Marta Gichko11:23, 02.08.24
Russian intelligence services are hunting for agents, trying to enter the group undercover.
Ukrainian guerrillas are fighting Putin on his own turf. An underground network of saboteurs is targeting Russian infrastructure in Crimea and beyond, The Times reports .
Atesh works everywhere
The young Russian fidgeted nervously, nervous before the date. He wasn’t worried about the girl; she was just a cover for his mission. He wondered how much he would be tortured if he were caught. He was tasked with sabotaging dictator Vladimir Putin’s personal project: building a new railway through occupied territory in southern Ukraine to connect Crimea to Russia.
If completed, the railway would allow the Kremlin to quickly move troops and heavy equipment into Crimea by land, reducing its dependence on the vulnerable Kerch Bridge.
Ukraine’s armed forces have already begun to isolate the peninsula, striking the bridge twice, destroying all three train ferries, destroying the Black Sea Fleet and striking Crimean air bases.
Putin’s railway, which he announced in March, could thwart Kyiv’s plans to make the peninsula uninhabitable for Russians. New sections of track are being built to connect existing railways from Melitopol and Berdyansk. When completed, the railway will stretch more than 500 km from the city of Shakhty in Russia’s Rostov region to Dzhankoy in Crimea, with hundreds of kilometres of connecting tracks.
Ukrainian guerrillas say they won’t let that happen without a fight. A few months ago, young people became part of Atesh, an underground resistance movement that has fought Putin in occupied territory and abroad. Its members are motivated partly by hatred of the Kremlin, partly by offers of cash from their Ukrainian handlers.
“These scumbags have already killed my classmates and friends. In my area, everyone who returned from the war is either crippled or alcoholic,” said one of the partisans.
Worried that he too would soon be sent to the front, the man decided to take preemptive revenge by burning vital relay boxes along the completed sections of the railway in Rostov.
“They sent me instructions on how to make an incendiary mixture. They sent me a point on the map, in which box and which railway. I was scared, of course. We are all afraid of being caught by the FSB,” he said.
A resistance fighter planned a walk with his date near his target, intending to carry out an operation on the way back. If he were caught, he thought, he would say he was seeing the girl off. During the date, he scouted the area, but the girl knew nothing.
On the way back he took the same route, but, thinking he was being followed, he jumped on a passenger train and left. A few days later he tried again, but failed the task again, his nerves giving way. Only on the fourth try did the Russian succeed.
“I went to that box, made sure there was no one in there 20 damn times. I tried to do it quickly, but I checked 20 times! I went closer to the box. I poured that liquid inside. Then I made a path for myself so I wouldn’t catch fire. I threw a match. It burned. My adrenaline jumped, and I took off!” the partisan recalled.
The boy has joined an army of guerrilla saboteurs who are fighting Putin on his own territory. Some are Russian, some are Ukrainian, many are Crimean Tatars or descendants of those dispersed by the Soviet empire in Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of Crimea in 1944.
Games with the FSB
Atesh is strongest in Crimea itself, one of the group’s coordinators said, but extends as far as Yekaterinburg, 1,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
The coordinator has been involved in some of the group’s most daring raids, including the bombing of the United Russia party headquarters in Nova Kakhovka last summer and the murder of the local party secretary ahead of sham elections in occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Putin.
“Our agents patrol railway stations, for example, in Mariupol, in Dzhankoy, which is a large hub. The Russians defend the border with the help of armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, “Tigers” in places of active construction work and near railway junctions,” the movement’s coordinator said.
The group burned a series of relay boxes, usually the softest targets, but last year also blew up sections of highway in Rostov and Kherson. In Yekaterinburg, the guerrillas destroyed a railway used to transport North Korean artillery ammunition.
They say the agents can also guide Ukrainian airstrikes on high-value targets. The July 26 ATACMS strike on the Saki airbase was based on information they provided. The missiles destroyed an ammunition depot, a radar station, and an S-400 air defense system.
They often post videos after an attack. The Ukrainian military intelligence GUR confirmed cooperation with Atesh.
The group’s activities led to them being mercilessly hunted by the FSB, which turned entire villages inside out in search of the partisans.
“Since the last attack, Russian police of the occupation administration and the FSB have been checking all the villages around Skadovsk. They have entered almost every house, interrogated villagers and checked their phones for cooperation with the partisans. Some of the villagers have disappeared altogether,” the movement’s coordinator said.
Russian intelligence even created a fake Atesh Telegram channel to try to expose its sympathizers, and has repeatedly tried to infiltrate the movement. The group’s organizers keep their work secret, but communicate only online.
“We don’t stop communicating with them, but we try to play operational mind games,” said coordinator Ates, explaining that Ukrainian intelligence helps them identify potential moles.
“We are trying to provide them with information, we are showing that we are supposedly interested in attacking some sensitive targets,” the coordinator added.
The FSB is so desperate to infiltrate that it sometimes carries out missions for Atesh to demonstrate its loyalty.
“They have no problem wiretapping someone, burning something. At our request, they even threw a Molotov cocktail at a recruiting station in Crimea,” the coordinator said.
One day, Russian intelligence tried to lure the operatives into an ambush by posing as a disgruntled soldier, offering to meet and show them where his unit’s equipment was. Ates left the agents waiting in the ambush for a full day, suspecting that the chosen location was so far from the front lines.
But the group says there are also real disgruntled soldiers working with Atesh. One of them is a soldier who filmed the Armavir air base in Russia and secretly showed the location of fighter jets and attack helicopters on the airfield. The group says it also has an FSB informant who warns them about law enforcement actions against them.
The Kremlin went to great lengths to label the group as terrorists, arresting a teenager who prosecutors said was planning a school shooting in Crimea and publicizing his alleged involvement with Atesh. The Russians used a fake Telegram account to encourage the student to carry out the shooting, but he ultimately refused.
“That’s why they detained him and showed in their propaganda media that Atesh recruits children for terrorism. We don’t give tasks to children. It’s inhumane and it would be too much of a risk for them,” the coordinator said.
This has not stopped teachers at Russian schools in Crimea from instructing their classes against the group. One student secretly recorded his teacher telling his classmates: “You can see leaflets in the city now offering to be the eyes of Atesh, on a black background with phone numbers and the like. Guys, this is a terrorist organization that declares itself to be partisans. So if you see such advertising, tear it down, throw it away, tear it to pieces! They recruit mainly young people and kill soldiers on territory that was Ukrainian and became ours, returned to Russia. And they kill in Russia itself.”
(C)UNIAN 2024
The activities of the Atesh partisans
On July 5, partisans of the ATESH movement carried out sabotage on a railway line along which Russians were transporting ammunition from North Korea; the movement of trains was stopped.
” ATESH agents managed to carry out a successful operation on the Trans-Siberian Railway near Yekaterinburg. As a result, the railway track along which North Korean ammunition was being delivered was blown up,” the report says.