Mykyta Orlykivskyi was a young soldier in the Ukrainian army when he met a woman online. Their ‘romance’ ended with the gift of a poisoned whisky
Jack Clover
August 6, 2026
The Times
The young soldier was found slumped on the balcony of his flat with a faint pulse. A bottle of liquor and a Swiss army knife lay on his table. In hospital the doctors said he had tried to take his own life. With his final ounce of strength he tried tell them they were wrong. “I went up to [his bed] and asked him, ‘Why did you do this to yourself?’” his aunt recalled in tears. “He heard me. He could not speak. But he shook his head. It was like he wanted to tell me something.”
At the behest of Russian spies, a woman who the soldier called his beloved had lured him to his death. It was in April that Mykyta Orlykivskyi first told his family he had met someone. His aunt Tetiana Apalko, 53, told his story on a park bench in Zhytomyr, a city hundreds of miles from the front line, clutching photos of her dead nephew.
A woman had reached out to him directly through the Telegram messaging app. She said that she had seen a Mykyta from Zhytomyr on a dating app and liked what she saw, asking if he was the same man. Orlykivskyi, 23, was not on any dating apps but he was flattered and continued the conversation.
The pair exchanged messages and photos. She told him that they were “so similar” and that she had taken a fancy to him. When asked whether he was a soldier, Orlykivskyi uploaded a photo of himself in uniform, wearing a patch bearing the New Zealand flag on his shoulder. It was taken when he was undergoing military training in the UK at the start of 2024, like thousands of Ukrainian soldiers before him. “For the Russian security services it was proof that he was really a soldier,” Apalko said. “They didn’t need anything else.”
The woman, who was saved on Orlykivskyi’s phone only as “Rodnaya”, meaning “dear one” or “darling” in Russian, responded with AI-edited images in which she appears in the same British forest to embrace him.
The woman had built a compelling backstory. She was 30 years old and lived in Kharkiv. Her flat had been shelled and she had been in and out of hospital. Her brother was even fighting for Ukraine. “When he first told us about her I said, ‘Look if she’s a nice girl then why not talk to her?” Apalko recalled. “I [even] said, ‘If the shelling’s that bad why doesn’t she come and live with us for a bit’.” The woman claimed that she could not leave Kharkiv while she sorted out paperwork connected to the bombing of her flat.
Meanwhile, Apalko watched her nephew fall in love. The pair chatted for two months, over message and video call, and they would talk at length about how much they both loved animals and cooking. “I even noticed a change in him for the better,” Apalko recalled. “She [seemed] to be a good influence on him.”
Apalko witnessed some of their video calls. At the time nothing seemed to be suspicious. The dark-haired woman was certainly real, she spoke Russian not Ukrainian, but that is common in Kharkiv. Yet, behind her, the backdrop was always the same white wall.
By the end of May, they had arranged a meeting. “I will soon come to you,” the woman wrote. Yet on the designated date she said she had to delay her travel due to a problem with her documents. For now, she would send a present instead.
At 10am on Wednesday, June 3, Apalko received a phone call out of the blue. A woman purportedly from “law enforcement” — most probably the Ukrainian intelligence services — asked whether she had seen her nephew recently as she feared he may already be dead.
By 1pm Apalko, with help from friends, had broken the door down to her nephew’s flat. “We rushed in. He was sitting on the balcony, already unconscious, and I started screaming,” she said. He was given CPR and taken to hospital. Doctors told her he had ingested poison. “I didn’t understand. I thought perhaps he had poisoned himself,” Apalko said. “Then I thought perhaps it was a drug overdose, but he didn’t do drugs at all.”
That evening a woman who called herself “Mykyta’s girl from Kharkiv” rang Apalko. Her voice seemed coarser than the woman she had heard on video calls with her nephew, and she did not give a name. She claimed she was concerned about Orlykivskyi’s welfare as he had not replied to her messages. She pretended to be shocked to hear of his condition and rang again the following day.
On Friday a report on local television about a separate case seemed to shed some light on what could have happened to Orlykivskyi. A 17-year-old girl from the nearby town of Berdychiv had been detained on suspicion of poisoning a 27-year-old Ukrainian soldier at the behest of the Russian security services. She had been recruited after searching for “quick money” jobs on Telegram, the Ukrainian authorities said.
Her handler had tested her as a drug courier to start with, then asked her to get close to a Ukrainian soldier. She found one online and they ended up renting a flat in the centre of Zhytomyr. “He left her to go to the shop to buy some liquor,” Oleh Lakyziuk, a senior investigator from the city’s police told The Times. “She called [her handler] on Telegram and explained the situation. The soldier came back with two bottles of cognac.” They raised their glasses and drank together. “But in one she had already added methadone,” Lakyziuk said. The soldier died.
Having seen the news, Apalko’s daughter called her. “She said, ‘Mum, it can’t be suicide, something’s not right. Go to the police’.”
On Saturday detectives searched Orlykivskyi’s flat and discovered the string of messages on his laptop. They showed that his “darling” had called him over video at around the time he is thought to have drunk the poison, his aunt said. The woman left the call before he became ill but he soon texted a friend with a photo of the whisky and a message: “What is this stuff? I have only had three shots and … I’m dead.”
The detective told Apalko that the case had hallmarks of the Russian FSB. His laptop, phone, the bottle of whisky, a suspicious knife and a gift bag were taken as evidence. “I was in shock,” she said. Her phone rang again, “Mykyta’s girl” checking in. This time, the detective told her not to pick up. She was calling for confirmation for her handlers that the job was complete, he said.
Mykyta’s “darling” did not send him the poisoned whisky herself, detectives surmised. Instead, a 19-year-old man from Poltava, in central Ukraine, had been recruited on Telegram to inject poison into the bottle and post the package to Orlykivskyi’s flat in return for 5,000 hryvnia — about £80. “A human life for 5,000 hryvnia,” Apalko said. “If only he just called me. I’d have given him 10,000 [on the spot].”
The woman is thought to have contacted Orlykivskyi not from Kharkiv, but from the Russian-occupied Donetsk region. Apalko was told by investigators that she was thought to have been a prison inmate, explaining the wall backdrop. Police could not confirm this, saying the investigation was ongoing.
When The Times called the phone number of Mykyta’s “darling”, the line was dead.
Mysteries remain. Why did Orlykivskyi, three days before he was poisoned, post a photo on his Instagram story showing a bottle of whisky, a knife stuck upright in a table, his open laptop screen and an AI-generated song called I am the Imperatrix playing in the background? Why did, according to Apalko, a man arrive at his flat moments before she came to break down the door asking neighbours whether a “drug addict” lived there? Why is the FSB recruiting in women’s prisons and what do the women get in return?
Ukraine has thwarted 50 attempts to kill its soldiers through fake dates this year, according to the SBU security service. The number of successful assassination attempts is unknown. “The SBU has recorded a significant increase in the Russian special services’ attempts to eliminate Ukrainian servicemen using the so-called ‘honeytrap’ method,” the service announced this week.
Improvised explosives are the most popular method of choice. In January, a woman invited a soldier on a date in an industrial area of Zaporizhzhia. But a man in a balaclava jumped out and stabbed him six times before the SBU arrived on the scene. In other cases poisoning is common.
Two teenage girls are accused of poisoning a soldier with methadone in January, then filming his death for their FSB handler. In April, in Uzhhorod, western Ukraine, a 26-year-old woman from Zaporizhzhia was accused of stealing information from a soldier’s phone, poisoning him and making the death appear to be of natural causes, in exchange for $3,000 from Russian spies.
There have also been cases of civilian Ukrainian women or intelligence operatives seeking to “catfish” Russian soldiers on dating apps such as Tinder to give away their positions or lure them into drone fire.
Orlykivskyi’s mother died when he was 14, and his father died a few years later. He lived with Apalko and her husband for a while, then moved to live with his grandmother in Odesa. He volunteered to fight after finishing college. Apalko tried to convince the recruitment officers not to take him. “He has no parents. He is still a child,” she said. The officers replied that he was an adult and had made his choice. “But his thinking was always quite childish, even at 23.”
He was killed while on leave, trying to organise documents to exit the army and become a carer for his grandmother, who was by then unwell.
As an orphan, he was an easy target, Apalko was told. “His whole life was ahead of him. He always wanted to have children,” she said. “It’s just so cynical. How is it possible that she could confess her love to him, while all the time knowing that she was going to murder him?”
Jack Glover works on news and investigations across different desks of The Sunday Times. Since joining the paper in 2022 he has reported on everything from dessert parlours to tree poisonings. Before training as a journalist Jack spent two years working as a theatre director in different cities across Ukraine from 2017-19 and nine months pulling pints at one of London’s finest riverside pubs.