sort of established their control over.

And can you tell me how they're recruiting and who they're getting to do this kind of stuff? So Ukraine has has this thing called the resistance movement. It's called Rukaparu. It's part of the Ukrainian special forces. They have a campaign of recruiting civilians who are in the Ukrainian occupied territories, and they're getting them to spy on Russia, I think mainly to coordinate targets of air strikes against Russian infrastructure, but also I talked to one of their lead commanders, kind of in charge of these operations, and he told me, yeah, they're killing people. We're, we've made them afraid of us.

We're killing every type of Russian soldier you can think of, like the highest ranking to the middle ranking to the lowest ranking. Ukraine has also done its own version of recruiting civilians into this. Who's more successful here? you know, if that's a fair question. You know, it's one of those things where, to me, it's, they're both fairly successful. I would say vantage Ukraine because it's more of an asymmetric attack. It's something you do when someone's bigger and stronger than me, which I think in this case

Russia definitely is, even though these are two peer-to-peer national militaries fighting each other. I would say that they've been very successful of killing people, but Russia has also kind of struck this certain amount of terror inside of Ukraine doing this. I think the fact that you have teens being recruited is sort of this propaganda victory in some ways. I know personally that there are Ukrainian officers who go into Kyiv and they're armed because they know that their targets. They check the chassis of their vehicles every morning to make sure that there's no car bombs planted on them. So the way someone put it to me who knew the sort of

secret wars and the COVID operation side of Ukraine, they said that there's lots of heart attacks and car accidents in Ukraine that we don't really know how they happened, which is to say there's There's potentially more of these killings that have happened that we just haven't been able to keep track of. To what extent do you think this has moved the needle on the overall war itself? I think it's moved the needle, but I think the biggest thing is on both sides, this is just, it's showing you how this war continues to degrade and decay into this kind of forever war, but also the desperation that's being used. to me. I think when it was at this stage in the war on terror, the so-called war and terror,

you know, when we saw some of these attacks in Afghanistan or Iraq or, you know, all over the world, the most of the Middle East, it was really indicative of how how much more debased it was getting and how much desperate people were to inflict sort of these both psychological and effective kinetic attacks on each other. And I think to me, that was what struck me about it when I started seeing the improvised explosive devices. It's you, you think to yourself, like this war is really taking on a nasty, not that it wasn't to begin with, but just the fact that it's getting to this point. It's no longer just conventional soldiers fighting each other. I was surprised at more people didn't know about it. This is the complexity and the nastiness of the

war in Ukraine. And just if you could put this into the context of what seemed like non-existent peace talks at the moment. Where does this fit into that broader conversation? I mean, I think it shows you how much love or how much love between the two there is right now. And it's obviously reflective of the appetite for a peace deal because both sides seem to be pretty far away from each other. We just had over the course of last week, President Trump said that he was going to provide Tom Hawk missiles to cranes. Yeah, I've sort of made a decision pretty much if you consider. Yeah, I think I want to find out what they're doing with them. Yes. You know, where are they sending them, I guess. I'd have to ask that question. Like I said, it's indicative of the escalation

that's happening between these two militaries. It was funny because I went, I went to Ukraine just as those peace talks were happening in Alaska, where there was a lot of, like, I believe Western feeling of, whoa, this war might actually end. And everybody I spoke to in Ukraine, who was a military officer or anyone there quite maintained contact with for a long time now, they all said to me, okay, we'll see. I'll believe when I see it. And, you know, looking back on that moment to now, things have not improved in the prospects for ending this war.

It's only gotten worse. When you were there, when you're talking to regular Ukrainians, how are they feeling after all these years of, of war and then now also what seems like an escalation in these kind of shadow techniques, bombs going off in Kiev. I think there's a lot of collective trauma. Honestly, I think that's something else people don't realize. I mean, I think it's easy to say or to compare sort of, you look at something like the war in Gaza. It's this horrific constant bombardment on this one space, smaller space, but, and there's this collective trauma there. I think in Ukraine there very much

is a collective trauma in the same way. It's spread out, but it's over many years. Even myself, I was there for a lot of the major Shahhead drone attacks and missile attacks in Kiev. So you're hearing this constant buzzing in the sky, there's criss-crossing buzzing, and then you hear this deep impact.

And when I came back to Toronto and I was falling asleep at night and listening to sort of the planes come in at Billy Bishop Airport and hearing kind of the smaller, Peller ones, the first few nights it actually shot my anxiety up because I just heard the buzz of the shaheads on impact, which is something that is, it's a very terrifying sound. And this is just one, you know, angle of this. I think this is happening across Ukraine. And it's not impossible

to be sitting in Kiev and hearing the clatter of anti-aircraft, small arms fire, taking out a drone. And this could be in the middle of the day. And this is just in the capital. So I think a lot of people are struggling as much as it looks beautiful there at times in parts of the country. People are just getting on with their lives, but there is major collective trauma. And I think I had one soldier tell me that he was very upset because he saw his small

son, who I think now is under 10, but he's been living at the war for a long time. When they hear the air raid, he hears the air raid silence. The son goes and grabs pillows. and runs into the hallway and puts the pillow over his head because he knows instinctually what to do. So I think it's very sad and there doesn't seem to be an end to this. Ben, thank you. Thank you so much for this.

Thank you. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.