Ukrainian Resistance in the Occupied Territories with Jade McGlynn
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Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, Director of the Stuart Center and Europe-Russia-Eurasia Program at CSIS. And I'm Maria Snegovaya, Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia. 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, Maria Snegovaya. Hi, Maria.

And today we're joined by our colleague, Jade McGlynn. Jade is a research fellow in the War Studies Department at King's College London and a senior associate non-resident fellow here at CSIS. Recently, Jade published what is really a fantastic and very unique report titled Crossing Thresholds, Ukraine Resistance to Russian Occupation. And it's a report based on extensive fieldwork that Jade has conducted in Ukraine prior

primarily in the deoccupied territories liberated by the Ukrainian military in the fall of 2022. And Jade's piece explores the myriad of forms of resistance to Russian occupation currently taking place in Ukraine today. For reference, Russia at this point occupies about 18% of Ukrainian territory, up from about 7% it occupied at the very start of the war. So it's a fantastic report. We're going to put it in the show notes. But Jade, thanks so much for joining us today.

Not at all. Thank you for having me. So, Jade, maybe you could start by telling us how you came to write this piece. And maybe you could talk about how you went about writing it, because it seems like one of the major challenges is just getting information, is getting sources, talking to people, understanding what's happening behind enemy lines. No, that's a good point. And in some way, my answer to both questions is related, because I didn't really go about

trying to write a report, it was more that I had information. And I felt like that information should be out there or should be known by more people. Because of course, there's certain amounts of information that I get that anybody gets that you can't share for security reasons, you know, and it did take a lot of editing and a lot of working out, and bluntly, a lot of discussions with Ukrainian

forces who work and liaise with the resistance about how best to phrase things, what stories could be

included as they were, which ones needed to be adapted. Of course, those stories in the de-occupied territories, first of all, they felt much easier. But then, of course, around the time of the report was being published, around the time where you had the Kharkiv offensive starting in May 2024. And so then I remember this sort of panic of me just reading through the report and wondering whether I needed to email you. And there's always that

that worry. But I think one of the things that really pushed me towards writing it is that so many people that I spoke to or that I received messages from, they were really keen that people in the West knew about what they were doing, you know, to the extent that it's safe. And it meant a lot to them. It meant a lot to their morale. And I think particularly, you know, we're now two and a half years into the full scale war.

And it's very lonely to be a partisan, to be a resistance fighter, particularly in these kind of 21st century conditions, you know, where the surveillance is so pervasive. And it clearly meant a lot to them, that sense that somebody could hear them, that people were discussing what they were doing.

Yeah, maybe you could talk a little bit about what life is like behind enemy lines, so to speak. And I think part of the presumption that at least I have, and I think many analysts and others maybe that don't follow things that closely, is that

Essentially, Russia has succeeded in squashing any sort of internal insurgency. When I go back and thinking about the State Department's and then US government's plans for what we would do if Russia invaded Ukraine, thinking back to 2014 and 2015 and 2016, the idea was, well, we would view

fuel an insurgency, that Ukraine wouldn't be able to conventionally stand up to Russia, so you'd fuel an insurgency. I think now the view is in some ways that that is a mistaken view because Russia would crush any insurgency very brutally and as seen by the occupied territories. Your report tells a different story, that there is resistance, there is stuff happening behind the lines, but maybe you could unpack what life is like and what forms of resistance you're seeing.

Yeah, I think that it would be incorrect to say that Russia has quashed all forms of insurgency on the occupied territories. That's certainly not what my research is saying. On the other hand, I completely understand how most analysts who aren't engaging with it so closely would come to that conclusion. And again, that's part of, I suppose, my motivation behind writing the report, because I remember just sitting, I think it was around the end of last year, and working out

just how many deaths were in open source. And as we have to imagine, there are presumably many more that are not easy to find in open source. And it came to the late 70s over just a period of a few weeks. And I think...

I think it's pretty fair to call that an insurgency if we're talking about partisans behind the line killing that number of officials and troops over the matter of a few weeks. That wasn't an especially active few weeks. You know, I didn't kind of choose that. It was just because it happened to be the period when I sat down to think, OK, but how numerically kind of significant is this?

So I think, yes, we can definitely talk about that. There are longstanding movements, particularly in places like Olszewsk, in places like Melitopol. There are different forms of resistance as well. Not everybody is in a position to be able to do or want to do violent resistance, but there's very ongoing different methods of non-violent resistance as well. But

But I think if we want to talk about what is life like behind the lines, first of all, we probably do need to start then breaking the territories down into different groups. Because I think it's typical to talk about the temporarily occupied territories. And of course, that makes sense.

But there are key differences, realistically. We have Crimea, kind of in a case of its own, because of the fact that it was illegally annexed or pseudo-annexed to Russia back in 2014, also Russia claimed. And then you have the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions that have been occupied since 2014, so the so-called DPR-LNA, and they're in a very kind of peculiar position,

And one of the interesting elements there was tensions between, or that I have in my communications, is tensions between people who are actually, or were originally actually quite grateful to be joined to Russia, just because it was an end to the absolute lawlessness that was the rule by the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic. Although that then was fritted away by the fact that the sister city program...

led to a lot of local businesses being put out. And then you had a number of people who originally weren't

They weren't exactly keen on the DNR, the LNR, but you wouldn't have described them as pro-Ukrainian patriots. But you then see them becoming much more antagonistic towards the authorities. So there's very interesting dynamics that are going on that actually sometimes are a lot more prosaic than perhaps a Hollywood kind of blockbuster about the French resistance might give us the impression of. I think where you do see things perhaps fitting the idealised image of resistance that we have is...

Definitely in some cases in Crimea, where resistance is actually very strong, particularly violent resistance, but also in the more newly occupied territories. So those territories occupied since 2022 and those people who have had to stay behind for different reasons or were unable to leave.

Thank you very much, Jade. In your report, when you talk of the situation on the occupied territories, what particularly struck me is this comparison that you give about people, how they feel in those territories and apartheid. Could you talk a little bit about that perhaps? And what is really the situation there? What's the Ruski Mir that Russians are claiming to install? What does it really look like for those people?

Thank you. Yes. I mean, it's funny because that term in particular, I went back and forth on using it because in a way apartheid is about legal systems, different legal systems. And you can make the argument that there isn't really a legal system in the occupied territories at all. But in the end, it did feel for certain flaws like the best term to use because you are talking about a very two tier system of

with certain exceptions for some of the collaborators, but really a very small amount. Essentially, what you're looking at are people who were brought in from the Russian Federation, may not necessarily be ethnically Russian, often in a very different position to those who were there before. I'm talking specifically now about the territories newly occupied since 2022, because there's obviously, again, a slightly different setup and different processes that have been happening in the other territories.

And what do I mean by that? Well, they are the ones who have access to the shiny new buildings that are being built in Mariupol, for example. We've seen lots of those. And what you see is actual residents. I mean, there's still shocking levels of homelessness, just to focus in on one city. Shocking levels of homelessness in Mariupol. Those people who did used to live in the centre, whose houses were, of course, destroyed during the bombing.

and whose houses have since been rebuilt into these new shiny towers, they have been moved out right to the outskirts of the houses. They have been offered a right on the outskirts of the city. So it's a complete breaking up of networks, of social networks, which are already pretty broken anyway. Some other issues include the fact that the salaries are, of course, artificially high to attract people to come from the Russian Federation. So then you have this issue where

prices are going up, locals are unable to afford things, only the incoming people are able to afford things because they're the people who are kind of driving the inflation. But those salary costs are artificially inflated because the Kremlin wants to encourage people to settle and indeed to settle from all of the many nationalities that make up the Russian Federation, the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation, because they're

They want to push an idea of these areas as multicultural and they want to drown out the sort of Ukrainian-ness, the Ukrainstvo, to use the Russian or the Putinist rather word, of these areas. So there's an odd mix of deliberate efforts and also in the bureaucracies too, in the occupation administrations, what you've seen across has been a kind of getting rid of anybody who has local connections, sometimes local,

seemingly quite violently, though it's very difficult to prove these things, sometimes less violently, and then replacing them with people who are not just, let's say, from the Russian Federation, but they have no real connection to Ukraine at all. So there's no worry about them having any of these sympathies. I think in part that reflects

Some of the issues and some of the dissent that, funnily enough, has come from some of the original, I suppose, pro-Russian Ukrainians, people like Oleg Saryov, who is, of course, I think quite rightly known in Ukraine as a collaborator and a traitor to Ukraine, but actually has been very critical at different points of how the Kremlin has proceeded in the occupied territories. And so that issue of political dissent, I imagine, played a role there. But I do think there's also a general...

well superciliousness feels a bit too kind a word but definitely looking down I've mentioned in the report you know one of the prosecutors refusal to kind of deal directly with the occupied territories you know everything has to go via Crimea or Rostov because he just doesn't want to talk to them so it's a very imperial mindset you know it's reminiscent of something like you know you would read in the archives about you know the British Empire doing or there's this sense of

They're not our level. This is a kind of a lesser or secondary culture. It's sort of just a fascinating point about the lack of trust, even of the Ukrainian collaborators that were pro-Russian and supported the Russian invasion. But you can't really trust them because you don't know, you know, they're still Ukrainian.

Maybe you could break down a little bit the repression that you're seeing. There's lots of reports of deportations, of sexual violence, and that probably engenders a lot of anger toward the Russian occupiers, but it also creates an incredibly stifling environment, I would assume. Maybe you could break down how Russia is approaching the populace in terms of what are their techniques to squelch any resistance.

Yeah, the repression levels are pretty horrific. I mean, they're very performative, like in Russia itself, in that sense of, you know, where the torture chambers are. But the scale is, I think it would be safe to say that the scale proportionally is much larger. Of course, as well, a lot of these people have already been through filtration. Many of them have been deported for various different types of crimes into Rostov, into the criminal system, and they're normally then processed through Crimea or Rostov.

So they're dealt with there. They're often removed from the occupied territory. Well, Crimea is occupied, but they're removed from the area that they're originally from. Of course, it's very difficult to come up with any... I can't give you any kind of fixed numbers about the numbers of people who've been tortured, but it does seem from those I've spoken to who have left the occupied territories...

It's not really a topic that I speak about much with those who are still on the occupied territories because it's a very sensitive issue. And in general, they're very specific questions. And the process of talking to them is obviously not like a conversation that we would have, you know, us three here. But for those who've left, sexual violence seems to be a pretty systemic part of the Russian occupation. In particular, it seems, yes, in the early days, but also later.

there's essentially an impunity that comes with occupation. And in many ways, I don't think that this is something that's specific to perhaps the sheer level of sexual violence is I'm not in a position to make these comparisons. But I don't think that that sense of the fact that you have these occupation officials acting with such impunity, I don't think that's something specific to Russia's occupation. I think that's what we see with imperial occupations is that sense of I can do whatever I want. And

Perhaps it sounds odd considering some of the sexual crimes that are, of course, recounted in the report. But one of the things that I found most touching was just the idea when one of the ladies explains, you know, that nobody gets their nails done, nobody gets their hair done and just these aspects because it's

I think anybody who's been to Ukraine knows, you know, how well presented and lovely and feminine and beautiful Ukrainian women are. They always have beautiful nails and beautiful hair. And it just made me, I don't know, it just made me think, obviously, it's really the smallest thing to worry about getting your nails done, but...

Sometimes you focus on those aspects that you imagine, I suppose, as a human being and what are the little things that just bring you happiness and to not even have those little things that are not political, but to just feel completely depersonalised, to be completely robbed of both of your national identity, of your cultural identity, and then even of the different ways that you might express your inner identity through your nails, through how you have your hair, through your clothes, through the ability to dress as you wish, it felt

It felt quite a totalitarian aspect. Honestly, to me personally, those elements of the report, the personal stories that really paint this picture, they felt particularly strongly and they really resonate. And it seems like being a woman in particular in those conditions under occupation is extremely tough. Is that right? Yes, I think so. And I think that's one of the elements I found interesting was what you do feel. Again, it's very difficult because...

because it has to be slightly impressionistic because of the nature, you know, you're really trying to find any pieces of the jigsaw that you can get and bring them together. And nobody can say that this is a whole picture or even always a correct picture because it's the nature of the gathering of such data. But certainly in my discussions, it did feel like the women were playing a very prominent role in the resistance. And I can't

save for certain why, but you do have to think that this is probably that sort of level of sexual violence and humiliation is playing a role and also a vengeance because, you know, the Russians obviously went through very quickly finding anybody who had links to the ATO, the anti-terrorist operation as Ukrainians call the war in the Donbass.

very quickly looking for any kind of men who had any sort of formal links. And of course, your listeners might ask, well, why didn't they work out and run away? But in some cases, they really didn't have the chance. In some cases, the Russians were there within 24, 48 hours. And when you're in that sort of situation, you don't know how that you're going to behave entirely rationally, to be honest. So yes, I think the women...

are in a particularly difficult situation especially because I mean a number of the women that I know who have stayed in the occupied territories they are there for caring responsibilities and as we know across the world it's often women who take on caring responsibilities and they feel unable to leave because they have a sick child who can't be transported who can't make it who will not make it through filtration and then you know a seven-day period

bus journey all around here and there, and then not even knowing if you'd be able to get into the EU on the other side. And then also bluntly as well, it's not something that I would discuss in the report because it's not directly relevant, but there are many issues for these people who leave the occupied territories and come into Ukraine. In particular, those from Donetsk. I've had many conversations with people who've left Donetsk since the full-scale invasion, but who had lived under occupation since 2014. And they've had many, many struggles because they've

there is an incredible distrust and it's one of those situations where you can really see it on both sides. You can see both sides point. You can see how both sides came to where they are and it's just, it's really just very tragic.

Maybe we could talk a little bit about the military significance of the resistance and what impact that's having on the war, on Russia's war effort, on Ukraine's war effort. How do you see the resistance that you're seeing on the ground impacting the trajectory of this war? Does it have an impact?

Yes, I think it does have an impact. So across different ways. So first of all, in Crimea, the resistance has been pretty central to providing the coordinates of different parts of the naval base, for example, that have been targeted. If we look at Luhansk, in particular, there was an attack, again, provided by coordinates that were given by the resistance.

on the Luhansk military headquarters. And because the Russian army really micromanages, that actually then had quite a big effect on military movers there for some time.

Is it going to be the resistance in the occupied territories that dictates the course of this war? No, of course not. It wasn't the French resistance that dictated the course of World War II, obviously, but they were pretty helpful. So I think provided that we don't have ridiculously high expectations for them and we're being realistic about what partisan movements can do, what insurgencies or insurrectionist movements can do,

then yes, I think we can say that they are having a shape on the trajectory. Also leads, of course, if this ultimately is now a war of attrition, we talk a lot about sustainability resources. It's an incredible amount of resources in terms of security that Russia has to deploy, in terms of security forces Russia has to deploy to the occupied territories. That then, of course, leaves gaps. I mean, Russia is not a country that's lacking in security force personnel, so perhaps the gaps don't always become as immediate as possible.

as they might in other places. But still, it does lead to many issues. And they're constantly sending more Roskvardia, you know, more of FSB, counterintelligence. So, and at some point, this all adds up, this constant need for resources. I think the difficult thing really at the moment for most of the people who are patriotically inclined within the occupied territories is morale.

Because it's really hard right now to think when is the liberation coming for obvious reasons that I think I don't need to explain why. And it's natural, you then start to go, okay, I can't leave, you know, because a lot of these people, they would have left already if they could have done by now, or they're going to. And then you need to start thinking about making accommodations with the operation, but still not losing yourself. And

I think that's a really tricky moral issue because, of course, when you have these conversations, you can't help but admire the bravery of the resistance. But on another level, I often think that

That probably, that wouldn't be me. I wouldn't be the person sending off the coordinates, you know, from somewhere under a bridge. I'd be stressing out trying to think how to make accommodations and most people would. And I think that was one of my worries, a little bit of writing the report is obviously I chose to focus on the resistance and I think it was the right thing to do because it's not discussed. But most people, most people aren't heroes and they're in a really difficult position.

From the public perspective, though, right, from the media's perspective, flagging that this resistance exists is also very important, not just to help Ukraine to get those territories back, but also to undermine Russian propaganda's narratives, right, about this being the two brotherly nations, the, you know, the same people, whatever, you name it. But I wanted also to ask you about this point that you make, that

this evidence of this resistance, despite the unprecedented level of repressions that you described targeted at those people, also sheds certain doubts on how much Russians domestically oppose this war, because we see nothing of the kind in Russia, right? But actually, when I promoted your report, some of the Russian liberals told me, well, you can't really compare. Those are really entirely different contexts.

Yes and no, right? But I'm just curious as to what your opinion on that would be. Certainly there are repressions in Russia, but also I don't think you can compare the extent of those repressions, right, to what the residents of the occupied territories are going through at the moment.

Yeah, I think that's fair. I don't think that it's possible to compare the repressions in Russia, if we're talking on a kind of general level, with the level of repression and surveillance that exists within the occupied territories. At the same point, I suppose you can then make the argument that Ukraine has had

even for those territories that were occupied in 2014, has had decades of a much more vibrant civil society and form of public discourse than Russia had. But I'm not, I mean, then that rather begs the question as to why, because it's not like Ukraine started off from a particularly better position than Russia did. But there's not, that then gets us too far away into a kind of philosophical discussion.

There are Russians as well who are helping the resistance. One of the fighters that I spoke to from Atesh spoke about, you know, a number of Russian nationals who were horrified by the full-scale invasion and have since helped him personally and other fighters with information. So it is happening. But yes, I think it does beg questions as to the scale of opposition. But in a way, yes.

I think if we all just speak honestly, well, it's logical, isn't it? Because these people who live under occupation, they, of course, they feel Ukrainian. And ultimately, the people who live in Russia feel Russian. So there's going to be a completely different element. And in a way, that also then takes us back to the original point of that you were making there about how much this does undermine all of these differences.

absurd at this point propaganda narratives about Ukraine and Russia as just one nation and brotherly peoples essentially the same nation because they're not and we can even see that in the scale of the opposition in that I don't doubt that many many of the Russian liberals really truly

this war and wish that it had not been launched. But it's completely understandable they're not going to oppose it in the same way as the Ukrainian would because ultimately the war is having different effects on them and also because we're talking about two different and distinct identities. And that's the main point that I hope did come across and I thank you for your comments then, Maria, because it

We are talking about two different issues. This is just, this is an occupation. This is taking, going into somebody else's home and taking over. And that's why you see the resistance there. When it comes to the resistance,

Is there a real distinction? You sort of talked about this a little bit earlier, but between the 2014 territories that Russia seized with Crimea and the Donbass and Donetsk and Luhansk versus the territories that have been seized since 2022. Because I guess my gut instinct would be that there would be

less resistance in the territories that have been now under Russian control since 2014, but much more so in those since 2022. I assume there's a distinction there, but perhaps not. Is there a difference there? Has Russia effectively de-Ukrainianized the territories that it sees since 2014? Or do we think of that still as part of Ukraine?

No, I don't think you can say it has de-Ukrainianized. I think where it has done that most is in Crimea, which, of course, already did have more of a population that identified itself as ethnic Russians. I always don't quite understand sometimes what ethnic Russian actually means in the Ukrainian context, because lots of people are ethnic Russians, but, you know, identify purely as Ukrainian. So...

But in any case, it had people who identified as Russian. Anyway, there's then since then been a very large influx. I think there are different numbers, certainly in the hundreds of thousands to Crimea, often through choice, not in the same kind of setup that we see with Mariupol and Melitopol. There are obvious reasons why one might want to move to Crimea. It's very beautiful. But.

I was quite surprised by the scale of resistance there and they do seem to have some of the most effective resistance as well and

To be honest, it wasn't something I could really get into detail on. Actually, I wasn't originally planning to do that much on Crimean. It was just that because there were so many examples, in particular of the Crimean seagulls, these ladies go around kind of tempting Russian soldiers, Russian servicemen with lovely food and drink, and then the Russian servicemen die because it's all poisoned. So you can't really not cover that if you're going to write a report on resistance efforts.

But yes, it's really interesting. And I think, again, actually, it sort of goes back a bit to Maria's question, but it does seem like that's also the area where you have the most cooperation with Russians. And perhaps that's not, again, that's not a surprise, given that obviously Crimea was annexed in Khrushchev by Russia in 2014.

When it comes to some of the other areas, I think it's difficult because we're at the moment speaking about this as if it's entirely organic. And there is much of it that is organic. But there's also, as I mentioned in the report, a lot of this that was planned. Support was also provided by Western partners, we'll put it that way.

So people deliberately stayed behind. That's been the case. There have been partisans and other movements that have been active in the Donetsk and the Luhansk so-called People's Republics since 2014. They're not, yes, they are locals. Often they came to this organically, but at this point they are also professionals.

And there are a number of professionals who stayed behind in the currently occupied territories. And I speak to somebody who was going to stay behind in a city that was not, thankfully, in the end occupied. But he gives a pretty good idea of certainly what their roles were, let's say, at the beginning or in 2022. Obviously, since then, things will have gone off script, no doubt. So to stress that point.

Again, I suppose to summarise, the regions are different. You know, Donetsk and Luhansk, they're in very different places. In general, my summary of Donetsk and Luhansk, it's a little bit of a generalisation. But whenever I say it to people from Donetsk and Luhansk, they laugh and say, yeah, that's it. But I'm very happy to be contradicted. But essentially, they seem to just hate everybody.

So they hate the Russians, but they happen to hate the Ukrainians more. I think that's the situation. And of course, there's a lot of tension. I mean, less amusingly, there's a lot of tension as well. I mean, a lot of the villages that I spent time in along the Kharkiv-Donetsk borders, they were occupied by troops of the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics. And they often, and I can't

say that you know I can't say to what extent this is factually true but they often said that they were the most violent they were the worst they were the most horrible and whilst I can't say whether that was true what I can say is that during my conversations with them you did sense with the villagers who had lived under occupation you did sense this real this real sense of betrayal you know because they were kind of our guys like our klopsy and how could they they come and do this and

I think, to be honest with you, whatever happens, literally any which way, the medium term, at least future of those regions of Donetsk and Luhansk looks very, very bleak to me. I think, you know, even in a best case scenario, let alone in a worst.

And then we can come, of course, to the more newly occupied territories, those territories occupied since 2022. But it is becoming harder to get in contact with resistance fighters than it used to be. Obviously, it's much harder to get into the territories. I mean, particularly in the first six months, you often had kind of grey zones where you could pass people.

between since the successful Kharkiv counter-offensive and Husson, that's really not been the case in the building of the Suravikin line and many other aspects. So you do have this entrenchment. However, ultimately, it's a very digital, we live in a very digitalized world, despite some very considerable efforts that Russia has made to isolate the occupied territories. Really, it's only...

in certain circumstances when the resistance is very active that they will completely shut off all of the communication systems and that's really what they need to do if they want to completely shut it shut it off and since they're not going to do that for the vast majority of the time you know for their own reasons as much as anything else there are still ways and there is still contact i have many friends who speak to their family in the occupied territories and

And they don't discuss politics, but they speak with them sometimes, not even for security reasons, just so that they don't fall out. But they stay in contact in some form. It's really, yes, in some ways it is a black box, but in another way, it feels very close. It's quite normal for me to speak to friends and say, oh, I was speaking to my aunt last night and she lives in Luhansk. And, you know, that sounds, that feels bizarre to be saying it here in English, you know, but...

That's just quite a normal conversation. It's just not something that's spoken about openly, I think, in our coverage of Ukraine. I think part of the reason is because it begins to complicate narratives on both sides. Yes, I think, of course, it rubbishes the Russian propaganda line and good, because there's really one good guy and one bad guy is one of those rare wards.

But on the other side, it also complicates some of the pro-Ukrainian positions, which also understandably, because I also really want Ukraine to survive and as many Ukrainians as possible to survive. But also, I think sometimes has consolidated into something that's overly simplistic.

And I think the moment that you start to say, well, this person is talking to their aunt in Luhansk, it then starts to open up questions that are messy. And of course it's messy because all humans are messy and war is the messiest time for humankind of all. Maybe we could turn to projecting forward a bit. So if

In the World War II conception of resistance, particularly on the Western Front in France and in the Benelux countries, the resistance served both as an intel gathering

causing some chaos and sabotage behind enemy lines, but basically waiting for that moment where allied forces were there breaking through and the resistance then comes up and then causes further havoc. Is that sort of the idea behind right now for a lot of the resistance? Is it preparing potentially for this hopeful breakthrough of Ukrainian forces at some point?

And then that's one question. And the second aspect is, what about if there isn't a breakthrough and that doesn't really come to pass and we're faced with a situation where the line is where the line is and you see the resistance perhaps fading out because when the prospects for that liberation fade, that the resistance might fade.

So I think in a way my answer, I have the same answer to both questions, which is that, yes, if we start with the first bit of your first question, yes, they fulfill those roles. And yes, there's, of course, the waiting for liberation. And of course, they believe in liberation very strongly. I think the second aspect to that, though, which is probably something that's quite different, certainly to what I've read, though I'm very much no expert in terms of the French resistance,

And in the Benelux countries, or even some of the partisan movements, with the exception maybe of the nationalist partisan movements, but of the Soviet partisans, let's say, has been this really historical narrativization of the war, which is seen by many.

those among the Protestants, among the Ukrainian resistance as just another kind of instalment in Russia's centuries-long effort to subjugate and destroy Ukrainian sovereignty and identity. So there's also this aspect of what they are doing is continuing a long fight, a long struggle, centuries-long struggle.

And it's important because it's because of the struggles of people like them in centuries or in decades before that Ukrainian identity and nation had survived through even bleaker moments than what they are going through right now. So I think this historical consciousness that informs it adds another layer, which then sort of draws me to the question, will the resistance peter out?

It will reduce, of course it will. The longer the Russian occupation entrenches, that's only natural. It will perhaps spur up at some points or after certain kind of ordeals or atrocities. But I don't think that it will disappear. First, for lots of different reasons. One, because of the digital connections that exist in this day and age.

Secondly, because some of these people are professionals, they know what they sign up to. There was planning for this. This war has been going on for a long time. It didn't start in 2022. These sort of networks have been built up. But thirdly, I think for that historical reason that we spoke about, I mean, ultimately, the Soviet efforts, if we compare it to the Soviet efforts to drive out the UNA-UPA in the 1940s and 50s, yes, they did eventually do it. But bluntly, they were pretty...

Their terror structures, the Stalinist terror structures were much more total and probably in the end effective than I think the Putinist terror structures are. So, yeah, I think that it will continue. But but obviously morale is is going to play a role in in recruitment.

And on that same note, Jade, in order to support these groups, are there any ways in which the West could help? Perhaps beyond just promoting the information about the fight, perhaps there's any other type of assistance that can be offered?

Yes, and I mean, some support already is provided by the West. So of course, important morale is just speaking about it, because I think it is important in terms of complicating our understanding of what's happening there. But yet more specifically, I think the big focus is on communications, so modems and telephones, so that...

people from the occupied territories can stay in touch, even if it's not necessarily to give the coordinates, not everybody will feel comfortable being involved in those sorts of activities. But just simply to get information out, because I think we can all agree that more information is definitely needed about what is happening there. But it's really important that that story is told as much as is possible with the input of those who are actually living through it, so that we can understand the nuance and we can take their stories, which

almost to a man or woman are fascinating and truly depressing into account and into our understanding of this war because you don't write the history of of of world war ii for example since that's come up a lot you don't write the history of world war ii just from the idea of okay well what's happened in in germany or what's happened in in britain or those countries those parts that it didn't take

And a big part of the story of war is in those territories that are captured. And it's funny because they're actually not really spoken about all that much. OK, they are during the battle, but then afterwards it's, oh, well, they're gone. But people still live there.

I actually will add that I think one of the amazing features, horrifying features of this war is that it actually sheds a lot of light on the atrocities that the Soviet Union committed in the past that we've heard or may not have even heard, but it really, really explains to us how many horrible things have been done. And thank you very much, Jade, for your courage and devotion to this cause for happiness and to send this a little better.

Yeah, Jade, thanks so much. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there. Massive thanks to you for joining us late at night from the UK, where I think it's raining. July. Yeah, it's July. It's raining. Of course it's raining. Well, it's still hot here in Washington. So I would actually take a UK pleasant rainstorm with mild temperatures then.

than blazing, sweating heat here in DC. But Jade, thank you for your work on this. Thank you for joining us.

If you haven't already, please be sure to check out Jade's report, Crossing Thresholds, Ukrainian Resistance to Russian Occupation. You can find it on csis.org or in this episode's show notes. Also, please subscribe to our podcast and give us a five-star rating. We would greatly appreciate it. And lastly, be sure to check out our sister podcast, The Europhile, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us and see you next time.

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