The team of the news website Pershyi Kryvorizkyi received an email with bomb threats on 30 January. Their address was on the list of buildings where bombs had allegedly been planted, but the letter referred to “your educational establishment.” Because of this phrase, the team did not contact the police, the news outlet reports.

The sender, who claimed to be a former Ukrainian Armed Forces sapper, said they had planted bombs in administrative buildings, educational institutions, and crowded spots. The bombs had supposedly been installed at various institutions in Kyiv and Lviv as well.

The sender used highly emotional and manipulative vocabulary, introduced themselves as a former serviceman, and made accusations against the state authorities. The email contained threats and calls for immediate evacuation and claimed that the explosive devices were undetectable.

The news outlet’s editor Olena Smolina told Kateryna Lysiuk, the Institute of Mass Information representative, that the email featured a list of buildings that were supposedly located near their office, although in fact they were in other cities such as in Lviv, Kyiv, and even Rome.

Smolina said that the team had not called the police this time because they had received similar threats before, and that the police inspections found no explosive objects in those cases.

“Since this is not the first time we have received such threats, we would always call the police. The police would come and check, but everything was fine, no explosives were found. This time the letter said ‘a bomb has been planted at your educational establishment,’ that is, not a news outlet, but an educational institution. So this is some kind of automated email campaign. Which is why this time we did not even report it to the police so as not to distract them from urgent matters,” said Olena Smolina.

This is not the first time that the news outlet has received such bomb threats. In January 2025, Pershyi Kryvorizhsky would receive such messages on a regular basis. Over the course of three months, from January to March, the news outlet and its individual journalists received almost two dozen emails and texts in various instant messenger apps, threatening to bomb their office building or to assassinate the news outlet’s journalists.

National Police departments in 22 oblasts received over 2,000 bomb reports on 30 January. Namely, Detector Media and 18000 received emails to that effect.