By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Ukrainian Saboteurs Behind Enemy Lines

There recently have been reports like, for example, Ukrainian saboteurs blew up a Russian helicopter 500 miles from Ukraine. Or, more recently, how members of a special forces unit use oars to push their boats into the water while on a night operation targeting Russian forces behind the front line. 

A network of partisans was activated in late July, just as Ukraine’s elite Special Operations Forces stepped up their missions in occupied territories, including using armed drones. The approach has also been helped by the arrival of US-made, truck-mounted guided missile launchers called Himars, which have extended the reach of the Ukrainian military to as far as 80km behind the Russian front lines. The objective was to reach behind the enemy lines “and teach them chaos, said the Ukrainian official, who asked not to be named when discussing military strategy. The official said that just because they have a meat grinder doesn’t mean we have to run into it, referring to Russian forces’ frontline artillery barrage.

Meanwhile, in central Kyiv, a tall man in a black hoodie stands outside a cafe furiously puffing on a vape. His official title, head of the Committee of Veterans, might sound like the role of a benign public servant, but he is far removed from parades and ribbon pinning.

He works with those who secretly fight for Ukraine behind enemy lines. He is one of the leading strategists and organizers of Ukraine’s partisans inside Russian-occupied territory. If they kill me, many others can take my place. We’ve had to adapt and become more creative. They might be strong, but we use our minds.

After Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 Feb., dormant veterans associations became the lifeblood of the Ukrainian resistance inside occupied territory. According to him, their networks relied heavily on dedicated volunteers who were in place months before Russia’s full-scale offensive in February. We said in 2014 that the Russians would not stop in those regions. So in a way, the country was preparing,” he said. Veterans from 2014 were part of this. Almost all of them returned to the army. We were readying people in areas we knew would be hit early. Even in our schools, we were psychologically preparing our kids.

Initially, politicians ignored the loud alarm raised by those inside Ukraine’s military and security services, preferring to take a wait-and-see approach to the impending Russian attacks.

After successful lobbying by people like him, however, the government in July 2021 passed the Law on the Fundamentals of National Resistance, designed to maximize civilians' role in Ukrainian defense. It helped establish the territorial defense groups in neighborhoods and connect these citizen defense groups with Ukraine’s broader security and military apparatus. By this February, makeshift distribution centers were established for those without weapons and training to allow civilians to defend their neighborhoods across the country.

He said that for Ukrainians, after the initial shock of the attacks of 24 Feb., these local civil-defense networks began to connect. “On the first day, people were shocked because rockets were falling and their targeting was not precise, so everything was hit. After the first two days of shock, people realized we needed to resist. They started coming together in their groups, he said.

Initially, organizers like him, many of whom are military veterans with experience in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and now work in collaboration with Ukraine’s military and security service in Kyiv, began to focus on coordinating the flow of information. They were tasked with figuring out what was being attacked, where weapons were required, and how to get them there. In occupied places like Sumy and Kharkiv, where street fighting broke out with Russian forces, the defense networks relied mainly on former soldiers, who sometimes still bore injuries from their earlier service, to fight back. These guys know how to use weapons, RPGs, etc. They trained in the Soviet army, so they knew the tactics of Russia. We made networks connecting people, but they often used their circles separately. Entire families got involved, he said.

But the partisans did not merely consist of former soldiers. He said civil servants, post office workers, and even hunters played a crucial role in Ukraine’s partisan movement. People who knew the forests wanted to help us. Some worked in forestry; others were catching poachers. Their territorial knowledge was unparalleled, so he said we worked with them to develop new ways to find information on the Russian movement and see if our actions inside their area had been successful.

One striking anecdote involves a hunting dog put to work for the national cause. When Russia started to attack Kyiv, the military realized it was fragile, so it utilized natural resources. In Kyiv oblast, it started planning how to flood rivers to prevent Russians from building temporary bridges. On one occasion, when it needed to raise the level of a river significantly, it hit a dam but had no way to check whether its attack had provided the desired results.

A local hunter offered up Kaban, who, equipped with a GoPro camera, traveled inside Russian-occupied territory to bring back valuable footage sent via the clandestine partisan network to Kyiv. How did his owner manage to retrieve Kaban from enemy territory? His owner whistled for him, he laughed. Through Kaban’s actions, Ukraine’s security services could confirm their mission was successful.

The partisans used any resources available to them in occupied territory. In one mission, weapons held by border guards were transported to designated areas where locals could collect them. Meanwhile, women who distributed Ukrainian pensions inside the occupied territories began to collect information on Russian movements. Even after pension money ran out, the women continued to travel from house to house under the pretense of pension distribution.

They were invaluable, he mused. Because the Russians have discovered these channels, he speaks about them but says many new methods are being used daily. “So many of our partisans were killed or tortured, but they keep volunteering, grannies, sisters, and mothers, he said.

A 46-year-old from the recently liberated Kherson oblast was part of his partisan network until his work filming Russian movements led to a brief detention with the enemy—and, ultimately, a lucky escape. I started filming the Russians and the movement of weapons on my phone. Finally, they realized someone from my village was filming, so they closed the checkpoints and started to examine our phones. I deleted my pictures, but I didn’t delete the trash. When they checked, they found the photos and tried to take me away. He said many people surrounded them, and some of my relatives gave them money and cigarettes. For the 46-year-old  veteran, finding a trusted network to send his videos to took time. Still, as family members learned about his activities, they offered to help, including his beekeeping father.

At the start, we didn’t know who to send the coordinates to, so I sent them to the administration office of the oblast, but then I found a relative who fought in 2014, so he had a much better network. When they started to bomb  Kherson, my father felt terrible and wanted to help. He worked with bees, so he would send us coded messages about places we kept the bees and things like this: whether it was busy now. Locations only we knew. There was a time when we needed to get a view of areas next to the river—even the satellites couldn’t view this. We pretended to go fishing and were able to report back on the location.

On the planning level, we work closely with Ukraine’s more conventional security service, the SBU, which works on counterinsurgency movements inside Ukraine. Those in the SBU are officially assigned by the Ukrainian government with the tasks of mapping out the Russian presence inside Ukraine, hunting for Russian spies in Ukraine’s ranks, and putting together a picture of how their counterparts work inside Ukrainian territory. From locating a Russian arms cache inside Kyiv to discovering a Ukrainian cook who sold the coordinates and times of meals in a military barracks in Rivne for $300, Ukraine’s security services are constantly on the alert for Russian insurgents inside the country. “Sometimes they’ll do it for money, but it’s so small,” Olek, an SBU officer, told us in Kharkiv oblast while on an intelligence-gathering mission near the border with Russia.

A lot of our people were arrested, he admits. In some villages, Russians went house by house, and they tortured people to get them to give up their networks. Sometimes they already had lists of veterans. In Kherson, they took databases of all government employees, especially anyone with a military pension.” When asked about Ukrainian mayors who said the partisans were capitulating to avoid civilian casualties, he was firm: They’re lying. That’s an FSB Russia's spy agency, the Russian Federal Security Service narrative.

As the SBU and its intelligence officers begin counterinsurgency work in recently liberated Kherson, he continues to work with partisans inside Russian-occupied territory. They constantly adapt their tactics to meet new challenges and exploit Russian weaknesses. Putin didn’t read his history books, or he would have learned about our partisans, he said. Stalin got to know them quite well.

Kyiv hopes its tactics of trying to reach behind the lines will also have a psychological impact on weary opponents. Imagine you’re a Russian soldier, and day after day, there is a bomb somewhere near you — do you think that soldier can sleep now? said the second Ukrainian official.

 

 

 

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