Citizen spies aim to obstruct Putin’s plan
In Kherson, avenues of resistance rise up against the invaders
KHERSON, Ukraine — This city, at the mouth of the Dnieper River, near the Black Sea, was captured in the war’s first days. Russian officials soon declared it part of Russia forever.
Kherson’s occupation government, run by Russian military commanders and Ukrainian collaborators, wasted little time pulling down Ukrainian flags, taking over Ukrainian schools, trucking in crates of Russian rubles, even importing Russian families. Perhaps nowhere else in Ukraine did Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, devote so much money and violence, the carrot and the stick, to bend a city to his imperial will.
But it did not work. Guided by contacts in the Ukrainian security services, an assembly of ordinary citizens formed themselves into a grassroots resistance movement, becoming spirited partisans for the Kherson underground. It was almost like something out of a spy movie.
They took clandestine videos of Russian troops and sent them to Ukrainian forces along with map coordinates. They used code names and passwords to circulate guns and explosives right under the Russians’ noses. Some even formed small attack teams that picked off Russian soldiers at night, making the fear and paranoia that settled over the city two-sided.
When the Russian army hastily pulled out in mid-November — perhaps the biggest embarrassment so far to Putin’s war effort,
Kherson became a powerful symbol: to allies questioning Ukraine’s resolve, and to Ukrainians who had suffered so much misery and death and needed a glimmer of hope., Kherson showed what was possible.
On Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion, thousands of Russian troops poured into Kherson, which had a population of about 300,000 before the war. Like in many other Ukrainian cities, local residents, some with military experience, banded together into a group known as a territorial defense force to try to repel Moscow’s army.
They had few weapons, mostly just some old hunting rifles. Worse, the
Ukrainian military made a strategic decision to withdraw from Kherson, leaving the local fighters on their own.
They tried to ambush a Russian column a few days after the invasion but failed miserably, according to witnesses, leaving at least 18 militia members dead on the frozen ground. After that, the Kherson resistance changed tactics. It went underground.
Members of the local defense force and other civilians began to spy on Russian troops in the city. The Ukrainian security services encouraged this — within days of the war breaking out, they set up special channels on Telegram and other messaging
services for people to funnel strategic tips.
The resistance movement would soon evolve. In the next few weeks, Ukrainian military commanders and intelligence agents based outside the city asked civilians whom they trusted to do even more.
Life was getting grim. Kherson was running out of food. Stores were closed. People were out of work. Russian troops were searching for civilians who were spying on them; many residents shared disturbing stories of themselves or people they knew being dragged into torture chambers and subjected to electric shocks and sadistic beatings.
But the residents kept finding avenues of resistance.
In mid-April, a rash of yellow ribbons mysteriously appeared all over Kherson, spray-painted on buildings. It was a small act of defiance, but residents said Russian soldiers were so enraged that they stormed into hardware stores and demanded to see closed-circuit TV footage to find out who had been buying yellow paint.
Members of Kherson’s partisan network and a Ukrainian military officer from the city, said that weapons — assault rifles, bullets and grenades — were passed from civilian to civilian to one location to another. Eventually, they were handed over to undercover Ukrainian security agents who had filtered quietly back into Kherson or to members of the underground territorial defense force.
“The system was built like links in a chain,” said Oleksandr Samoylenko, head of Kherson’s regional council, who helped coordinate partisan activity from outside the city. “No person knew the next link, so if someone got caught, it wouldn’t compromise the whole operation.”
Acts of defiance kept popping up. When the occupation government severed trade links with Ukraine and then instructed transportation companies in Kherson to haul stolen Ukrainian grain to Russia, some refused.
“They assaulted our country,” said Roman Denysenko, the owner of a trucking company who was later kidnapped. “I wasn’t going to work with them. Period.”
Samoylenko, the Kherson regional council head, said that civilians working with the army had sent in realtime surveillance information that enabled Ukrainian forces to bomb a meeting of high-level collaborators in mid-September and a hotel full of Russian intelligence officers a few weeks later. He cited two factors behind those successes: American precision artillery and partisan intelligence.
“It’s only because of the residents that the liberation happened so quickly,” he said.
Flush with new, more powerful weapons, the Ukrainian military ratcheted up the pressure. They blew up bridges across the Dnieper River. Ground forces advanced across the countryside and pressed in on three sides.
By early November, the Russian forces had begun to flee.