2024-08-05 07:14:40
Atesh works everywhere
The young Russian fidgeted restlessly, nervous about the date. He wasn’t worried about the girl, she was just a cover for his mission. He wondered how badly he would be tortured if caught. He was tasked with sabotaging Putin’s personal project: building a new railway through occupied territory in southern Ukraine to connect Crimea with Russia.
If the railway is completed, the Kremlin could quickly move troops and heavy equipment into Crimea by land, reducing dependence on the vulnerable Kerch Bridge.
The armed forces of Ukraine have already begun to isolate the peninsula: they struck a bridge twice, destroyed all three railway ferries, damaged the Black Sea fleet and struck air bases in Crimea.
March. the announced construction of V. Putin’s railway may hinder Kiev’s plans to make the peninsula unusable by the Russians. New track sections are being built to connect the existing railways from Melitopol and Berdiansk. When completed, the railway will stretch more than 500 km from the city of Shakhty in Russia’s Rostov region to Dzhankoy in Crimea, and will have hundreds of kilometers of connecting tracks.
Ukrainian guerrillas say they won’t let that happen without a fight. A few months ago, young people became members of Atesh, an underground resistance movement fighting Putin in the occupied territories and abroad. Its members are motivated partly by hatred of the Kremlin and partly by offers of monetary rewards from Ukrainian leaders.
“These abominations have already killed my classmates and friends. In my neighborhood, all those who returned from the war are either invalids or alcoholics,” said one of the partisans.
Worried that he too would soon be sent to the front, the man decided to take preventive revenge and burn important communication transmission boxes on the Rostov railway sections.
“They sent me instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail. They sent me a dot on the map, told me where to drop it and on which railroad. Of course I was scared. We are all afraid of being caught by the FSB,” he said.
The resistance fighter planned to walk with a friend to a location near the target, intending to carry out an operation on his return. If caught, he planned to say he was accompanying a girl. During the date, he scouted the area, but the girl knew nothing.
He took the same route on the way back, but thinking he was being followed, he jumped on a passenger train and left. A few days later he tried again, but again failed, his nerves could not take it. Only on the fourth attempt did the Russian succeed.
“I went to that place, made sure 20 times that there was no one there. I tried to do it quickly, but I made sure 20 times! I moved closer to the box. I poured this liquid inside. Then I made a way for myself so as not to catch fire. I threw a match. She lit up. My adrenaline jumped, and I ran away!” – recalled the partisan.
He joined an army of partisan saboteurs fighting Putin on his territory. Some of them are Russian, some Ukrainian, many Crimean Tatars or descendants of those who were dispersed by the Soviet empire after 1944. Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of Crimea.
Games with FSB
Atesh is strongest in Crimea itself, said one of the group’s coordinators, but its activities extend to Yekaterinburg, a thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
The coordinator has been involved in some of the group’s most daring raids, including the bombing of United Russia party headquarters in Novaya Kachovka last summer and the killing of the party’s local secretary ahead of sham elections in occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Putin.
“Our agents patrol railway stations, for example, in Mariupol, Dzhankoy, which is a major railway hub. The Russians are defending the border at active construction sites and at railway junctions,” said the movement’s coordinator.
The group has burned scores of relay boxes, usually the easiest targets, but last year also blew up stretches of highway in Rostov and Kherson. In Yekaterinburg, partisans destroyed a railroad that was used to transport North Korean artillery ammunition.
Agents can also adjust Ukrainian airstrikes against high-value targets, they said. July 26 The ATACMS strike on the Saki Air Force Base was carried out based on information provided by them. The missiles destroyed an ammunition depot, a radar station and an S-400 anti-aircraft defense system.
They often post attack videos. Ukraine’s defense intelligence has confirmed its cooperation with Atesh.
Because of the activities of this group, it was mercilessly persecuted by the FSB, which turned entire villages upside down in search of partisans.
“Since the last attack, Russian occupation administration police and FSB officers have been checking all the villages around Skadovsk. They entered almost every house, questioned villagers and checked their phones to see if they were collaborating with the guerrillas. Some villagers have completely disappeared,” said the coordinator of the movement.
Russian intelligence even created a fake Telegram channel for Atesh to expose his supporters and repeatedly tried to infiltrate the movement. The organizers of the group keep their activities a secret, but only communicate online.
“We don’t stop communicating with them, but we try to play operational mind games,” the Atesh coordinator said, explaining that Ukrainian intelligence helps them identify potential spies.
“We try to give them information, we show that we are supposedly interested in attacking some secret targets,” the coordinator added.
The FSB is so desperate for infiltration that it sometimes carries out missions behind Atesh to demonstrate its loyalty.
“They don’t have any problem listening to something or burning it. At our request, they even threw a Molotov cocktail at the recruitment center in Crimea,” said the coordinator.
One day, Russian intelligence tried to lure the agents into an ambush by pretending to be a disgruntled soldier, offering to meet and show them where his unit’s equipment was. Atesh left the agents waiting in ambush all day, suspecting that the chosen location was very far from the front line.
However, according to the group, there are real disaffected 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 airstrip. The group says it also has an FSB informant alerting them to law enforcement action against them.
The Kremlin has gone to great lengths to label the group as a terrorist group, arresting a teenager who prosecutors say was preparing to shoot up a school in Crimea and publicizing his alleged ties to Atesh. The Russians used a fake Telegram account to encourage the schoolboy to carry out the shooting, but he ultimately refused.
“That’s why they arrested him and showed in their propaganda media that Atesh was recruiting children for terrorism.” We do not assign tasks to children. It’s inhumane and it would put them at too much risk,” the coordinator said.
This did not stop Russian school teachers in Crimea from teaching their classes against this group. One student secretly recorded his teacher telling his classmates: “You can now see leaflets in the city offering to be Atesh’s eyes, on a black background with phone numbers and so on. Guys, this is a terrorist organization that claims to be guerrillas. So if you see an ad like this, rip it off, throw it away, tear it to shreds! They recruit mostly young people and kill soldiers in the territory that was Ukraine and became ours, returned to Russia. And they kill in Russia itself.”
“Union” inf.
2024-08-05 07:14:40