Resistance is always a risk, but safety and risk are two incomprehensible concepts for those of us who experience life with the invaders. “When Kherson fell we organized ourselves into small groups, although most of us acted individually in various forms of resistance such as sabotaging the occupation authorities by refusing to cooperate, publishing patriotic pamphlets, monitoring their positions…”, 28-year-old Viacheslav Cherniavski tells this newspaper.
And part of the Kherson region, in southern Ukraine, is free after eight and a half months of Russian occupation. And knowing how its population resisted so many Russian months, moreover, gives unexpected clues about the path of success of the Ukrainian resistance to Russia.
Surprise: If there is talk of non-violent resistance, it is due in part to the Russian action itself.
“When you ask the neighbors about the resistance, they answer that there was hardly any, because they relate it exclusively to the armed struggle and their life was without weapons, although with a fierce opposition to the Russians to dominate the symbolic space”, report Oksana Mikheieva and Serhí Danilov in a recent report of interviews with the local population of areas even recently occupied.
And here, “despite the fact that both men and women actively resisted the occupiers”, they continue, “Ukrainian women became the face of the opposition. They were more active. If the Russian soldiers treated the men as a threat, the women did not treat them seriously, probably because of the patriarchal nature of the occupation regime. This has contributed to diversifying the means of expression of resistance”.
This, it is explained, has given rise to an influential non-violent Ukrainian resistance either to remove Russian flags and replace them with the Ukrainian one, to graffiti Ukrainian symbols in the occupied public space, to paint monuments identified with Russia, to distribute flyers, stickers and yellow and blue ribbons or to wear shirts with traditional embroidery and claim Ukrainianness.
All this when “it is known that the main task of the Russian occupiers is to destroy any sign of Ukrainian identity: books, language, religion, etc.”, explains to La Vanguardia Ígor Semivolos, of the School for the Construction of Peace in Ukraine, one of the greatest experts on the resistance, and who uses first-hand information to confirm this: he works in recently free zones.
“An elderly woman, a unique expert in her field, agreed to work with the occupiers only after they said ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ some schoolteachers refused to work with the Russians despite the risk and continued to secretly teach the children at home using the Ukrainian curriculum,” Mikheieva and Danilov’s study specifies with examples. “Each act of sabotage immediately inspires people to new acts of non-violent resistance. People are inspired by the examples of desperate people”, summarizes Semivolos.
Ukrainians living under Russian occupation also have one of their mainstays in language: “They use a dialect or an accent that allows them to distinguish friends from enemies. Surjik, from standard Ukrainian and Russian, has lost its negative connotation that it had and, instead of pointing to an uneducated person, it identifies the local, and therefore indicates that someone is untrustworthy”.
It is recognized, however, that in recent months the situation has deteriorated with more forced disappearances and deportations and more military mobilization. Also due to the fact that there is more linguistic pressure in favor of Russian.
“There continues to be resistance and non-cooperation in areas such as Zaporizhia and Crimea and less so in the Donbass”, summarizes here after a lot of work on the ground Felip Daza, professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. He himself, in fact, in a recent investigation for the Barcelona ICIP, explained how these actions are generally distinguished because they are informal and decentralized, in networks based on social trust and how, since the invasion, they have seen three waves.
From February 24 to the end of March 2022, mass protests and symbolic actions and non-violent intervention stood out, such as physically standing in the way of the Russian advance, building barricades, or manipulating traffic signals.
Since April 2022, due to the growing repression, there have been underground protest actions through graffiti, hanging flags, yellow and blue ribbons for the colors of the Ukrainian flag and the first action of non-cooperation, such as not selling grain to the occupiers or hiding from their mobilization. Until June with particular intensity in the territories of Kherson and Zaporizhia.
Finally, from November 2022 to today, there is the consolidation of the yellow ribbon campaign, cultural resistance and actions in defense of human rights and the participation of minority communities such as the Crimean Tatars, are also key.
The non-violent resistance of the first phases of the invasion, thus, is not so intense now, admits Semivolos. There are constant raids, searches, telephone checks, a firm control of citizens’ movements and control of documents, he says.
Under this pressure, many pro-Ukrainians were forced to leave the occupied territories and those who remained were under constant surveillance. There are synergies between armed and non-violent resistance at least in terms of information, say the experts consulted, a reality that still goes largely unnoticed in the West and which is key behind the Russian lines, they insist.
“We will know more after the release. Right now, for security reasons, there is little information and that is understandable, because it is about illegal activities in the occupied territories in the face of a tough regime of enemy counter-espionage”, concludes Semivolos.
