How a group of Ukrainian citizens helped seal Russia's biggest defeat

How a group of Ukrainian citizens helped seal Russia’s biggest defeat

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The Institute for the Study of War also says that Ukrainian partisan warfare is being waged in Melitopol, Tokmak and Mariupol in the south and Donetsk and Svyatov in the east.

Serhiy Haidai, the exiled governor of eastern Luhansk province, which has been under Russian control since last June, said partisans there were waging a sabotage campaign and attacking suspected Russian collaborators.

In an interview on 23 January, he attributed a recent attack on a railway line that Russia’s military was using to transport troops and equipment to partisans. He declined to provide further details for security reasons and Reuters could not independently confirm Partisan involvement in the attacks.

captured partisans

Dollar said that at the risk of arrest, interrogation, torture and death, partisans in Kherson hung Ukraine’s blue and yellow national colors on trees and relayed Russian positions on Google Earth and other online maps to Ukrainian security officials.

Vitaly Bogdanov, 51, a regional council member, said that during the eight-month Russian occupation, he passed on information collected to law enforcement officials in Kyiv and later used to launch investigations of suspected collaborators.

“We were able to launch a very large number of criminal cases,” he said. He declined to provide further details as the investigation was ongoing.

Kolya, a member of the 4-member Kherson cell, said the group was told by its handlers not to use firearms because information was a more powerful weapon.

Other parties took up arms.

Aleksey Ladin, a lawyer in Russian-occupied Crimea, told Reuters he was defending two Ukrainians held there who have been accused by the FSB of violent attacks against Russians.

Pavlo Zaporozhets served in the Ukrainian military from 2014-17 and joined Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence during the occupation of Kherson, Ladin said.

Ladin said Zaporozhets was arrested while attempting to attack a Russian military night patrol and could face a life sentence on international terrorism charges.

He said Zaporozhye was being held at a detention center in Simferopol and that he and his client had attended a preliminary court hearing in the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don on February 2 by video link. The court ordered Zaporozhye to be transferred to a facility in Rostov, Ladin said.

According to an FSB account seen by Reuters, Zaporozhye, 31, was arrested by FSB officers in Kherson on May 9 with two grenades, a fishing line and two plastic bottles that he had made into homemade bombs.

Zaparozhets told his interrogators that he had been contacted by a Ukrainian GUR handler codenamed Optimum and agreed to fulfill his order for 30,000 hryvnias ($800) a month, according to FSB case documents seen by Reuters .

Ladin said the FSB account was based on testimony his client had been tortured during interrogation and showed Reuters a copy of Zaporozhye’s handwritten note from last August, in which he described being subjected to beatings and electric shocks while in custody. described as subservient.

Although some details about the FSB account were correct, Ladin said, the FSB falsely accused Zaporozhye of deliberately targeting civilians as well as night patrols. Ladin said military action was to be taken with the intention of avoiding civilian casualties during the curfew.

Ladin said the “optimal solution” would be an exchange of Zaporozhets and another client, Yaroslav Zhuk – who was arrested in Melitopol in June and accused of setting up a home-made bomb for Russian POWs held by Ukraine Was. Ladin said Zhuk denied attacking civilian targets.

Ladin said the FSB refused to recognize Zaporozhye as a Ukrainian soldier eligible for a prisoner exchange, saying they could not verify the document produced by the defense. In Zhuk’s case, Ladin says that his client is a combatant covered by the Geneva Conventions; The FSB has not accepted the designation.

Reuters was unable to speak directly to the two detainees.

Exodus Kherson

Dollar, Kolia and Mart – another member of the cell – said they felt compelled to resist the Russian takeover of Kherson because their city had no organized defense when the Russians attacked on 24 February.

Dollar and Mart’s first open bid to confront the Russians came on March 1, he said, when he drove a truck loaded with concrete blocks toward the Antonovsky Bridge, the city’s main entry point, aimed at slowing Russia’s advance. .

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