While a lack of weapons, ammunition and equipment is hampering the Ukrainian military, there are signs that a nascent partisan insurgency is mounting in strength, allowing Ukrainian troops to launch deadly strikes on Russian-controlled territory, even in areas where it is dangerous and sometimes impossible to attack. deploy troops.
This week, partisan scouts working for the Ukrainian army behind enemy lines carried out artillery strikes on two Russian bases in the occupied Kherson region, killing dozens of enemy soldiers, according to a senior Ukrainian military official who was aware of the attacks.
On an episode this week, scouts approached a Russian army installation in the village of Chkalove and discovered many foreign fighters stationed at the base, along with Russian soldiers and heavy weapons, the senior official said. They passed on the coordinates of the base to a Ukrainian artillery unit stationed about 20 kilometers away.
The Ukrainians then pulverized the base with grenades and killed dozens of fighters just after midnight on Thursday, the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.
Later that day, scouts launched another artillery strike, this time on a resort complex in Stara Zburivka, near the mouth of the Dnipro River, killing dozens of enemy soldiers, including two generals, the senior official said. One of the generals was from the Russian army and another from Russia’s counterintelligence service, the FSB, the official said.
The scouts are local partisans helping the Ukrainian army in Russian occupied territory. They can be former soldiers or just civilians collecting information such as the location of enemy units. It could be men pushing potato carts, or farmers, or a grandmother with a cell phone.
Ukrainian partisans have taken credit for attacking Russian trains; targeting Russian proxies appointed to local government administrations; killing Russian soldiers; and supporting Ukrainian military efforts. Their support could be crucial both in the south of Ukraine, where Russia has conquered territory, and in the east, where Ukraine is defeated and fighting to hold onto its land.
Details of this week’s two attacks could not be independently verified. The Ukrainian military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither does the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The strike in Chkalove took place near an area of active fighting in southern Ukraine. To determine the death toll, spotters counted body bags as they were loaded into rescue vehicles, the senior official said.
The death toll in the strike was apparently so high because the grenades hit a stash of ammunition, triggering an explosion and a blaze that burned for six a.m. Thursday, the official said.
The official said the partisans approached some of the foreign fighters before the attack and after trying to talk to them suspected they were Arabs. The foreign fighters appeared to be living in tents near buildings occupied by Russian troops, the official said. He said they may have been part of a contingent of Syrian troops that arrived in Russia three weeks ago.
It has long been rumored that Syrian fighters would join Russia’s fight in Ukraine, but there has been no official confirmation of this.
The exact form and scope of the uprising in southern Ukraine is unclear, and resistance to the Russian occupation could take many forms – from aiding direct attacks on enemy forces in coordination with the Ukrainian military to putting up pamphlets on street corners to demoralize occupiers. The goal, according to insurgent scholars, is always to ensure that the enemy never feels safe.
On June 3, the Ukrainian military command in southern Ukraine reported, without providing any evidence, that: Russians changed their behavior for fear of the growing resistance.
“The leadership of the occupying authorities is moving around with large numbers of guards, in bulletproof vests, in armored cars,” the military command reported. “There is fear for their lives.”
During the early months of the occupation, witnesses described how Russian forces tried to locate anyone with a military or security background in the region in order to interrogate them. Amid ongoing attacks by insurgents, witnesses have described increasingly draconian efforts to locate possible rebels.
All traffic to and from Kherson to the Ukraine-controlled country is now closed, and those moving could face a maze of checkpoints, with occupation forces checking their cell phones for hints of pro-Ukrainian sympathies.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
Partisan resistance began in the early days of the war, when civilians armed with Molotov cocktails joined attacks on invading Russian columns. But as Russia’s hold on the south deepened, it had to become clandestine.
Ukrainian news media have reported that underground resistance in the occupied territories is being coordinated by a unit of its armed forces, the Special Operations Forces. The division was formed after attempts to build an insurgency to counter the Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region failed in 2015.
The Ukrainian government has set up a virtual center of national resistance that provides instructions on things like setting up ambushes and dealing with arrests.
“To become an invisible avenger that the occupiers will fear, it is necessary to know tactics, drugs, internet security, homemade weapons and nonviolent actions,” says the center’s website.
In an example of the tips the government is giving the resistance, it recently published an online step-by-step guide to hot-connecting Soviet-era armor.
Several attacks on Russian-appointed officials in the Kherson and Zhaporizhzhia regions have been reported by both Ukrainian and Russian officials, although the attacks are depicted in very different ways. The Ukrainians praise the resistance. The Russians call the attacks terror.
Andrei Shevchik, the pro-Kremlin mayor of Enerhodar – who was installed shortly after Russian troops occupied the Ukrainian city on the Dnipro River – was outside his mother’s home when he was seriously injured in an explosion. That turned out to be the work of insurgents, Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency reported on May 22, citing an emergency service worker in the city as the source.
Last week, an explosion occurred near the office of Yevgeny Balitsky, a pro-Kremlin-Ukrainian official in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol. The pro-Kremlin authorities in the city explicitly blamed Ukrainian partisans, and the Russian Commission of Inquiry — the FBI’s equivalent — blamed “Ukrainian saboteurs.”
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, said there is a long tradition of waging guerrilla warfare in southern Ukraine, where the vast steppes leave little room for the enemy to hide.