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By Lilia Yapparova
Ms. Yapparova is an investigative reporter at Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet. She wrote from Riga, Latvia.
At dawn on May 8, 2023, a 17-year-old Russian teenager named Pavel Solovyov climbed through a hole in the fence of an aircraft plant in Novosibirsk, Russia. He and two friends were looking for a warplane that could be set on fire. An anonymous Telegram account had promised them one million rubles, around $12,500, to do so — a surreal amount of money for the boys.
But when the boys saw the Su-24 supersonic bomber, they got scared. This heavy war plane, versions of which have been pounding Ukraine for the past three and a half years, looked too impressive and dangerous to simply incinerate. After some deliberation, the kids decided to singe the grass around the jet but film it to make it look like the plane was engulfed in flames. The stranger from Telegram had promised to pay only after receiving video evidence of the arson.
