The Invisible Front: Ukraine’s Partisan War in Occupied Territory
How Atesh, Zla Mavka, and Others, Continue a Resistance Tradition That Won’t Stop for Ceasefires
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The relay cabinet exploded at 5:31 AM on a December morning near Urozhayne, a village in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast that most people have never heard of. The blast tore through electrical equipment on the railway line between Bolshoi Tokmak and Verkhniy Tokmak, severing power to a section of track that Russian forces depend on to move ammunition and fuel to the front. The agent who destroyed it transmitted precise coordinates—47.216805432, 35.961234274—to confirm the operation, then disappeared back into the population of an occupied Ukrainian town where Russian soldiers patrol the streets and FSB officers hunt for exactly this kind of resistance.
This wasn’t an artillery strike or a special operations raid. This was a partisan sabotage operation conducted by Atesh, one of two major Ukrainian resistance networks operating across occupied territories from Crimea to the Donbas, and increasingly inside Russia itself.
When Western policymakers discuss “freezing” the conflict or accepting “current realities” along the front line, they reveal fundamental ignorance about what happens in occupied territory. They’re proposing ceasefires that partisans won’t honor, settlements that resistance networks will ignore, and diplomatic solutions that assume occupied populations will simply accept foreign control.
They won’t.
The Continuity of Resistance
Volodymyr Zhemchugov—known as “The Luhansk Partisan”—has been explaining this reality to anyone willing to listen since escaping Russian occupation in 2014. A native of Luhansk who lived under Russian control for years, organizing partisan cells and gathering intelligence while surrounded by occupation forces, Zhemchugov now operates openly as one of the resistance’s most articulate voices.
His message is unambiguous: partisan resistance in occupied territories operates according to its own logic, independent of formal military commands or diplomatic agreements. These aren’t soldiers who will stand down when ordered. They’re civilians-turned-guerrillas fighting for their homes, their families, and their very identity.
“People in the occupied territories didn’t ask for Russian ‘liberation,’” Zhemchugov regularly reminds his audience. “They’re waiting for Ukraine to return, and they’re making the occupation as costly as possible in the meantime.”
This isn’t rhetoric. It’s operational reality documented across more than a decade of resistance—from the initial 2014 occupation of Crimea and Donbas, through the desperate months after February 2022 when Russian forces controlled vast swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine, to the current partisan networks operating in territories that remain under Russian control.
The infrastructure built during those years—the communication networks, the sleeper cells, the coordination protocols with Ukrainian intelligence—didn’t materialize overnight when Russian tanks crossed the border in 2022. It evolved from years of underground organization, drawing on Ukrainian historical memory of partisan resistance against both Nazi and Soviet occupation.
Two Faces of Modern Resistance
That historical continuity now manifests in organizations like Atesh and Zla Mavka, which represent different but complementary approaches to partisan warfare in the digital age.
Atesh—the name evokes fire—operates with military precision across the widest geographic expanse, from Sevastopol in Crimea to Chelyabinsk deep inside Russia. Analysis of their Telegram channel reveals 873 documented operations since the full-scale invasion: 260 targeting and intelligence operations that provided coordinates for Ukrainian strikes, 251 reconnaissance missions tracking Russian military movements, and 197 direct sabotage actions. Their agents include embedded Ukrainian civilians, Crimean Tatars who never accepted Russian occupation after 2014, and increasingly, Russian military personnel who have turned against the war.
Zla Mavka—the “Angry Mavka,” named for a Ukrainian forest spirit—emerged from Melitopol in February 2023 with a different character. Founded explicitly as women-led resistance, their channel launched with a simple declaration: “We girls got together and decided to help the boys torment the Russians until the Armed Forces arrive.” Over 584 operations documented in their communications show a network focused on community organizing, collaborator targeting, and local intelligence gathering.
Both groups evolved from the resistance networks that formed in 2014 and expanded dramatically after February 2022. When Russian forces occupied Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, and other southern cities in early 2022, they encountered populations that had spent eight years watching what occupation meant in Donbas and Crimea. Those populations didn’t wait for instructions from Kyiv—they began organizing immediately.
The Yellow Ribbon movement in Kherson marked Russian military positions with yellow and blue ribbons, providing targeting information for Ukrainian forces. Underground media operations continued publishing news despite Russian attempts to control information. Partisan networks maintained communications even when Russians cut cellular networks, using encrypted channels and satellite links that Ukrainian intelligence had prepared years earlier.
Operating Behind the Lines
The intelligence value alone justifies calling this an invisible front rather than scattered resistance.
When Atesh agents in Hola Prystan on the left bank of the Dnipro River transmitted boat base locations to Ukrainian forces, the subsequent strike destroyed more than ten watercraft and killed Russian personnel preparing for assaults across the river. When Zla Mavka operatives documented the concentration of Russian equipment in Berdyansk port, Ukrainian long-range strikes reduced that equipment to scrap metal. When partisan networks across Kherson Oblast provided detailed mapping of Russian defensive positions during summer 2022, that intelligence proved crucial to the successful counteroffensive that liberated the city in November.
This coordination between partisans and conventional forces represents a significant evolution from historical guerrilla warfare. World War II partisans operated from forest bases with radio sets and ammunition caches. Modern Ukrainian partisans live in occupied cities, communicate via encrypted Telegram channels, and coordinate strikes using smartphones and commercial drones.
But some operational patterns remain constant.
Atesh conducted a months-long infiltration that mirrors classic partisan tradecraft. An agent signed a contract with the Russian military, attended their UAV operator training center, and deployed to a drone unit operating in Donetsk Oblast. For six months he transmitted intelligence—warehouse locations, headquarters positions, planned offensive operations. Then he provided the exact coordinates of his own unit’s forward operating base. Ukrainian forces struck the position during preparations for an assault on Toretsk.
Result: two Russian drone operators killed, three wounded, the offensive disrupted.
The report announcing the operation ended with photographs of the destroyed position and a line that could have come from UPA operations in 1943: “We note that most of those visible are already dead.”
The railroad sabotage campaign demonstrates how traditional guerrilla tactics combine with modern coordination. Atesh has systematically targeted relay cabinets and electrical infrastructure along the rail lines supplying Russian forces in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts. Each successful operation—documented with precise coordinates transmitted to Ukrainian intelligence—disrupts logistics for days or weeks. The cumulative effect: Russian commanders never know if ammunition will arrive when needed, fuel deliveries don’t materialize, reinforcements show up late or not at all.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re part of sustained campaigns spanning months and years, executed by networks that survived brutal FSB counterintelligence operations and adapted continuously to Russian countermeasures.
The Geographic Scope
What makes these operations strategically significant isn’t just their tactical effect—it’s their geographic reach across territories Western diplomats casually discuss “freezing” in place.
Atesh reports operations from:
Sevastopol, where they’ve conducted reconnaissance of the 91st Ship Repair Plant servicing Black Sea Fleet vessels
Kerch, monitoring the bridge and military installations around the occupied Crimean crossing
Chelyabinsk, where they destroyed a vehicle at Shagol Air Base, home to Su-34 bombers striking Ukrainian cities
Bryansk, where they conducted reconnaissance of the Kremniy EL plant producing microelectronics for Russian missiles
Norilsk in the Arctic Circle, where they mapped the military commissariat to disrupt mobilization
Zla Mavka operates primarily across southern Ukraine:
Melitopol, their stronghold where they’ve systematically targeted collaborators
Berdyansk, providing intelligence on port logistics and Russian equipment concentrations
Occupied portions of Kherson Oblast, coordinating with Ukrainian forces across the Dnipro
Crimea, where they’ve documented strikes from Yalta to Sevastopol
This isn’t resistance confined to front-line areas where Ukrainian artillery provides support. These are networks operating hundreds of kilometers from Ukrainian-controlled territory, in cities that Russian forces claim to control, conducting operations that prove occupation remains fundamentally unstable.
Cross-referencing partisan reports with documented Ukrainian strikes shows pattern correlation. When Atesh announces reconnaissance of the Saki airfield in Crimea, Ukrainian strikes follow. When they report ammunition warehouses in occupied territories, those warehouses explode. When Zla Mavka documents Russian troop concentrations, precision weapons find those concentrations.
Direct Action
The operations go beyond providing targeting coordinates.
Zla Mavka conducted a systematic campaign in Melitopol that sent unmistakable messages to occupation authorities:
Sergey Skovyrko, head of occupation police precinct officers: eliminated
Dmitry Kucherkov, occupation fire department official: vehicle attack
Alexander Mishchenko, occupation police officer: vehicle bombing
When I was in newly liberated territories in 2022—Bucha, Izyum, Kherson—the first question residents asked wasn’t about food or electricity. It was about the collaborators. Who would be held accountable. Who would face consequences for working with the occupation.
In Melitopol, that accountability is being delivered in real time.
The moral and legal complexity of these operations deserves acknowledgment. Extrajudicial killings violate due process—no trial, no defense, no judicial review. But occupation authorities don’t provide trials either. They provide torture cells in basements, filtration camps where thousands have disappeared, arbitrary detention, and forced deportation to Russia.
Ukrainian courts can’t operate in occupied territories. International tribunals move at glacial pace if they operate at all. So what accountability mechanism exists for a police official who helps FSB forces identify resistance members, knowing those people will be tortured?
The legal answer: they should face trial in Ukrainian courts after liberation, with full due process and proportional sentencing.
The operational reality: liberation could be years away. Every day a collaborator operates strengthens the occupation apparatus, identifies more resistance members, causes more civilian suffering.
The partisan answer: immediate consequence.
International humanitarian law recognizes that civilian officials of an occupation administration can lose protected status when they participate directly in military operations or security functions. An occupation police chief coordinating with Russian security services to suppress resistance arguably crosses that line.
But the moral calculus remains uncomfortable. And should remain uncomfortable. The moment partisan resistance becomes morally easy—without ethical tension—it ceases to be resistance and becomes revenge.
Russian Soldiers Who Won’t Fight
What Zhemchugov has emphasized—and what Atesh operations increasingly document—is resistance emerging from within Russian military ranks themselves.
Atesh reported that Russian soldiers on the Kherson front are deliberately sabotaging equipment to avoid suicide missions. Agents embedded in the 126th Separate Coastal Defense Brigade document soldiers breaking boat motors, puncturing inflatable vessels, and transmitting boat base coordinates to Ukrainian forces specifically to avoid assaults across the Dnipro.
Russian command opened three official investigations into sabotage. Their solution: more investigations, more punishment threats. The actual problem—soldiers who would rather commit sabotage than die in pointless attacks—remains unaddressed.
Atesh doesn’t just document this phenomenon. They encourage it. Their recruitment messages targeted at Russian soldiers don’t appeal to Ukrainian patriotism. They provide practical survival advice: how to sabotage your boat’s motor in ways that look like accidents. How to damage equipment. How to preserve your life while commanders send you into death traps.
This represents psychological warfare at its most effective. But it also reveals the fundamental instability of Russian occupation. When occupying forces include significant numbers willing to sabotage their own operations, when soldiers facing combat prefer committing acts that get them court-martialed over following orders, the occupation isn’t sustainable regardless of what lines get drawn on maps.
The Women’s War
Zla Mavka’s explicitly gendered resistance adds dimensions that military-focused analysis misses.
The channel’s founding message was direct: “Girls got together and decided to help the boys torment the Russians.” The communication style—conversational, using emojis, informal language, explicit appeals to women subscribers—creates community that purely military channels don’t.
This isn’t peripheral to resistance operations. Women in occupied territories face specific vulnerabilities that create specific opportunities. Russian filtration operations target women differently than men. FSB interrogators use different techniques. Occupation authorities assume women are less threatening, which creates operational space. A woman photographing a military convoy attracts less attention than a man. A woman asking questions at a checkpoint faces different responses.
Zla Mavka operationalizes these realities while maintaining cultural resistance that extends beyond military targets. When they warned Melitopol residents about mobile FSB listening stations, they preserved operational security for the entire community. When they continued posting in Ukrainian despite occupation authorities demanding Russian, they maintained cultural identity under conditions designed to erase it.
This echoes the role women played in resistance throughout 2022. In Kherson, Nova Kakhovka, and Melitopol, women led the mass protests confronting Russian soldiers in March 2022. They brought Ukrainian flags to demonstrations despite Russian forces firing over their heads. They demanded the release of kidnapped mayors and officials. They organized food distribution networks that sustained populations when occupation authorities tried to enforce dependency.
The transition from public protest to underground resistance happened when Russian forces began using live ammunition against demonstrators. But the networks formed during those protests—the trusted relationships, the communication channels, the organizational structures—persisted into partisan operations.
The Technology of Resistance
The operational methods combine ancient guerrilla warfare with capabilities that earlier partisan movements couldn’t access.
Encrypted messaging apps allow coordination across occupied territories when Russian forces cut cellular networks. Satellite communications provide links to Ukrainian intelligence. Drones—both commercial and military-grade—enable reconnaissance and in some cases precision strikes. Social media spreads psychological operations while requiring careful operational security to avoid FSB monitoring.
Atesh and Zla Mavka both maintain active Telegram channels that simultaneously serve multiple purposes: coordinating with Ukrainian military intelligence, recruiting new operatives, conducting psychological operations against Russian forces, deterring collaborators, and maintaining morale in occupied populations.
The recruitment appeals themselves represent sophisticated psychological warfare. When Atesh distributes leaflets in Bryansk and Yevpatoria with QR codes linking to recruitment channels, they’re conducting operations inside Russia proper while demonstrating that Russian security services can’t prevent resistance organizing even in Russian cities.
When they post detailed operational reports—complete with coordinates, photographs, and after-action assessments—they prove to Ukrainian forces that intelligence networks function, demonstrate to Russian forces that occupation isn’t secure, show potential recruits that resistance is effective, and warn collaborators that consequences are real.
This transparency distinguishes modern partisan warfare from historical precedents. World War II partisans operated in secret by necessity. Modern Ukrainian partisans announce operations publicly because transparency serves operational purposes: intelligence coordination, psychological impact, recruitment, and documentation.
Every operation documented and announced publicly becomes part of the permanent record. Russian authorities can’t disappear this resistance the way Soviet forces eventually suppressed the UPA through mass terror and information control. The world watches in real time.
The FSB’s Impossible Mission
Russian security services face a mathematical problem they can’t solve.
To suppress resistance effectively, occupation authorities need enough reliable security personnel to monitor and control entire occupied populations. But how do you identify reliable personnel when resistance networks have penetrated Russian military units? When Russian soldiers sabotage their own equipment? When occupation police officials get eliminated by networks those officials are supposed to suppress?
The deteriorating quality of Russian occupation forces compounds the problem. Early in the war, Russia deployed relatively professional units to occupied territories. Three years later, those units suffered massive casualties and rotated to the front. Their replacements are mobilized conscripts, Wagner mercenaries, Chechen forces, and increasingly African and Cuban contractors.
Atesh reported that the 810th Marine Brigade trains African and Cuban mercenaries at the Kazachiy training ground in Sevastopol. These forces are supposed to occupy Ukrainian territory and suppress resistance. They can’t even communicate with the population.
FSB operations have intensified across occupied territories—arbitrary detentions, torture, show trials, public executions. In Simferopol, two railway depot masters were detained and beaten during interrogation, accused of providing intelligence to Ukrainian forces. Both were released weeks later when no proof materialized.
That pattern—arbitrary detention, beatings, release for lack of evidence—reveals Russian authorities’ actual position. They know resistance networks operate. They know intelligence flows to Ukrainian forces. They don’t know who specifically provides it, so they arrest people indiscriminately, hoping to demonstrate competence to Moscow while terrorizing populations into silence.
It’s not working.
Every arbitrary arrest creates new grievances. Every torture session generates new resistance sympathizers. Every execution proves that collaboration with occupation authorities doesn’t guarantee safety. Every disappeared person leaves family members with nothing to lose.
Russian forces can kill resisters. They can’t kill resistance.
The Ceasefire That Won’t Happen
This is what Zhemchugov has been trying to explain to Western audiences who discuss “freezing” the conflict: any diplomatic agreement that leaves Russian forces occupying Ukrainian territory won’t end the war—it will shift the war entirely into the shadows.
Partisan resistance won’t stop when diplomats sign papers in distant capitals. It will intensify.
The infrastructure exists. The networks function. The grievances are real and growing. The historical memory of successful resistance against occupation extends across generations. The coordination with Ukrainian intelligence continues regardless of what conventional forces do.
Western policymakers who urge Ukraine to accept Russian control of occupied territories are asking occupied populations to abandon their neighbors to continued torture, deportation, and cultural erasure. Zhemchugov makes clear that’s not a compromise anyone in occupied territories will accept.
The resistance will continue until every inch of Ukrainian territory is liberated. That’s not a negotiating position. It’s a description of reality.
Occupied populations have agency that exists independently of whatever deals governments might strike. They’ve demonstrated that agency through twelve years of resistance—from the initial 2014 occupation through the desperate months after February 2022 and the sustained campaigns continuing now.
Historical Echoes
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought both Nazi occupation and Soviet re-occupation from 1942 through the mid-1950s. They controlled vast forest areas, maintained underground administrations, and sustained resistance operations for over a decade after World War II officially ended. Soviet forces eventually crushed them through overwhelming violence, mass deportations, and systematic terror, but it took years and cost tremendous resources.
The current resistance echoes that tradition while adapting it for modern circumstances. What’s different is the technology, the integration with conventional military operations, and the transparency. What remains constant is the determination of occupied populations to resist foreign control regardless of the cost.
Ukrainian historical memory includes not just the UPA but also Soviet partisan networks during World War II, the resistance to Russification throughout the Soviet period, the Orange Revolution, Euromaidan, and the resistance to occupation since 2014. This isn’t abstract history—it’s lived experience passed between generations.
When Atesh operates in Crimea, they’re continuing resistance that began in 2014 when Russia first seized the peninsula. Crimean Tatars who spent eight years under occupation didn’t suddenly become compliant when Russian forces invaded the rest of Ukraine. They expanded their resistance networks and began coordinating with Ukrainian military intelligence.
When Zla Mavka organizes in Melitopol, they’re building on community networks that formed during the 2022 protests, which themselves drew on organizational experience from Euromaidan and earlier democratic movements.
The resistance isn’t starting from zero. It’s accelerating a process that’s been developing for more than a decade.
The Intelligence Dimension
Perhaps the most strategically significant aspect of partisan operations—and the one least visible to external observers—is the intelligence gathering that enables Ukrainian precision strikes.
The detailed targeting information that allows Ukrainian forces to eliminate senior Russian officers, destroy ammunition depots, and conduct HIMARS strikes with devastating accuracy doesn’t come exclusively from satellites and signals intelligence. It comes from partisan networks operating at tremendous personal risk.
Zhemchugov illuminated this dimension: partisans aren’t just resistance fighters conducting sabotage. They’re Ukraine’s eyes and ears in areas where conventional intelligence gathering is impossible. They photograph military installations, document troop movements, identify command centers, map logistics networks, and transmit all of it to Ukrainian intelligence.
This intelligence function won’t vanish with a ceasefire. If anything, it becomes more valuable if Ukraine needs to plan eventual liberation of occupied territories. The partisan networks documenting Russian military positions today are preparing the battlefield for future Ukrainian operations.
When Ukrainian forces eventually advance into currently occupied territories—whether through military operations or following Russian withdrawal—they’ll have detailed intelligence about defensive positions, minefield locations, collaborator networks, and occupation infrastructure. That intelligence comes from partisans who maintained operations through months or years of brutal occupation.
Measuring What Matters
The strategic impact of partisan resistance resists simple quantification, but certain indicators prove substantive value.
Ukrainian forces have struck hundreds of targets in occupied territories with precision requiring detailed intelligence. Some comes from satellite imagery and signals intercept. Some comes from agents on the ground photographing exact coordinates, documenting guard schedules, identifying which building houses which unit.
When the railway line near Tokmak loses power from sabotaged equipment, Russian logistics officers face impossible choices: send ammunition by road where convoys are vulnerable to HIMARS, or wait for repairs while frontline units run low on shells. Partisan sabotage created that dilemma.
When Russian boat bases on the left bank of the Dnipro get hit by precision strikes hours after Atesh announces surveillance operations, Russian commanders know their rear areas aren’t secure. That knowledge degrades offensive planning, increases resource allocation to security, and undermines confidence.
When collaborators in Melitopol keep getting eliminated, potential future collaborators reconsider. Ukrainian civilians who might consider working with occupation authorities because of economic desperation receive clear messages: there will be consequences now, not someday after liberation.
The morale effect cuts both ways. For Ukrainians in occupied territories, resistance operations prove they’re not abandoned. For Russian forces and occupation officials, every sabotage operation demonstrates they don’t control what they claim to control.
But effectiveness must be measured honestly. Partisan resistance can’t achieve strategic objectives independently. It can’t liberate territory, defeat military formations, or force political outcomes. It serves as force multiplication for conventional operations, degrades Russian capabilities, raises occupation costs, and maintains Ukrainian presence in areas Russian forces claim to control.
The coordination with conventional forces determines impact. Railway sabotage achieves maximum effect when timed to coincide with Ukrainian offensives that stress Russian logistics. Intelligence on ammunition warehouses matters most when Ukrainian forces can strike those warehouses before contents get distributed. Resistance operations work as part of integrated strategy, not standalone heroics.
The Long War Zhemchugov Describes
How long can resistance networks sustain operations? Zhemchugov’s answer, based on living through years of occupation: as long as necessary.
Historical precedents provide mixed lessons. Yugoslav partisans fought through World War II and emerged controlling the country. Greek communist partisans fought through German occupation then fought a civil war before defeat. French resistance operated throughout the war but required Allied liberation. Philippine guerrillas resisted Japanese occupation until American forces returned.
The common factor: none succeeded independently. All required conventional military victory for liberation. But all complicated occupation, raised its costs, tied down security forces, gathered intelligence, maintained alternate authority, and preserved populations’ connection to legitimate government.
Ukrainian partisan resistance follows this pattern. They can’t liberate occupied territories alone. They can make occupation more difficult, more costly, more dangerous. They can maintain Ukrainian presence and identity. They can gather intelligence and conduct sabotage. They can preserve networks that will enable post-liberation governance. They can prove to occupied populations that Ukraine hasn’t abandoned them.
Atesh celebrates three years of resistance as of February 2025. Their operational tempo hasn’t decreased—it’s increased. They’ve expanded from Crimea into occupied Donbas, Zaporizhia, Kherson, and deep into Russia. They’ve recruited within Russian military units. Their coordination with Ukrainian forces has grown more sophisticated.
Zla Mavka has operated for two years, maintaining community connections in Melitopol despite intense FSB pressure. They’ve sustained morale-building functions, intelligence gathering, and operational activities.
Both groups face constant threats. Some operations will fail. Some operatives will be captured. But Russian security services face their own impossible mathematics: they need to suppress resistance across millions of people scattered across vast territories while fighting a conventional war, managing internal dissent, and confronting economic pressure.
They can’t deploy unlimited resources to counterintelligence. They can’t monitor everyone continuously. They can’t eliminate every resistance network.
So the invisible front continues.
What Comes After
Zhemchugov is explicit about what resistance means for any potential settlement: there won’t be a frozen conflict. Any Russian occupation will face ongoing insurgency, making occupied territories ungovernable and economically worthless to Moscow while imposing continuous military casualties.
This isn’t a threat. It’s a description of reality that policymakers need to internalize.
Questions about post-liberation accountability remain complex. Ukrainian prosecutors should be building cases against collaborators now, documenting crimes, preserving evidence. International mechanisms should prepare to process war crimes. But these judicial processes work slowly.
What happens to partisans who conducted extrajudicial killings? Does Ukrainian law provide immunity for partisan actions during occupation? Should it?
The legal framework matters. Partisans who operated within bounds of international humanitarian law—targeting military objectives, distinguishing civilians from combatants, using proportional force—should face no prosecution. Those who crossed those bounds should face accountability even if actions occurred in service of resistance.
Drawing these distinctions requires investigation that may be impossible during occupation and difficult after liberation. It requires acknowledging that resistance can be both necessary and morally complex, legitimate in principle but requiring oversight in practice.
The easier path is broad amnesty for all resistance activities. That path leads to unaccountable violence and erosion of rule of law. The harder path is investigation, prosecution where warranted, distinction between legitimate resistance and criminal acts.
Ukraine should take the harder path. It’s the only way to preserve principles worth fighting for.
No Easy Solutions
When Russian forces withdrew from Kherson in November 2022, they left behind torture chambers, execution sites, mass graves, and terrorized populations. They also left knowledge that resistance had continued through eight months of brutal occupation.
Ukrainian flags had been hidden in attics. Partisan networks had transmitted intelligence. Civilians had refused to collaborate despite threats. The occupation administration collapsed the moment Russian forces withdrew.
This pattern will repeat across every territory Ukraine eventually liberates.
Whether liberation comes through military victory, negotiated settlement, or Russian collapse, occupied populations will face the same questions: did they resist or collaborate? Did they maintain Ukrainian identity or accept Russification? Did they help liberation or assist occupation?
Most will fall between these extremes, as humans always do in impossible circumstances. But the partisans—Atesh operatives embedding in Russian military units, Zla Mavka agents tracking collaborators through occupied Melitopol, railroad workers sabotaging relay equipment under FSB surveillance—chose resistance knowing the consequences.
Their operations matter tactically—every intelligence report, every sabotaged railway, every disrupted logistics chain. They matter strategically—proving occupation remains contested, that costs continue accumulating, that Russian control is hollow. They matter historically—continuing Ukrainian resistance traditions stretching back generations.
Most importantly, they matter morally.
Because they prove that occupation requires consent, and consent can be withdrawn. That territory claimed on maps doesn’t translate to actual control. That civilian populations can be terrorized but not truly subjugated. That resistance against illegal aggression is not only possible but mandatory.
What Zhemchugov has been trying to explain to Western audiences is reality that won’t change regardless of what diplomats sign: the war isn’t over until occupied populations accept occupation.
They haven’t.
They won’t.
So agents keep transmitting coordinates. Saboteurs keep destroying railway equipment. Networks keep gathering intelligence. Communities keep resisting.
Russian commanders keep discovering that controlling territory on maps is not the same as controlling populations living on that territory.
That’s the lesson of Atesh and Zla Mavka. That’s what twelve years of partisan resistance proves. That’s why the invisible front matters.
Because Ukrainians in occupied territories aren’t waiting passively for liberation.
They’re fighting for it.
And they won’t stop fighting just because diplomats in distant capitals want tidy conclusions to messy wars.
The partisan war will continue until Ukraine’s territory is restored—making any “frozen conflict” scenario not a path to stability but a guarantee of ongoing violence.
For policymakers proposing ceasefires that leave Russian forces occupying Ukrainian territory: understand that you’re not proposing peace. You’re proposing a different kind of war—one conducted entirely in the shadows, one that won’t respect diplomatic agreements, one that will continue until liberation comes regardless of how long that takes.
The partisans have already made that choice.
Western capitals can acknowledge that reality or ignore it.
But they can’t change it.
Chris Sampson is Editor-in-Chief of NatSecMedia and author of “Hacking ISIS.” He has reported from liberated Ukrainian territories including Bucha, Izyum, and Kherson. He lives in Kyiv.