The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded Whats App messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine is not losing. Russia is not winning.]Ukraine’s resistance is alive and more lethal than ever. But it has changed dramatically since its early days. A man I will call Dmytro (he requested anonymity for reasons of safety) has served with a resistance team inside occupied Kherson from the first days of the full-scale invasion. “We took insane risks then,” he told me. “Nobody thought the Russians would be here long.” Partisan cells sprang up organically—people who knew one another, sometimes ex-military, improvising as they went. Symbolic acts of resistance happened daily. Ukrainians flew their flag and blared patriotic songs in public. The image of a grandmother pressing sunflower seeds into a Russian paratrooper’s hand—“so that sunflowers grow here when you die”—traveled around the world.As it became clear the Russians intended to stay, such open defiance faded. Today, expressing support for Ukraine in Russian-occupied areas