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Thresholds of Survival: The Latest Report on Ukrainian Resistance to Russian Occupation by Jade McGlynn
00:45:42
Max and Maria spoke with Jade McGlynn about her latest report on Ukrainian resistance in the Russian occupied territories of Ukraine.
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- [00:07]
A
Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, director of the Stewart center and Europe Russia Eurasia Program at csis.
- [00:12]
B
And I'm Maria Snigavaya, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia.
- [00:16]
A
And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the center for Strategic International Studies. Hello everyone and welcome back to Russian Roulette. I'm Max Bergman here with my co host as always, Maria Snegavaya. And today we are joined by our Dear colleague Jade McGlynn. Jade is a research fellow in the War Studies department at King's College London. Additionally, she is the author of Russia's War from Polity Press in 2023, which examines domestic popular approval for Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine. And she's also the author of the book Memory Makers, the Politics of the Past in Putin's Russia from BloomSbury, also in 2023. She was very busy that year or probably the year before in how book publishing works. In that book details how the Russian state and society have used history to create a unifying national identity. Most importantly though, Jade is a non resident senior associate with us here at CSIS in our Europe, Russia and Eurasia program and we are thrilled to have her back on the pod. Jade, thanks so much for joining us.
- [01:27]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [01:28]
A
Now we're having you back, Jade, not just because you're an expert in all things Russia and what's happening in the war in Ukraine, but we're here to discuss your latest report for CSIS is titled Thresholds of Survival, the Resistance and Occupied Ukraine. It's out now@csis.org we're going to put a link to the show notes and this paper is really a sequel. It follows on the previous research you have also done for CSIS examining the state of the resistance against Russian forces against Russia in occupied Ukraine. That last report was back in the summer of 2024. Now that we're about a year and a half later, a lot has changed or not. And that's what we're going to sort of discuss today. So Jade, let's start with an overview of your findings. What is the what are your main takeaways in your paper and what is the kind of how would you characterize resistance right now in occupied Ukraine?
- [02:21]
C
So in terms of the key findings, I think the most important one is that resistance persists, but it's really changed. And without wanting to sort of anticipate any future questions, that is one of the core reasons why I wanted to write a follow up because if previously certain forms, let's say in 2022 and even into 2023 to a certain amount, some forms, particularly public forms of resistance, were still possible. In 2024, 2025, they become close to suicidal exception, a few cases. So really what we've seen in terms of changes in the resistance can't be decoupled from the changes we've seen in the occupation model, which has become, and it was already quite an extreme model, quite an extreme regime has become, you know, been a real development in terms of forms as well as scale of surveillance. There's been. Kiriyenko's influence has only grown, as it seems to grow in absolutely every field, but it's also grown in the occupied territories. And so we're starting to see a sort of unification of certain policies across. Whereas I think previously we were talking about three to arguably four very different types of regimes. Let's say between occupied Crimea, occupied Diana, so called Dina and Elena, and then occupied Zaporizhzhia, occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and occupied parts of Kherson. Now we're starting to see much more an effort to make them all quite similar in terms of the way the rules are applied. It's not there fully, but it's happening. We're also seeing, because of the incredible amounts of surveillance, both physical and of course, digital. And I'm sure we'll get on to talking about the max super appeal, that the forms of resistance that persist do tend to be private, they do tend to be focused around sending coordinates, they do tend to be, I think, more strategic, certainly less demonstrative, certainly don't look as good on Instagram. And I think that's going to be a kind of point that comes up again and again because this, the reality of the occupied territories, the reality that, you know, there are 15, 250 people who have been documented who are either, you know, in black sites or are just missing. And that's half a population. That's roughly now, if we exclude Crimea, because Crimea still does live in a slightly different setup. If we exclude Crimea, we now have about 3.36 million people in the occupied territories, excluding Crimea previously, it's obviously difficult with the maths because they were occupied at different times, but previously we can roughly say around 9 million people. So prior to 2014 or prior to 2022, so we've had massive depopulation as well. Most of the people, people who've stayed, 2 million of them are pensioners who are not necessarily the key demographic for resistance, for obvious reasons, but it's not like in the Hollywood movies. And it's also not like you might see on Instagram or TikTok. It's very arduous. It's very lonely. And what I wanted to do with the paper was to provide an overview of how the occupation regime has changed in a hopefully at least semi digestible format, but also to draw attention to the fact that resistance does persist. Because to me I find it quite remarkable that it does and I think I suppose to bring, bring some visibility to it, but in a realistic way. You know, that doesn't, that doesn't try to over romanticize it and also that doesn't try to kind of package it or brand it because it feels, I think it's quite like a unique. Without wanting to, you know, you always have to be careful not to sort of fall in love with your research, your research subject. But I think it is quite a remarkable and an unusual type of courage to perform resistance, such conditions. And I think that at the very least it's a human interest story and one that deserves to be a part of discussions of the war and yet so rarely is.
- [06:10]
A
Maybe I could ask you on when you reflect between the paper that has just come out in January and the one that came out in the summer of 2024, how has the resistance efforts evolved? I mean, it strikes me that in 2024, I think there was still hope that the Ukrainian military would be able to kind of go on the offensive, seize territory. I think probably by then hope had sort of diminished. The counteroffensive in 2023 had not been successful yet. There was still kind of a rationale or rhetoric, at least to that effect from the Ukrainian government about freeing occupied parts of Ukraine. Obviously in the last year since Donald Trump has become president, there's been talk about territorial concessions, about ceding the territory permanently to Russia. I would think that would diminish the, the motivation for those resisting. I could only imagine sort of In World War II, you know, if, if resistance elements within France or other places had sort of gotten a message from the allies that they weren't coming, you know, that would be a demoralizing element, I would think. But I'm so I'm curious how has the mood shifted? And maybe we can, we can talk further about, about how Russia has shifted. But has that shift in Ukraine's approach impacted the resistance in the occupied territories?
- [07:36]
C
At risk of sounding unkind, I think perhaps that slightly over centralizes the American role to the people of the occupied territories. In the sense that you picked up on something correctly. It was after the failure of the counteroffensive. It took a little bit of time, but obviously people did start to adjust their hopes. And I think that, that of course it hasn't Blunt. I don't think, I don't think President Trump's administration and his comments around kind of, you know, oh, like seeding, seating Donbass or giving up this or that have in any way helped motivation. But I think people who were motivated by the idea that liberation was kind of, if not imminent, then going to be somewhere in the short term. I think they had been disillusioned even before, you know, Trump was, was real. President Trump was reelected. And you did see that sort of across 2023, end of 2023 and into kind of summer 2024. I think that the primary motivation for most of the resistance, people who've been involved and since left the resistance, or people who are involved in curating the resistance so from the government occupied territories, the key motivator, to be honest with you, is just hate. There's just hatred of the people who've come to their homes and, you know, destroyed them and obviously behaved in, in all manner of grotesque ways. And one of the reasons why I really wanted to sort of write this, this update is, you know, to keep with the threshold theme. The occupation environment really has crossed this threshold where any form of visibility or resistance is very dangerous. And that means that sometimes I think probably certain people kind of get to define narratives about the occupied territories and the truth doesn't come out. And obviously I had to be very careful, just had to be careful with the first one. I had to be, I'd say, even more careful because this is something that I'm researching realistically every day, often in, in real time. And I think, I hope that I, at least I was able to provide a report that is not romanticized or asceticised, but still does bring some visibility. Because if we just think about the concrete elements by 2024 and certainly by 2025, essentially all digital traffic in the occupied territories is routed through sorm. You have. So the FSB is kind of Russia's lawful interception architecture. If something is encrypted, then is not encrypted, then the FSB can just read it in real time should they wish to. And of course, if it's a prominent, let's say like pro Ukrainian channel active in the occupied territories or a Ukrainian military affiliated channel, they're obviously probably going to pay more attention to that. You also have kind of other more sort of intelligence led, but they look civilian networks. Like there's these SMERSH style, they're called SMERSH after the Soviet death to spies, sort of spy grouping or counter, counter reconnaissance grouping. And they're like these telegram ecosystems that exist and sort of scrape and find any sort of Ukrainian who lives in the occupied territories, who might be posting or might have posted and something pro Ukrainian in the last few years. So since occupation and you know, it's not uncommon for people to just disappear over such things and then to reemerge in a couple of years and to be, you know, sentenced to 10 or 15 years for treason. So it's a completely lawless place and nobody pays any attention partly because it's difficult to know what's going on. There are certainly easier topics to research both in terms of happiness and in terms of access, but nobody knows what's going on. And therefore Russia, the Russian authority, seem to believe that they can just get away with this. And to be honest with you, unfortunately it looks like they're right. I mean there are efforts by for example, her coordination HQ to, to try to track and trace the civilian detainees, but it's, it's really quite, it's really quite difficult. And of course civilian detainees who are, who are essentially prisoners, but it's not diplomatically correct to call them that because that would infer that they were Russian and they're Ukrainian. It's not quite as an engaging a topic as children because of course children is always more of an emotional topic. But I hope as well to have drawn attention to their plight because you can't just keep 15,250 people in black sites. I mean, 42 of these sites according to the UN are just disused garages or like basement. I mean it's, it feels like it should at least be spoken about there. Of course, one of, I suppose the ethical issues in writing about this is in some ways you don't want them to have visibility because you know, any visibility is going to bring risk. And I think that there's always has to be an element of give and take there in the sense that I think there are many people who feel frustrated by some of the narratives that do get pushed by the Ukrainian government because you also drew attention to the Ukrainian government. And I think it's very fair to say that, I mean, there was the closing down of the ministry that was more responsible for the occupied territories, the Ministry of National Unity, so called, did nothing to help or even to try to engage the people of the occupied territories. It was headed for a long time by a man, Chernyshov, who was recently implicated in the Mindich Gate. So I don't know if the people of the occupied territories, if perhaps that tried to steal from Ukraine's energy system, perhaps perhaps you might have seen them as more worthy of attention. But I think that the people of the occupied territories have been let down by the Ukrainian government often. I think they've been ignored often in the west, and I think they've been left out of a conversation in a way that is, on a human level, to me, quite baffling, because it's, at the very least, a very interesting story. Obviously, on a moral level. Well, I mean, there are lots of stories that are morally worthy of our attention, and there are lots of stories morally worthy of my attention that I don't pay much attention to. So I. I won't get into that. But on the strategic level, this is just the other side of the front line, and these are people sending coordinates, providing human intelligence, checking whether or not that drone really did hit. And I think they're a pretty integral part of, you know, stopping logistics. Like, there's a reason that we see all of this, you know, blowing up of different systems on the railways, particularly the Zaporizhzhia line, because it slows down the logistics. Like, they. They deserve some recognition, even if it can't be individualized for very obvious reasons. I think there needs to be some recognition of what they're doing and in really quite scary circumstances.
- [14:19]
B
Thank you so much, Jade. And obviously all the admirable work that you've been doing that is very risky and highly, highly informative. I wanted to follow up a little bit on the key issue, the key change that you flagged in your paper, talking about Kiryenko's new impulse model in ways in which it's difficult, different from what we've seen before in Crimea, in Donbass, ways in which it actually parallels previous trends, the economic and demographic controls in particular, that you cover. If you could provide more detail and also how effective you think Russia's demographic engineering could be in changing the social reality on the ground in light of the issues that you flagged before and perhaps lack of responsiveness sometimes on the side of the Ukrainian government. Government.
- [15:07]
C
Big, big questions. If I start with the sort of the general environment. So just to give a very, very quick overview, obviously Crimea has its own path because it was, you know, according to Russian law, it was, you know, immediately taken in and made part of the Russian Federation. And so many things sort of happened much quicker in Crimea, as opposed to the parts of Donbas that were occupied after 2014, which were pretty lawless to be mean. There's sort of, I think you could describe it as kind of gangster led. Obviously, Russia ultimately was in control. I don't think there's any, any doubt about that. And there's, there's plenty of evidence, but it wasn't and still now does have, let's say, slightly more autonomy. It's slightly less controlled than occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and occupied parts of Kherson, where there's really quite a. Fewer, even fewer things are possible. And there are some pluses to that for occupied Zaporizhzhia, parts of occupied Zaporizhzhia and occupied Hassan. Well, not pluses, but there are efforts to try to meet some of this very bare and basic social needs in occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and occupied parts of Kherson, because they understand that the population is very much not loyal and that they need to, you know, manage them. In occupied Donetsk in particular, is where you tend to see the, you know, the most unhappiness in terms of both the infrastructure situation, economic situation. So there are still, you know, inevitable differences. Korenko's sovereign management approach has tried to sort of norm, of course, to normalize the occupation, the sense of, you know, Russia's here forever, it's always been here. There was that weird blip when Ukraine was here, but, you know, let none of us talk about that. And of course, to manufacture a sense, sense of sovereignty, to manufacture a sense of legitimacy, which clearly they don't have any of, you know, even among, you know, some people who would have been described as so people who wait, or people who are waiting for the Russians, I think it's fair to say that many of them were perhaps disappointed with, with the reality. The defining features are very much a sort of a pursuit of total control. But there's not even the kind of legalism or technocratism because it's to a certain extent a bit. A bit wild. And obviously it's incredibly militarized as an area. I mean, many of the various plants and factories that were sort of ransacked or raided, they're then being turned into sort of different militarist uses, I have to say. I mean, if this isn't 100, what my research focuses on. But of course, you come across various elements of militarization, the building up of bases, and it seems like the occupied Territories are being turned into, into fortresses but also into launch pads. It's to look at it, it does not look like a country that is considering peace and you know that Russia is a country considering peace anytime soon. If you look at those sorts of dynamics. To return to the more demographic questions, passportization is essentially complete now. So passportization is the forced. Forcing people to take Russian passports. I mean access, access to health care, to property, to employment had, you know, to schooling had, had long been tied to. But after September 10, 2025, if you didn't have a Russian passport then you had to either leave the occupied territories or be classed as a foreigner. Even though perhaps let's say you'd never left Mariupol or Melitopol in your life. At the same point you have, you know, huge levels of kind of ideological re engineering, much of which we see in Russia itself, to be honest, in terms of the new advisors to head teachers or principals in American English to who explain who check that the schools and the pupils are doing enough patriotic education, much of it very militaristic. This process is only more intense in the occupied territories. Plus there's added elements of kind of specific de Ukrainianization a big focus. There have been various manuals leaked from Ministry of Education and also from the FSB about how to spot extremism in young, in youngsters in the occupied territories. Obviously extremism being any form of sort of lingering loyalty to the Ukrainian state. Ukrainian language instruction in all occupied schools has essentially been banned or just dropped. That's since September 1, 2025. So in some ways this is actually harsher than you know, for many of the years of the Soviet Union as well. If we come back to the point around the kind of demographic resettlement we're seeing, it's very difficult to find exact numbers but we are seeing quite large numbers of both migrants. So from Central Asia, but also in some places particularly to Melitopol or places that just weren't as damaged by the war and bluntly are just perhaps nicer places to live than some places in Siberia because they're by the sea and warmer. You are seeing some people moving in. I mean it's, it's a pretty unfair system. I wrote about this in the first report about a kind of two tier system where you essentially a lot of the houses, if, if you lost your house, let's say in Mariupol, you should in theory be able to, to achieve some kind of content to receive some kind of compensation for, for that property. In practice there are very few of these compensation houses. So most people, so many people are still effectively homeless in Mariupol. And you do sometimes see this come out onto, you know, give us back our homes. There was some graffiti in Liver Barishne in Mariupol earlier, earlier this year from a group of, of ladies who, who were not especially anti, who are not an especially anti Russian group. Often people dismissively call what they do kind of in that sense of, you know, very kind of the videos to Putin, you know, please. They're very sort of submissive. But you do see these, these outbursts in Miracle because the housing situation is very bad. But there are flashy new apartment complexes going up, which leads to confusion. Those apartment complexes are all mortgage housing and some of the mortgage rates offered are as low as 2%. And I haven't checked the mortgage rate recently in Russia, but I feel like 25 to 35% is a more reasonable mortgage rate compared to certainly that I used to see. So a 2% mortgage rate, which would be a dream in, in England. I mean, they're obviously designed to sort of lure people in. And you do still have kind of ongoing efforts as well to encourage people to move. I should say, though, that the Ukrainian government recently spoke about siberization sounds better in Russian, this idea that people were being moved out en masse and deported to Siberia. And I'm afraid there's really. No, no, I've looked for a long time and there is no evidence of that. I mean, it's. Again, kind of comes back to this point. It's a great narrative. Like, you know, there's a part of me that almost wants to believe it because it tracks with the sort of thing they would do. But, but there isn't any evidence of that. But there are, there is a lot of effort to pressure, particularly people who are seen as politically unreliable out of the occupied territories. And of course, people who are active and politically unreliable, they can just be disappeared and are showing the full force of, of the law. So I think that a bit like in Russia itself, although of course, the repression has played a huge role, particularly at the start. I think that it, for many people, it's going to be just the extreme fear and just the needing to get on with your life, the needing to survive. I mean, in parts of Donetsk, Marupa, you get water once every three days. It's very difficult to wake up and start, you know, examining to what extent you really feel Russian or you really feel Ukrainian. If you just don't know how you're going to get water to Kind of bathe your baby, right?
- [23:06]
A
Jade, maybe we could talk about the technical aspects of this, because it strikes me that one of the very 21st century elements of this resistance or of the context in which this resistance is taking place is in sort of almost total technical surveillance. In your piece. Your report does a really good job, I think, of, of walking through the kind of universality of Russia's surveillance of the population. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the aggressive promotion of the Russian government's Max super messaging app and you could tell us about how this is working, what sort of environment this is creating for those resisting. It seems like in some ways they're probably going back to the kind of analog days to the, you know, if you're resisting, to kind of what people were doing maybe in, in, in World War II and other times in resisting. So maybe you could walk us through the, the technological element here.
- [24:11]
C
I mean, of course this is an environment that's completely saturated by propaganda. You do have, you have the Max super apps, much like in Russia itself, there's a real reticence towards moving over to it. You know, people try to have it on a second phone or, you know, people are not silly. They understand that that app is not designed to protect their privacy and their personal data, to put it mildly. In the occupied territories specifically, the rollout of Max has been more aggressive and started somewhat earlier, for example, for a long time already. So for a good kind of six months already, it's been not possible to buy phones in, at least in Mariupol and probably further across the occupied territories without having Macs and other things already pre installed, installed. So, so if people wanted to buy a new phone, they, they had to travel all the way to Rostov to, to Russia. Of course, even if you don't have the Mac super app on your phone, I've already referenced sorm, so the, the kind of digital monitoring system which means that without any kind of need for any form of sort of even faux legalism, you know, the security services in Russia can just intercept and read your communications if it's unencrypted. So essentially if it's Telegram, which is what a lot of people are just using, and it's still by far, you know, the most most popular kind of messenger in the occupied territories. If you're using secret chats, your message, they wouldn't be able to see the actual content of your message. They would be able to see, you know, metadata, like are you sending a photo, are you sending videos? Which would be the sort of thing they'd be looking for, presuming that they might think it was a video of, let's say, Russian equipment, military equipment, etc. Who are you messaging is, you know, where that person is, etc. If you're just using Telegram, let's say for example, you're using a bot. And there are a lot of channels that do ask people in the occupied territories to upload for them coordinates or to send them coordinates via unencrypted bots, which as I think you can probably hear, like frustrates me and frankly shocks me a lot. But if you send it via that, then they can just see what you're sending. Now if it's a bot that's not really very well known, and if all you're doing is sending code coordinates and it's, you know, the people asking you to do that are quite clearly asking you to do it for military purposes, then I think you're going to be dealing with a more informed kind of cyber literate person who would be able to take the measures to avoid that. I think where I worry is when sometimes it's not clearly military, where, you know, it might be encouraging people to just upload kind of non military things, but things that, you know, Russia, you can, everybody can read, including an English translation, Russia's recent kind of national nationalities policy. It was published at the end of November 2025. There are very clear metrics there about their need to make Ukrainians Russian, you know, about the need to have 96% of people in the occupied territory, sorry, 95% of people in the occupied territories evincing a Russian Civic identity by 2036, like really weirdly specific metrics. And they also make it perfectly clear that they see any form of kind of Ukrainian identity among people of the occupied territories as a form of terrorism. So even if we might see, okay, we're sending a nice sort of photo of yourself in Ukrainian colors from somewhere like Yorta or occupied Melitopol. That's a nice thing to do and that's nice and nonviolent. The Russians will not see it that way. And we have to be cognizant of the atmosphere in which people are being asked to do certain things. So I think it's not even just about understanding the levels of surveillance, which are extreme. And not just digital either. I mean there are numerous checkpoints, particularly as you get enter occupied Zaporizhzhia and closer to the front line you have roving teams who have all, you know, who go around checking if There are any phones that are active, that are not, that are not registered, because in order to buy a sim now you have to be. A sim has to be linked to your Russian passport. And you also, there also has to be video footage of you buying the sim. To my understanding, that's also the same in Russia. Recently in Donetsk, Phoenix cut off about 30% of users. So Phoenix is, is the pretty illegal, I think, mobile network carrier that exists in occupied Donetsk and which seems, according to Telegram, to not work a good 70% of the time anyway. But nevertheless, they cut off, I think, 30% of people who hadn't updated their phones to be linked to a Russian passport. So they are trying to sort of crack down. It's a place where I think for resistance actors, it must feel incredibly low only. And as we, as you mentioned and as I discussed in the paper, there is naturally a shift back to analog forms. People can still talk, you can still use VPNs. You know, the Russians try to make that harder, particularly in areas closer to the front line. There's been a massive crackdown on VPNs recently, as I presia, according to, let's say, people close to Ukrainian special forces in other areas like Luhansk, where it's not so sensitive in terms of the front line, that there's less, there's less focus on elements like this that it's not to say that they can't, you know, kind of rare up again at different points, but there's no real way around it. You, you have to be aware of it. But ultimately, if you want to get coordinates and images and messages to the other side, you are going to have to use digital forms. And I think it's just about encouraging, to a certain extent you can try to encourage cyber literacy, but if Telegram's the only real app that, that works, people are going to use it. I mean, if it's Telegram or Max, you're going to go with Telegram. I think much more important is to make sure that the people who are trying to communicate with people in the occupied territories are themselves cyber literate and not. And, and context. And literate in the context of the occupied territories. Because you could know a lot about cyber and it would just not be relevant. Relevant because the FSB have all of these powers that you aren't aware that they have or just resources that you wouldn't expect them to have, for example, because otherwise you do end up in a position where ultimately people in the occupied territories are being exploited by people who aren't doing that. Intentionally, but just because of their lack of contextual knowledge, that happens.
- [30:30]
B
Okay, thank you very much. Another question that we have about the paper is the interest of interesting patterns of variation in resistance. For example, you provide data on different kinds of attacks and sabotage and especially their geographic distribution. Maybe you can clarify as to why. What are the factors explaining this variation across various occupied regions of Ukraine?
- [30:53]
C
I should be careful and say the figures are a bit provisional because they're based on publicly available reporting. And even if somebody in the Ukrainian military was silly enough to give me, or indeed themselves had, because the resistance, you know, in Ukraine is managed in a very chaotic, ad hoc and Ukrainian fashion. But even if they were kind of silly enough to give them to me, clearly I wouldn't be allowed to publish them. So these are just from publicly available reporting that we've kind of cross checked and used my research assistant for this particular element, Ilyam, that we've kind of tried to cross check. So it has to be treated, I think as indicative and very much not as, you know, an infallible process. That said, with all the caveats, I mean, there are certain patterns that are pointed out. So the south, so particularly like occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and Mariupol, they tend to be the most prominent areas in some ways, perhaps that's not surprising, both because these are the key kind of supply chains, you know, for, for Zaporizhzhia, for the. Where the front line, where a big part of the front line is. But also this is clearly, these are also clearly areas that were occupied after 2022 and where parts of the population are just demographically going to be more likely. Well, they've not had, you know, 12 years under occupation. There's not been 12 years of different types of schooling, bluntly of brainwashing, of propagandization, of militarisation, and also of huge marginalization, which I think changes almost the level on which human beings live. Like we were talking about earlier, if you don't have access to water, you're just going to engage with certain questions less, you're going to develop certain critical thinking elements left because you're just living in bare survival mode, which unfortunately has been the case I think, in parts of occupied Donetsk, not necessarily for collaborators or people close to Pashilin, but certainly for other. It's in Donbass activity does still persist, but I think it's fair to say that there it's often carried out more in terms of Ukrainian armed forces working with coordinates and Human intelligence rather than some of the more on the ground activity that we see in occupied parts of Kherson. I pr. You also see activity in occupied Crimea as well. I think one of the difficult things that we've had when collecting this data is it's very well known that you can just pay people to do certain things for you, to blow things up or, you know, to disrupt or to commit sabotage. And one of the things we tried to do was to make sure that this was linked at least to somebody who was officially willing to claim it. But it still is. It's a very difficult process. And certainly even over time, you know, there were groups who perhaps were legitimate at the start, but then they, they maybe get a little bit of fame and then, you know, some of the claims start becoming more bombastic. And it's not purely from a research kind of ethics, though of course, that's important point of view that I want to be careful of. That is also because, I mean, one of the elements that really comes out is of course, people in the occupied territories are living under huge amounts of propaganda from the Russian side. And often actually, you know, it's not as some of the propaganda is ridiculous, like the official narrative narratives, the official channels linked with, let's say, the kind of the Gauleiters or the collaborator officials, but there's also local channels which are a little bit more reasonable and kind of have to try to sort of in some way cohere or correspond to the reality on the ground and then to manipulate that reality or to find the best way to frame it in the most kind of pro Kremlin way. They have those huge amounts of propaganda. And unfortunately there are. Well, no, fortunately there are a number of. Of excellent Ukrainians themselves, often from the occupied territories, number of excellent Ukrainian like news outlets and investigative journalists who are communicating, but I would say broadly from the Ukrainian government itself often, or from the military often you do get similar similarly unbelievable and propagandistic narratives being pushed towards them that have, you know, very much focused on these ideas that, oh, you know, another kind of. I exaggerate obviously for effect, but, you know, another 12 FSB agents have been, you know, taken out today and occupied top well, they just clearly haven't. And of course anybody living in Tokmak or wherever knows that this hasn't happened. And to come back to the siberization point that I made earlier, it's important because it, it reduces credibility and trust in Ukraine among Ukrainians still living in the occupied territories, people living in occupied Hasan. They know that that's not happening, happening. They know that people aren't being deported to Siberia. So it's confusing to them why they would, why people would say that. And it makes them feel even more alienated. And I think of all the things that don't need to happen, the pro Ukrainian citizens of the occupied territories should not be being made to feel more alienated by the communications.
- [35:55]
B
Very important and obviously in a lot of ways, heartbreaking. Thank you so much for your description. One follow up to that is, is to what extent, given this difficult ways in which the resistance now, resistance now expresses itself and the covered operations, everything that you've described, to what extent it alters how we think of success of these operations. You discussed this in the paper. If you could perhaps describe it for our audience in a little bit more detail.
- [36:25]
C
Of course. And I think it's an important question because people often ask me, okay, but what impact does it have? And I think it's better to talk about the impact of in, in more qualitative terms. So in the paper, and often in answer to that question, I always use the example of Artem Timofeev, who is a man from Donetsk, originally from Donetsk, who went back into occupation. He took a Russian passport, he set up a company that hired out lorries, trucks, I think in American English, you know, like large. Yeah. And he did all of that so that he could move freely and coordinate the logistics and indeed provide said lorries, trucks for Operation Spiderweb. And on the day before he, he crossed the border from Russia and in the happiest way possible for a citizen from the occupied territories, has not been seen again and hopefully will not be seen again until it's safe for him to be seen again. So I think it's less about the visibility or, you know, God, God forbid, the number of followers or some other kind of nonsense that a network might have and actually the extent to which they're able to remain an important and effective part of the Ukrainian military effort. Because I'm, without wanting to sound kind of cynical and jaded by the war, I'm afraid I am rather cynical about the idea of non violent resistance in such a war. I just don't, I mean, in the case of the occupied territories, I just think that, I think it's kind of a manipulative term because ultimately everything leads to violence. If somebody goes out into the street with a nice sign about how much they love Ukraine, in the occupied territories, that's going to end in violence. That person is not committing violence, but that is going to end in violence for that individual because the FSB or whoever are going to find them and drag them off and do awful things to them. We can pretend that's non violent because we like it and it seems nice and it lets us live in our kind of safe worlds. But there's violence, violence in it. Similarly, sending coordinates in itself is not a violent action, but it is consciously leading to violence and destruction. And I think it's important to reflect just the sheer violence of, of the reality that people live in in the occupied territories. And of course, you know, I'm not a military person. It's not my job to say, certainly because I wouldn't be brave enough to do it, say what people should or, or shouldn't do. It's simply that I have to be honest in depicting what I can see and what to me seems, seems possible. And therefore I don't find it surprising that we've seen such a shift towards this very private, quite individualized, quite atomized and very lonely effort towards much more kind of private and violent resistance. The sending of coordinates solo acts. Because even for a resistance network to survive, it can't really be a network work or a cell in the traditional sense. Certainly, as the resistance operating concept puts it that NATO uses in its doctrine is much more, you know, having one coordinator who then has agents, agents who never speak to each other, do not know the other one exists, but who are sometimes often unknowingly spying on other ones is a very lonely existence and it has to be that way in order to keep them safe.
- [39:32]
A
Yeah, I think one thing your report does a really good job of is sort of highlighting the difficulty of trying to resist in this environment. And in some ways our military doctrine in the west is sort of built up for democratic resistance, a resistance against a democratic occupier in the sense that it can be shamed to about the use of force, about the use of violence, about repression. It's not that the US and coalition forces didn't do this in Afghanistan, other places, places. But there's a general governor on the kind of expression of violence that is, doesn't really feel in a more authoritarian state that that is, that is the case. I want to maybe pivot to one final question because it's late where you are. You're in coming to us from Estonia, it's late at night. But maybe just one final question about how you see things inside of Ukraine. As someone who's been spent a lot of time in Kharkiv, and I'm curious what your sense is of the current mood of the country we're in the. In January, it's wintertime powers being shut off. It's a real, really cold winter. What is your kind of just as sort of a closing question which we could go on and on but maybe you're, you know, how do you see things right now in Ukraine itself? We've been talking about the occupied territories, but what do you think that the mood is? Is there a shift in how people are viewing the war? And maybe you could just talk about your reflections on where things stand as we stare at the middle of a cold winter in Ukraine.
- [41:10]
C
Yeah, I got back a couple of weeks ago and I'm heading back out in about four hours. So I think people are just completely understandably exhausted and just wondering like when will this end and how will it end? Because, you know, and I completely agree with most, the vast majority of my Ukrainian interlocutors who say this just Russia does not look like a country that is engaging seriously with the negotiation process. It looks like a country that is planning to, that thinks it can, it can, you know, achieve its objectives. Which I would suggest is the loss of Ukraine losing its ability to function as a state, Russia regaining control and then being able to reclaim what it perceives as its kind of lost global role or lost role over European security architecture. Ukrainians feel I think, frustrated with Europeans for just not having even a smidgen of the bravery and courage that they've had. I think they feel a bit flabbergasted maybe by what's happened in America. And I think they feel very frustrated with many of their own politicians. Certainly the removal of Mr. Yamak was, was met with overwhelming positivity in the country given his connection to a variety of unpopular efforts to, to crack down on anti corruption bo and his, his links to both alleged and, and seemingly less alleged certain corruption scandals. I think the recent changes, people, people want something to hope for but you know, the world is, is not, is not giving them much. On the other hand, I mean, what choice do they have? Like Russia. We've just been discussing how grim it is to be in the occupied territory. I think is, I think that explains how you can have these figures where people say yes, they want the water and of course they want the war to end. Who in their right mind at this moment does not want that war to end but to hand over, you know, free cities? I mean, I go to Slovansk quite a lot, which is one of the unoccupied cities of Donetsk region, it's close to the border of Kharkiv region to just hand people over knowingly to the type of regime that we've just discussed. People just dragged out at 3am I mean kind of Stalinist style and then just disappeared and you cannot find and maybe you'll never ever find out about them because many of them will just be tortured to death or, or even executed. For many people, that's not an option. I have to be honest with you, no matter how much I would want some something to end, I would find it very hard to hand over like a part of my country to that of my people. You know, my fellow citizens.
- [44:06]
A
Jade, I think that's a really profound point and I think that's part of the reason why these peace talks are seem sort of destined to go nowhere as we've talked about on the show. Unfortunately, we're gonna have to leave it there. I want to thank you so much for joining us so late and hopefully you can get some sleep before your flight and your journey back to Ukraine. Be sure to check out Jade's paper. It's titled Thresholds of the Resistance in Occupied Ukraine. It's out now at csia. If you haven't already, please don't forget to subscribe to our show and give us a five star rating. Additionally, please subscribe to CSIS channel on YouTube and be sure to check out our sister podcast, the Europhile, where in one of our recent episodes we have an interview with Michael Kaufman about not just the war in Ukraine, but really looking at NATO's response and NATO forces and how they would stand up in a fight with Russia. So please check that out and you can find the Euro file wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you next time on Russian Roulette.
- [45:12]
B
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- [45:18]
A
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- [45:26]
B
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