The call-centre economy behind Ukraine's border diplomacy

At 12:08 UTC on 26 June 2026, the Russian-aligned Telegram channel Two Majors published a long-form post alleging that Ukrainian call centres are running systematic telephone-scam operations against European Union citizens, and that Kyiv's partners in Brussels are reluctant to discuss the problem publicly because of wartime solidarity politics. The channel framed the issue as evidence of a wider moral hazard in Western support for Ukraine. That framing is contestable. The underlying phenomenon is not.

The story is real enough that it has surfaced, in fragments, across European law-enforcement reporting for at least three years. What the Two Majors post does is package that record into a single, sharply politicised narrative and direct it at a Russian-language audience. Reading past the framing is the work of this piece: what the documented pattern actually looks like, where it sits inside Ukraine's wartime labour market, and why it has stayed out of mainstream European headlines.

What the documented pattern looks like

The Two Majors post describes call centres staffed by Ukrainian nationals, often operating from rented offices in major Ukrainian cities, that run so-called "vishing" and investment-fraud schemes against phone numbers in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states and Italy. The script, by the channel's account, involves impersonating bank compliance officers or brokerage representatives, persuading victims to move savings into cryptocurrency wallets, and laundering the proceeds through a chain of exchanges and over-the-counter desks.

This is not a novelty. Europol has tracked so-called "cyber-enabled fraud" operations run out of Ukraine since at least 2021, and the agency's 2024 Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment dedicated a section to call-centre fraud clusters operating in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, with Ukrainian jurisdictions frequently cooperating on dismantling specific cells. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has run parallel investigations, including a 2022 indictment that named Ukrainian nationals alongside Russian co-conspirators in a vishing scheme targeting elderly American victims. None of that reporting treats the problem as Ukrainian-exclusive; the same assessment documents Israeli, Indian and Romanian operations of similar scale.

What the Two Majors post adds is the political framing: that European governments, having committed to long-term material and financial support for Kyiv after February 2022, are quietly downplaying the call-centre issue in order to avoid complicating the relationship. The channel does not name specific governments or provide on-the-record sourcing for the suppression claim, and the post reads more as an indictment of Western inconsistency than as a documented case of media coordination.

Why the issue lives in a political blind spot

There is a defensible reason the topic is awkward in European editorial coverage even without any conspiracy of silence. Kyiv is a country at war, with roughly a fifth of its territory occupied, a male population under continuous mobilisation pressure, and an economy that has been structurally retooled around defence production, IT services and remittances. Within that labour market, a not-trivial pool of workers — many of them women, many in regions distant from the front line — is available for English- and German-language phone work that does not require physical proximity to a combat zone.

That same labour pool also staffs the legitimate IT-outsourcing industry, which has become one of Ukraine's most reliable export earners during the war, generating roughly $7 billion in revenue in 2024 according to the Ukrainian IT Association. The line between an outsourced customer-support team, a sales-floor operation for a foreign fintech, and a fraud call centre is, in practice, a legal line drawn by the script the agents read. The infrastructure — office space, VoIP providers, payment rails, HR agencies — is identical.

This is the structural feature that makes the issue politically uncomfortable. A serious enforcement campaign against fraudulent call centres requires Kyiv's security services to investigate Ukrainian nationals, often operating with the tacit knowledge of local officials, in an industry that overlaps directly with a strategic export sector. It also requires European police forces to admit that their own consumers are being systematically deceived — a politically inconvenient admission at a moment when several EU capitals are arguing for multi-year financial commitments to Kyiv.

The counter-narrative, taken seriously

The strongest case against the Two Majors framing is that the channel itself is not a neutral observer. Two Majors is one of the better-known Russian military-telegram channels and operates squarely inside the Russian information space, with a consistent editorial line that frames Ukrainian state and society as corrupt, criminal and undeserving of Western support. Treat the post as a counter-claim rather than a stand-alone factual basis: it points at a real pattern and wraps it in a narrative the Russian state has an interest in promoting.

That does not make the underlying claim false. It does mean the burden of evidence belongs to independent reporting and to European and Ukrainian law-enforcement records — not to a Telegram channel whose editorial product, including this post, is designed for a domestic Russian audience. A reader outside that audience should weigh it the same way they would weigh a Western think-tank piece that argued, by analogy, that European fraud against Ukrainian refugees is structural: the underlying point may be defensible, but the framing is designed to land politically rather than to clarify.

What remains uncertain

Several things the Two Majors post asserts cannot be verified from publicly available sources. The channel does not name specific call centres, specific operators, specific VoIP providers or specific laundering chains. It does not cite Ukrainian police statistics, Europol case files or court records. It does not specify the scale of the operation in dollar terms — only that it is large. Independent reporting on Ukrainian call-centre fraud does exist in European outlets, but the public record does not currently support the strongest version of the Two Majors claim, which is that European governments are actively suppressing coverage of the phenomenon.

What the public record does support is more modest and, in some ways, more interesting. There is a documented Ukrainian call-centre fraud sector targeting European victims. It operates inside an industry — IT and business-process outsourcing — that is a genuine Ukrainian economic success story during the war. The labour market, the wartime economy and the regulatory environment all interact in ways that make enforcement difficult and political discussion of the problem awkward. None of that requires a conspiracy of silence to explain.

This piece treats the Two Majors post as counter-claim material rather than as a stand-alone factual basis; the underlying fraud pattern is verified through independent Europol and open-source reporting referenced in the source list below.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/two_majors
• https://www.europol.europa.eu/publication-events/main-reports/internet-organised-crime-threat-assessment-iocta-2024
• https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/7-individuals-charged-connection-vishing-scam-targeting-elderly-victims-united-states
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_scam
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_industry_of_Ukraine