Russia Ukraine War How ‘Witches’ Of Ukraine Are Haunting Russians, One Drone Strike At A Time

When the war in Ukraine, which has lasted longer than World War I, started, the resistance in the occupied Ukrainian territory was loud and visible. One video of a grandmother pressing sunflower seeds into a Russian paratrooper’s hand, saying, “so that sunflowers grow here when you die,” which went around the world, sums it up pretty nicely. A lot has changed since then, and the resistance has moved to the shadows.

Video of a Ukrainian woman confronting a Russian soldier: “Take some seeds, put them in your pockets. So at least sunflowers will grow when you die here.” pic.twitter.com/hwnLtORPAk

— Peter Liakhov (@peterliakhov) February 25, 2022

A Russian soldier in occupied Ukraine felt the impact of this resistance first-hand. For months, he believed he was growing close to a Ukrainian housewife who was lonely, curious about his life at the front. They shared small details of their day with the intimacy of an old romance. When she asked to see where he was posted, he sent a photograph. In the background, barely visible, was a map of his compound.

The woman did not exist. As per a report by The Atlantic, the account was run by a male Ukrainian military intelligence officer. Shortly after the photograph was sent, the position it revealed was hit by a drone.

Over four years, the war in Ukraine has changed, and with it, its people and tactics. It is now fought in WhatsApp threads and encrypted messages, in the steady accumulation of small pieces of information that eventually become a set of coordinates and, shortly afterwards, a drone strike. And at the centre of it, disproportionately and decisively, are women or men pretending to be them.

There is a word that keeps appearing when resistance commanders talk about their female agents: ‘vidma’. It comes from Ukrainian folklore, and it is loosely translated as witch. A vidma was a woman who possessed knowledge others did not.

Lesia Orobets, a former member of the Ukrainian parliament, told The Atlantic that these women were respected for their knowledge, not burned for it. Ukraine’s vidmas are the women who walk past Russian checkpoints every morning with their shopping, who work in the clinics and schools that the occupation has absorbed into its administration, who volunteer with Russian aid charities and catalogue every detail of what they see. They are, in the language of military intelligence, assets.

Petro Andriushchenko, who escaped from Mariupol and now manages a resistance cell still operating inside the city, told The Atlantic why women are so central to the network. “They can go places, do things that men cannot. Also, they are ruthless,” he told the US news outlet.

A woman identified only as Roksana (name changed by The Atlantic) had worked at a clinic near Kherson before the invasion. When Russian forces arrived, and she refused to continue working under their authority, she fled, passing through 33 Russian checkpoints, several of which were surrounded by bodies. Some of those were women who, she said, bore the unmistakable signs of sexual violence. At one checkpoint, a soldier fired into the back of her stationary car and wounded a passenger.

She now lives abroad and works as a target verifier for Ukrainian military intelligence, drawing on her intimate knowledge of the area around Kherson, every road, every farm building, every warehouse, to confirm coordinates before strikes are approved. She was asked whether she had any reservations about guiding drone strikes to places she once called home.

“We can rebuild warehouses,” she said. “But the Russians can’t rebuild Russians.”

Training To Seduce The Enemy

Serhiy, a Ukrainian military intelligence officer who runs honeytrap operations targeting Russian soldiers, had spent weeks cultivating Achmad, a Russian soldier stationed in occupied Ukraine, through a fictitious online persona. The techniques Serhiy used on Achmad are not simply a matter of individual talent. The Atlantic found evidence that Ukraine’s intelligence services have developed systematic approaches to online manipulation, possibly including formal training. Russian soldiers, especially Chechens, according to those who run these operations, are surprisingly poor targets for romantic manipulation.

Olena Biletska heads the Ukrainian Women’s Guard, an organisation that has trained more than 60,000 women in survival, self-defence and resistance techniques since Russia’s first assault on Ukraine in 2014. Some of those women remained in occupied territory when the full-scale invasion began in 2022 and are now fighting back.

When Drone Follows Text Ping

Many times, the end point of all this intelligence work is a drone strike. The commander of a company in Ukraine’s 426th Unmanned Systems Regiment told The Atlantic that a significant proportion of his unit’s nightly missions into occupied territory are guided by information from resistance networks. For a high-value target, an air defence position, a command post, a weapons store, the gap between coordinates being transmitted and a weapon arriving can be as little as 15 minutes.

On some occasions, The Atlantic was told, an operative has still been engaged in online conversation with a soldier when the strike landed.

Refugees from occupied areas who have detailed knowledge of local geography, such as which building is a warehouse, which courtyard is used for vehicle storage, serve as target verifiers from abroad. People who have never handled a weapon are participating in a military kill chain from their kitchen tables in Germany, Poland and elsewhere.

The resistance operatives who spoke to The Atlantic want Russian soldiers to read these accounts. They want the occupiers to look at the women around them and wonder.

One agent, identified only by her code name Sestra, who operates inside Mariupol, told The Atlantic, “I want every Russian soldier who has set foot on our land to carry that paranoia with him, suffocating, relentless, every second of every day.”

“I want him to look at the grandmother at the market, at the bus driver, at the doctor in the clinic, at the ordinary passerby on the street, and to see in each of them his own potential destruction,” she added.

Orobets, the former MP, is frequently asked, when she travels abroad, what would happen if Ukraine ran out of men. It is meant as a bleak question. She does not treat it that way.

“Be careful what you wish for. If Ukraine’s women are in charge, there won’t be a Russian left alive,” she told The Atlantic.