High-ranking Russian officials are warning residents who live in some of the country’s regions on its western border with Ukraine to not stop using online dating sites because their enemy in the war is using them to gather intelligence.
On Tuesday, Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry warned all residents who live in Bryansk, Belgorod and Kursk to avoid those sites. The Moscow Times published a translation of a report that appeared in Interfax, a state-run media outlet, which warned:
“The use of online dating services is strongly discouraged. The enemy is actively using them to gather information.”
The warnings went much further than that, though. The Ministry said that residents should shut off any security cameras they have as well as any CCTV. As a spokesperson for the Ministry said:
“The enemy is identifying IP address ranges in our territories, remotely accessing unprotected security cameras, monitoring everything from private yards to strategy roads and highways. Unless necessary, it is better not to use security cameras.
“It is important to monitor and moderate chats and to quickly delete the accounts of people captured by the enemy (referring to any soldiers captured by Ukrainian military forces) or those whose phones have been compromised.”
Russia’s government has already declared a state of emergency for the Kursk region. Earlier this month, Ukraine entered the region as part of a surprise offensive, and started to capture territory.
According to Ukrinform, a state media network in Ukraine, Kyiv had taken control of 486 square miles of Kursk territory as of Tuesday. Officials in Russia haven’t disputed this progress thus far, but they have accused Ukraine of committing abuses of human rights against some civilians in those regions.
Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of Kursk, said that he’s planning to evacuate as many as 180,000 residents of the region because of the incursion by Ukraine. Just since August 13, he said 121,000 of those people have already been displaced.
The government in Ukraine continues to insist that, unlike what Russia did in its invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, it doesn’t intend to capture any cities or territory in Russia or try to convert any territory in Russia into land that Ukraine owns.
Instead, the military is “creating a buffer zone on the aggressor’s territory,” as Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said in a national address last weekend. He said that this is being done to make it tougher for Russia to move its soldiers to the war’s front lines.
The recent warnings about using online dating sites comes following multiple reports of such things happening over the last two years. One recent report said that Ukraine was having people set up fake accounts on these sites to lure desperate Russian men in.
They would then use these men to gather information or to even have them send money to them, which they would then use as part of their defensive war effort against Russia.
