logo
Inside Ukraine's secretive hacker group helping track down children abducted by Russia in Putin's war

Inside Ukraine's secretive hacker group helping track down children abducted by Russia in Putin's war

Independent01-03-2025

In the three years of Putin's bloody war against Ukraine, one of the most shocking statistics to emerge is that as many as 150,000 children may have been abducted by Russia.
As the world's attention turns to Donald Trump raging against Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House and hopes of peace talks evaporate, the loss of loved ones is still the daily reality for the Ukrainian people.
Among the missing are orphans whose parents have been killed in the conflict and then separated from their remaining relatives. Thousands of others have been taken from orphanages that fell into Russian hands. Most of the children have been spirited away to unknown locations in Russia, often thousands of miles from their homes where they are indoctrinated to despise Ukraine.
Attempts to retrieve the children by family members have, overwhelmingly, proved fruitless. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has labeled the deportations as a war crime and issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, his 'Commissioner for Children's Rights', in March 2023.
But there are those trying to help rescue the children and return them to their homeland, including hacker groups using Ukraine's technological expertise to do it.
Click here for the latest updates on the war.
The Independent has spoken to Maksym Dudchenko, the co-founder of one of the most active such groups, called Kiborg. Dudchenko, a 21-year-old student based in Ukraine's eastern city of Kharkiv, said that he and others who started Kiborg in the summer of 2022, were prompted by a desire to help trace the abducted children.
The group is named after Ukrainian soldiers who became a legend as they defended Donetsk Airport for a year against overwhelming enemy forces after Putin launched the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Because they refused to quit, the Russians dubbed them 'kiborgi' - 'cyborgs', a nickname the defenders were happy to apply to themselves.
Dudchenko explained that one of the group became an expert in exposing the activities of Russia's 'shadow fleet' which illegally exports shiploads of stolen grain and other agricultural products from Ukraine. He mentored Dudchenko in 'hacktivism' and inspired him to co-found Kiborg.
'I think I learned quickly,' he said. 'I and my colleagues were able to hack large amounts of data. I was driven, in part, by the desire to find out something others did not know about; to discover something unique and not to just grind out something that had already been covered several times but to find something that would impact on the situation, might even change the world.'
Dudchenko said Kiborg hacked into archives of Quisling governments established by Moscow in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, during Putin's initial grab of Ukrainian territory, and in puppet authorities of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions occupied in 2022.
The hacks remained undetected for some time, said Dudchenko, enabling Kiborg to access huge stores of data. Much of that dealt with deported children and in its first big success the group identified exactly where 160 of the children now lived and who with.
Kiborg has continued its work concerning the snatched children, tracing not only their whereabouts but also the identities of Russian officials and Ukrainian collaborators responsible for overseeing the deportation process.
Dudchenko said that Kiborg shares its information with Ukrainian government agencies, including its SBU intelligence and HUR military intelligence agencies dealing with Russian crimes and international justice and human rights bodies such as the ICC and UN.
The hackers broadened their searches to uncover the identities of Russian officials and secret police agents deployed to bolster Moscow's grip on the occupied territories.
Kiborg has handed over the names, photographs and Russian home addresses of hundreds of such Russian officials many of whom are accused of committing murder, torture and rape.
Dudchenko said the group had also identified 'thousands' of Ukrainian collaborators in the occupied zones and provided the details to the Ukrainian authorities.
Dudchenko says Kiborg knows that much of the huge dumps of information, often comprising many terabytes, does not seem to have an immediate value and, in any case, requires time-consuming sifting through using sophisticated specialist computer programmes, some now enhanced with Artificial Intelligence.
Kiborg and similar groups hope that the information they dig up will eventually be used for investigations into Russian war crimes and to fill in blanks and help assemble an accurate record of Moscow's actions in Ukraine.
Dudchenko says that Kiborg differs from other 'hacktivists' because they make their data available as resources to Ukrainian and foreign journalists.
In turn, hacked data about child deportations led Kiborg to investigate a Russian organisation called 'YunArmiya' - an abbreviation for 'youth army' which prepares schoolchildren, starting from pre-teen years, for military service by indoctrinating them with the Kremlin's version of history, training them to use weapons and accustoming them to life in uniform.
YunArmiya began under Putin's patronage in Russia but has set up branches in occupied parts of Ukraine. Kiborg has obtained and publicised details about Ukrainian children inducted into the YunArmiya system. Dudchenko said that some of those from areas in thrall to Moscow since 2014 had been conscripted into Russian forces and had fought and died fighting against troops from the country of their birth.
Dudchenko explained that data has provided Ukrainian intelligence agencies with a wealth of information to trace the home addresses and cars of senior Russian military officials, politicians, Ukrainian collaborators and others playing a prominent part in Moscow's aggression against Ukraine.
Ukrainian intelligence has thanked Kiborg multiple times for their information and Dudchenko knows their agents have carried out assassinations in occupied territory and inside Russia itself. But he says Kiborg has never been told if its data has led to this happening directly.
'Obviously, I am not informed of anything like that,' he said. 'But, thanks to our information, our defense forces, our special services, can use these databases to find information about our enemies.'

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Ukraine brings home new group of POWs, Zelenskiy says
Ukraine brings home new group of POWs, Zelenskiy says

Reuters

time25 minutes ago

  • Reuters

Ukraine brings home new group of POWs, Zelenskiy says

KYIV, June 10 (Reuters) - Ukraine on Tuesday returned a new group of prisoners of war as part of an earlier agreement with Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. "Today marks the first stage of the return of our seriously wounded and injured soldiers from Russian captivity. All of them require immediate medical attention. This is an important humanitarian act," Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messenger.

Denmark picks French, German and Norwegian air defence suppliers
Denmark picks French, German and Norwegian air defence suppliers

Reuters

time26 minutes ago

  • Reuters

Denmark picks French, German and Norwegian air defence suppliers

COPENHAGEN, June 10 (Reuters) - Denmark will acquire short-range air defence systems from MBDA France, Germany's Diehl Defence and Kongsberg Gruppen ( opens new tab of Norway, the Nordic country's defence ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in February ordered the military to go on a buying spree to beef up the country's defences in preparation for potential future Russian aggression in Europe. Denmark will spend over six billion Danish crowns ($919 million) on the artillery acquisition, with the first deliveries expected in 2026, the defence ministry said. Denmark received 10 offers, including from suppliers in Turkey, Israel and Italy, and decided in the end to buy systems from French and German suppliers and to lease one from Norway's Kongsberg, it added. ($1 = 6.5304 Danish crowns)

Defence at 5pc or learn to speak Russian? Spasibo, Mr Rutte
Defence at 5pc or learn to speak Russian? Spasibo, Mr Rutte

Telegraph

timean hour ago

  • Telegraph

Defence at 5pc or learn to speak Russian? Spasibo, Mr Rutte

The secretary general of Nato, Mark Rutte, has come to London as the head of the most powerful military alliance on the planet to remind us Brits that unless we re-invest in our military capabilities we had better start learning Russian. Had we not achieved a similar feat after the 'awakening' of 1940, we would now be talking German. The development of Hitler's Nazi Germany in the 1930s is so frighteningly similar to Putin's actions in the 2010s and 2020s as to make you think the same playbook is being followed. Appearing to almost directly address Ms Reeves – ahead of her spending review on Wednesday – Rutte said: 'If you do not go to the 5 per cent, including the 3.5 per cent for defence spending, you could still have the NHS … the pension system, but you better learn to speak Russian. That's the consequence.' Rutte means 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence – as opposed to Keir Starmer's only concrete target of 2.5 per cent – plus another 1.5 per cent on security and infrastructure. In some respects Rutte is wrong. There will be no welfare state and no NHS if Putin takes over. Just look at the fate of ordinary people in Russia who can barely afford to eat, and both inflation and interest rates north of 20 per cent and rising. That shows what life might be like under a modern Warsaw Pact. Mr Rutte realises that we cannot appease tyrants like Putin and the only way to scare them off is to show strength. 'We are deadly serious that if anyone tries to attack us, the consequences of that attack would be devastating – be it Russia or anyone else,' he said. We must not repeat the mistakes of our forebears in the 1930s, who failed to rearm to the level of deterrence. If we had realised that only total domination of Europe would satisfy Hitler, we would have confronted pressing demands at home for more welfare spending and avoided war – not by letting the aggressor have his way, as was famously attempted by Neville Chamberlain, but by being strong enough that Hitler would have avoided a confrontation. As history recalls, when Chamberlain returned from Munich saying he had chosen 'peace in our time', Winston Churchill rebuked him: 'You were given a choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.' If we look realistically at what Putin has been telling us for the last 20 years we will understand that only the re-establishment of the old Soviet Union will satisfy him. The fact that none of those countries want to be part of Putin's Russia, means only one thing, as we are sworn to defend them under Nato Article 5: war. If we abandon them, we will be dishonoured – and we will be next, facing an enlarged empire with even greater resources. The Germans, realising belatedly the threat of another tyrant who wants to subjugate them, have issued a stark warning this week. Herr Bruno Kahl, head of the Federal Intelligence Service, said his agency had clear intelligence indications that Russian officials believed the collective defence obligations enshrined in the Nato treaty no longer had practical force. 'We are quite certain, and we have intelligence showing it, that Ukraine is only a step on the journey westward,' says Kahl. Secretary General Rutte is spot on. This message from a former European liberal politician may get many backs up here, but we cannot ignore it. History tells us he's right. Sadly we do not appear to have a Churchill among our modern day politicians to lead us through the coming confrontation with Putin. I know from comments added to my previous pieces on this subject in this paper that there appear to be some who want us to capitulate and give up without a fight. Most of them are clearly Russian bots, part of the massive Russian propaganda machine who would want us to do exactly that. But if people think life in Britain is bad now, look east and see the misery most Russians live under. Let us heed Rutte's warning, and in the immortal words of Donald Trump 'build baby build' military capability. Quite frankly if we fail to defend ourselves now, everything else vexing people at the moment will become horrifically irrelevant.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store