On 27 January, an anonymous person from Kyiv messaged the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) about mining all schools in Lviv. Law enforcement officers started checking the information, as Svitlana Dobrovolska, a spokeswoman for the National Police in the Lviv region, confirmed in the comment to Lviv Now.
This is the third time this month schools have had to evacuate due to anonymous bomb threats.
Schools, where pupils of primary classes are still studying in person despite quarantine tightening in the Lviv region, sent a message to parents that the SBU had received an e-mail notification of a mine and asked them to take their children home.
Read more: «Russia Took Our Data.» Lviv Developer Makes Alternative to Russian Apps Used by Ukrainian Troops.»
As Lesia Vasyuta, acting head of the Lviv Department of Education added in a comment to Lviv Now, students in 56 schools in Lviv were evacuated. Workers are being evacuated in other schools. Police inspected the premises of educational institutions and surrounding areas and evacuated students and teachers.
As Lviv Now reported earlier, the Security Service of Ukraine claims that the Russian Federation is behind a recent spate of bomb threats to schools, trying to shake up the situation in Ukraine from within. The agency suggests that Moscow has lured hooligans into sending these messages through software that promises anonymity.
«The goal of the aggressor country’s special services is obvious – to create conditions for additional pressure on Ukraine, to sow anxiety and panic in society,» the SBU said in a statement released via Facebook (in Ukrainian).
According to the Ukrainian state media Suspilne (Public), the number of pseudo-mining in Ukraine tripled since 2014. Bohdan Petrenko, Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Institute for the Study of Extremism, claims that this is an element of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine.
«Russia is launching such waves of pseudo-mining over Ukraine. It doesn’t scare people, it annoys locals when they can’t get to work, or to the other end of town to pick up a child from school or kindergarten. It also annoys people when shoppers are evacuated because of reports of pseudo-domination. In particular, it causes negativity to law enforcement officers,» Petrenko said.
Suspilne also says that during the past two weeks, there were reports of pseudo-mining in several regions of Ukraine, in particular, Sloviansk in the Donetsk region (25 January), Zaporizhia, Cherkasy, Poltava, Odesa, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Zhytomyr (24 January), Lysychansk and Severodonetsk in the Luhansk region (13 January), Kropyvnytskyi in the Kirovohrad region (27, 25, 13 January).
We will add that on 12 January, an anonymous person from Kyiv messaged Lviv police that all schools in the city had been mined. After that, the city received two more reports of mines in two hypermarkets. 18 January, the law enforcement agencies were looking for an explosive in the lyceum in the Sykhiv district of the city. The day before that, Lviv reported that the College of Technology of Lviv Polytechnic National University had been mined. Another report of mines in all schools was received on 21 January.
Olga Shveda, translated by Vitalii Holich
Photo: illustrative
You can read a Ukrainian language version of this story here.
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Lviv Now is an English-language website for Lviv, Ukraine’s «tech-friendly cultural hub.» It is produced by Tvoe Misto («Your City») media-hub, which also hosts regular problem-solving public forums to benefit the city and its people.
