February 17, 2025 - 10:00am
In December 2023, 24 Russian soldiers based in Crimea died suddenly, while a further 11 were hospitalised. The cause of death? Vodka and sausages. The men had earlier accepted a bundle of food and alcohol from attractive, young local women who approached the Russians to thank them for “protecting” the lands they were in fact occupying. The women were actually Ukrainian partisans, the gifts laced with arsenic and strychnine.
Poisoning has been a common method for female saboteurs in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. It is also a highly dangerous one, with those caught then forced into sex with Russian generals. They are only some of the many Ukrainians risking torture and execution to wage their own war against the invaders.
This shadow war is likely to ramp up should the fighting come to a diplomatic end and the territorial lines be redrawn. Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday that his country would never accept a peace deal struck by America and Russia, without Kyiv’s involvement. Ahead of this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, the Ukrainian President proposed a territory swap with Moscow. Under this plan, Ukraine would return the Kursk region for one of the five Russian-annexed territories — Crimea, Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. While outright hostilities may end, what does it mean for the Ukrainians who will be living under Moscow’s rule? Sabotage is likely to proliferate.
Some in the resistance work in conjunction with Kyiv in organised groups; others struggle alone. Resistance can range from displaying pro-Ukraine propaganda or national colours to organising assassinations, transmitting the locations of Russian forces and damaging the railways that transport Moscow’s men and arms to the front. Others have even gone so far as to attack the Russian army from within: Ukrainian militants have repeatedly broken into enemy barracks to stab soldiers to death, while saboteurs have joined Moscow’s forces to leak information, wreck operations and disable equipment.
Interviews reveal a wide range of motivations. A commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and a desire to be free from oppressive life under the Russians are both common, as is a sense of their actions as righting historical wrongs committed by Moscow against Kyiv. Others rebel due to personal grudges, seeking revenge for loss of property, personal harm or sexual violence suffered under the regime.
While the clandestine nature of their activities makes it hard to ascertain the exact number of incidents, vigilantes currently show no signs of backing down from their fight. Car bombings recently claimed the lives of senior Russian military figures, a judge who collaborated with the new authorities, and the ex-head of the notorious Olenivka penal colony where Ukrainian prisoners of war were massacred in 2022. Meanwhile, members of the “Atesh” partisan group have discussed their plans to destroy the Kerch Bridge and assassinate high-ranking members of the Russian government, claiming to have members in Moscow and St Petersburg.
This month in Crimea, pro-Ukraine posters and graffiti proclaimed that locals are “waiting for the Armed Forces of Ukraine”. The difficulty is that they may be waiting some time. Even Zelensky has admitted that it is currently impossible for his army to push out Russian forces from the occupied territories by force. Instead, he has suggested that those areas be returned at an unspecified future juncture via diplomatic means.
This raises the question of what partisans will do if their territories are formally ceded to Russia in any forthcoming peace agreement. Will they be galvanised to fight harder or begrudgingly accept that their struggle is over? Dr Jade McGlynn, Research Fellow at King’s College London, has tracked resistance activities and tells me that a deal could encourage partisan activity as the sole remaining way to target Moscow. “It could demoralise some of the resistance,” she says. “But since Ukraine will never recognise its occupied territories as Russian, it may bring added opportunities to the Ukrainian resistance who will be much more the focus of attention and support without an active frontline.”
Zelensky has previously endorsed rebellion in occupied zones and the government is looking to train civilians in resisting Russian aggression. As such, even after a deal, the Ukrainian security services would likely continue covertly offering resources and information to those partisans struggling against Russian occupation in the hope of keeping Ukrainian nationalism alive and the population prepared, in case Kyiv is ever in a position to reclaim those territories.
Negotiations would, ostensibly, bring peace between Russia and Ukraine. Yet, in reality, a ceasefire could well intensify the shadow war, a battle against Moscow to be fought not by the soldier, but by the saboteur.
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SubscribeZelensky will clearly have to approve any ‘peace’ deal that the US and Russia negotiate, without his approval the negotiations must be ended and inevitably the status quo would continue, but for how long without US help?
Any rejection of a peace deal by Zelensky would surely embolden Russia and the risk being Ukraine would lose more land to Russia.
This I believe is why there will be a peace deal, but any breaking of the deal with covert operations after the deal has been implemented would bring an end to peace and a re-start of hostilities by Russia.
The implications are huge for mainland Europe, particularly the Baltics, and yet the EU are providing no input.
Europe is going to have to step up. After all, the European nations are going to be at war with Russia soon enough, and right now, the Ukrainians are doing all the “heavy lifting”. Lets face it, the Ukrainians have developed ways to kill Russians cheaply and efficiently. The Europeans would do well to learn from them in that regard.
The resistance obviously would be better under any peace deal of not ‘poking the bear’ though it’d be a very hard ask; but ultimately ‘sleeping dogs’ and all that. Personally however IMHO Putin will ever back off he’s far too proud; constantly planning his legacy.
Maybe the Resistance can move its operations to Russia itself. There are a few more generals that need blowing up.
There aren’t that many “feel good” stories on UnHerd, but that certainly was one. The first paragraph of it made me laugh out loud. “Hi, here’s some food and drink to thank you for liberating us from those nasty Ukrainians”. The Russians in question must have had about three brain cells between them.
Stories like that are too good to be true. This one came just from social media. It’s false.
Oh, ok. I’ll have to just keep deriving my pleasure from watching Youtube clips of Russian soldiers being blown up by Ukrainian drones as they cower behind trees then.
… and intensified shadow war will lead to violent war.
I keep saying that Western Europe will be at war with Russia soon enough. They had best prepare for it.
Occasional murder of this sort was employed by some Dutch women against the occupying Germans in the Second World War. It did not alter the strategic situation. Some German prisoners held in the USA during the Second World War were poisoned with contaminated food.
Some of these Dutch women suffered what would now be called mental health issues after liberation as a result of not only committing murder but in the way they carried it out; things that they would never have countenanced before the war.
War damages people morally. During the Great War, the peace activist Caroline Payne made many notes about the merciless outbursts and callous accounts she heard from formerly civilised or Christian people.
Some of the conversations she recorded included ones wishing that all the Germans should be killed. Showing Christian mercy was mistaken. British troops habitually killing wounded prisoners. Wholesale massacres of Hungarian villages and accounts of heaps of corpses on the Western Front coolly recounted by officers in drawing rooms under reproductions of Botticelli’s Venus.
The Kremlin’s invasion is cruel and wicked and stupid. The suffering of Ukrainians – young married couples and their infant children killed – is heartrending. But murder with deceit by people who claim to be Christians would make a ‘fallen’ woman blush. Proverbs xxv.21 may be intended to apply to rivals in peacetime, but giving bread sans poison to occupying forces might result in better treatment of the civilian population. Murder will certainly produce reprisals.
How many in the UK and Europe who are spectators in this war told as a morality play gloat over the ‘slaughter of Russians’? In doing so have they not become morally damaged by a war they are not even fighting in?
Wars don’t always end neatly, I suppose, so we will see how neatly or otherwise this one ends.