The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged, a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine is not losing. Russia is not winning.]

Ukraine’s resistance is alive and more lethal than ever. But it has changed dramatically since its early days. A man I will call Dmytro (he requested anonymity for reasons of safety) has served with a resistance team inside occupied Kherson from the first days of the full-scale invasion. “We took insane risks then,” he told me. “Nobody thought the Russians would be here long.” Partisan cells sprang up organically, people who knew one another, sometimes ex-military, improvising as they went. Symbolic acts of resistance happened daily. Ukrainians flew their flag and blared patriotic songs in public. The image of a grandmother pressing sunflower seeds into a Russian paratrooper’s hand, “so that sunflowers grow here when you die”, traveled around the world.

As it became clear the Russians intended to stay, such open defiance faded. Today, expressing support for Ukraine in Russian-occupied areas is likely to earn a trip to “the basement,” a euphemism for Russian torture chambers. Dmytro described Russia’s repression as a kind of machine: “It takes time to get spinning, then it has its own momentum.” High-resolution surveillance cameras now blanket city centers, and interrogations are a feature of daily life. Resistance leaders from Mariupol estimate that nearly half of the adult population there has been polygraphed by the Russian security service.

Even peaceful acts can meet with extreme repression. In 2022 and 2023, occupation forces in Mariupol effectively banned the colors blue and yellow. Residents describe receiving aid packages, including school supplies, with yellow and blue markers ripped out of their boxes. Today, Russia’s camera net is sophisticated enough to track individuals block by block, masked or not. Petro Andriushchenko escaped from Mariupol and now coordinates a cell still operating there. “Pro-Ukrainian graffiti can get you killed,” he told me. “Even disguised, your movements can be traced backwards to find where you live.”

The kind of symbolic resistance once waged by the general public has now given way to intelligence work, carried out by serious operatives. Managed by handlers in unoccupied Ukraine, these agents help identify targets, verify coordinates, and pass them to the Ukrainian military. The location of Achmad’s barracks, although traced through online subterfuge, was almost certainly confirmed by an agent on the ground. The result is a movement that has grown both quieter and deadlier. It now feeds the “middle-strike” campaign, a sustained drone offensive against targets deep inside the occupied territories, including air defenses, logistics hubs, command posts, and personnel. A crucial link in that kill chain is information from loyal Ukrainians behind enemy lines.

The partisans I spoke with included coordinators directing operations from free Ukraine, operatives working inside occupied territory, and volunteers scattered across Ukraine and abroad. Many have family members still living under Russian occupation and must closely guard their resistance activities. Inside the occupied territories, most agents work alone, their only connection via encrypted communication with their handlers. One operative, code-named Sestra, has no idea how far the network around her extends, except that it kills Russians almost every day. “What you do not know,” she explained to me, “you cannot betray under interrogation.”

The Russian military is a meat grinder. Commanders send infantry forward in waves that Ukrainian officers refer to as “human radar”: The piles of bodies reveal Ukrainian strong points. As crude as Russia’s infantry operations may be, its electronic countermeasures are very sophisticated and continually reshape how the resistance communicates and survives.

Until June 2022, Ukraine’s mobile carriers Kyivstar and Vodafone kept operating in the occupied zones, because the Russians had not yet stood up their own infrastructure. Then the Ukrainian networks went dark, and the resistance had to improvise. Early fixes were crude: VPNs, Wi-Fi nodes. Methods have since been refined, and the details are closely guarded. What is clear is that any phone purchased inside the occupied territories is useless for resistance work. Devices sold there come preloaded with monitoring software developed by Russian intelligence. That app is called Druge, Друг, which means “friend” in Russian.

Druge monitors communications, photographs, and location data, relaying all of it back to Russian intelligence. One woman who had recently escaped from an occupied zone told me that her mother, who still lived there, tried to delete Druge. The icon disappeared, but the app kept running in the background. At checkpoints, Russian soldiers examine every phone. Not having Druge installed is a red flag to them; having an encrypted app, such as Signal, guarantees a phone’s owner a trip to the basement.

Phones smuggled in from free Ukraine are the linchpin of resistance communications. For a time, one reliable route ran through Deutsche Post: parcels mailed from Germany, routed through Russia, delivered to innocuous addresses in occupied territory, a government office, a shop, and wrapped so that any tampering would be evident. That route is now closed. Others remain, though the specifics are closely held. In emergencies, a phone can be delivered by drone, which demands real-time coordination and carries its own risks. These “clean” devices do not have Russian spyware installed, and they lack SIM cards that would connect to the local mobile network. Because cell towers can detect when a new phone enters their coverage area, resistance members compose encrypted messages on a clean phone then send them via internet, using the hotspot of a second device already recognized by the network.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine has finally given up on Trump]

Few resistance agents have professional training. Most learn on the job. Partisans pass around hard-copy tradecraft manuals to avoid using vulnerable digital channels. Within Kherson’s partisan brigade, one of the most sought-after is a Soviet-era handbook describing CIA catfishing tactics in Africa during the Cold War. No online version exists, but a well-worn original circulates among the resistance.

“Your CIA was good at this,” Dmytro said. “You bastards knew how to use sex.”

Several Ukrainian print shops have developed methods for hiding instruction manuals inside best-selling books. A guard at a Russian checkpoint, thumbing through an artificially tattered paperback, will likely have no idea that some of the pages explain how to kill him.

Inside the occupied territories, women form the backbone of the resistance. Many hold positions in Russia’s civil administration, at clinics, schools, and government offices, and report to Ukrainian intelligence. They exploit the occupiers’ assumptions: Russian soldiers often fail to imagine that women can be combatants. Few suspect that a grandmother passing their barracks every morning, shopping bags in hand, is the first link in a kill chain.

Some women volunteer with Russia-based charities supplying aid to military units. Every interaction is a collection opportunity. In late May, a government-linked Russian aid organization circulated a warning about this over Telegram: It had identified individuals, the agency noted, “who offer to deliver humanitarian aid to the Special Military Operation zone” as “a tactic employed by hostile forces to gather intelligence regarding the deployment of Russian troops.”

The most valuable sources are the occupiers themselves. In free Ukraine, agents build online relationships with occupation soldiers. Most of the operatives are women, though some men, such as Serhiy, have a gift for it. Native Russian soldiers tend to be difficult marks; they are transactional, Serhiy’s commander told me. “They always ask in the first five minutes: ‘Are we going to fuck or not?’” Chechens, by contrast, are “much more likely to seek a real relationship” and are easier to manipulate.

Since its creation in the early 1990s, the National Academy of the Security Service of Ukraine has trained operatives to cultivate intelligence assets. There are rumors of a new course that requires students to develop online connections with real occupation soldiers. An instructor at the academy, who requested anonymity for security reasons, would not confirm the course’s existence but insisted that “every intelligence agency does this, even yours.” When pressed about a specific aspect of the rumor, that the highest grades go to students who deliver target coordinates by the end of the course, he smiled. “That would indeed earn high marks.”

Most instruction for resistance agents, however, remains unofficial. Olena Biletska runs the Ukrainian Women’s Guard, a volunteer organization launched after Russia’s initial assault in 2014 to train women to survive under attack or occupation. By 2022, training had been delivered to more than 60,000 participants, some of whom remained in occupied territory. Most courses cover basic self-defense and survival, but others apply to resistance work. Pipelines smuggle training materials behind enemy lines. One course focuses on defeating polygraphs; others cover urban surveillance and intelligence-gathering.

Outside Ukraine, a diaspora helps vet target coordinates obtained through these resistance networks. Refugees from the occupied territories, who have detailed local knowledge, provide insight for the middle-strike drone campaign. A woman I will call Roksana, who asked for her name to be withheld to protect her network inside Ukraine, served in a clinic near Kherson on the occupied south bank of the Dnipro River. She barely escaped with her life after refusing to work for the Russian military. Now, living abroad, she helps verify targets for Ukrainian military intelligence. “I know my village, every street, every farm, every warehouse,” she told me.

For Roksana and some of the other women operatives I spoke with, the determination to destroy the Russian occupation was forged in dark experience. “Almost every day, for the first few weeks after the invasion, we would hear about another body in the street,” Roksana said. “If it was a woman, they were often abused.” The doctor Tetyana Kostyantynivna runs the women’s center at one of Kyiv’s largest hospitals. In 2022 and 2023, her facility treated a steady stream of sexual-assault survivors from the occupied territories, ranging in age from 4 to 75. “Over the past four years,” she told me, “we have become a world leader in new methods for gynecological reconstructive surgery.”

During her own escape, Roksana passed through 33 Russian checkpoints, several of which were surrounded by dead bodies. Some of those corpses were of women and showed what she understood to be clear signs of sexual violence. At one checkpoint, a Russian soldier fired into the back of Roksana’s car while it sat parked, hitting a passenger in the legs. The soldiers did it for sport. But Roksana’s group made it through, and today, she has no reservations about guiding drone strikes against her own village, if doing so helps drive the Russians out. “We can rebuild warehouses,” she said, “but the Russians can’t rebuild Russians.”

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Women are crucial to the Ukrainian resistance. “They can go places, do things, that men cannot,” Andriushchenko, who runs agents inside Mariupol, told me. “Also, they are ruthless.” Several resistance leaders call their female agents vidma, a term that appears often in Ukrainian folklore. Its closest translation is “witch,” but it has a very different connotation here. The word derives from vidate, which means “to know.” Lesia Orobets, a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, explained: “Vidmas were wise. They understood the secrets of the surrounding environment. Here in Ukraine, our vidmas were respected for their knowledge, not burned for it.”

These warrior-witches have become Ukraine’s most feared intelligence assets, moving through occupied territory like shadows. Orobets travels abroad often, where she is sometimes asked, “What happens if Ukraine runs out of men?”

“Be careful what you wish for,” she says. “If Ukraine’s women are in charge, there won’t be a Russian left alive.”

In the early months of the occupation, children played a role in the resistance. They slipped through checkpoints easily, took instantly to encrypted apps, and were extraordinarily brave. But the risks they took were no less grave than those faced by adults. An errant social-media post, or simply “liking” content supportive of Ukraine, was enough to get a child hauled in for interrogation. Those sessions could involve unspeakable violence, especially for girls. I interviewed one who was only 11 when her village near Kherson had been occupied. Implicated in “resistance” activities, she was dragged from her home. As we began our conversation, she apologized for her stutter. “I did not used to have this problem,” she told me, “until the Russians took me to the basement.”

The resistance says that it now enforces an absolute ban on children taking part. Dmytro, from the Kherson brigade, explained that “it’s not just about the risk to the kids. It’s about the risk to the whole unit.” The death of a child at Russian hands can devastate morale. Andriushchenko described the case of two teenage boys from Melitopol who had been interrogated by Russia’s security service. Their bodies were never returned, almost certainly because of how badly the boys had been tortured. “Their deaths hit us hard,” he said. “What they did to them.”

In practice, the ban on children helping the resistance has its limits. In one occupied city, teenagers have learned to move around the Russian camera network. For a while, they spray-painted Ukrainian colors on the sides of abandoned buildings. Now, given the risks of carrying blue or yellow paint, they chalk or scratch the Ukrainian letter Ї, which does not exist in the Russian alphabet, wherever they can get away with it. Even this, resistance leaders discourage. Sestra, the agent operating inside Mariupol, describes how “a single piece of graffiti can mean torture, a cellar, or deportation to Russia for the child, and arrest or the stripping of parental rights for the family.”

“It’s not worth it,” Andriushchenko said. “We need intel, not art. When they turn 18, they’ll get their turn.”

If resistance fighters are the first link in the kill chain, drone operators are the last. Iegor Kravchenko, whose call sign is “Ram,” commands a company in Ukraine’s 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment. Every night, his unit launches attack drones into the occupied territories. “A significant percentage of those missions,” he told me, “rely on intel provided by the resistance.”

Today, the middle-strike drone campaign is the main engine of partisan activity. It has become extraordinarily efficient. For a high-priority target, an air-defense system, a command post, a munitions dump, anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours can elapse between the transmission of coordinates and the strike. There have been moments when an operative was still chatting online with a soldier as a drone hit his position. “Our goal,” Orobets said, “is to make sure Russian soldiers never reach the front line.”

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

I asked the partisans why they would talk with me at all, sharing intimate details of the war’s most dangerous operations. In part, they are sending a message to the occupier: You are hated here. Sestra put a finer point on this: “I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him, suffocating, relentless, every second of every day. I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street, and to see in each of them his own potential destruction.”

The Ukrainian operatives also want Americans to know that Ukraine is fighting for every inch of its land. Asked whether Ukraine would tolerate a peace deal ceding occupied territory, Biletska answered, “Have you seen Bucha? Kherson? Mariupol? That’s not peace.”

As for Achmad, the Chechen commander who revealed the location of his own barracks, Andriushchenko was blunt: “He’s gone dark online, but we suspect he still doesn’t realize he was flirting with a middle-aged chuvak,” meaning a dude.

I asked whether he worried about exposing Achmad as a source. “No. I hope his unit learns what he did,” Andriushchenko said. “And then I hope they cut off his balls.”