Trained by the ‘elves’ to fight the ‘orcs’. Inside the Ukrainian resistance
The BBC has gained exclusive access to a resistance group operating in and around Kyiv.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army has had to face not only the hardened opposition from the regular armed forces, but also a substantial partisan and underground resistance movement, within the occupied territories. The BBC has gained exclusive access to a resistance group operating in and around Kyiv.
Partisans and underground groups played a significant role in forcing the Russian army to retreat at the beginning of April, abandoning their attempts to take the Ukrainian capital.
“We tried to do it as far from town as possible for the safety of the locals,” says Anatoly*, peering between the sparse trees along the side of the country road. “Lots of local residents are still around, and we didn’t want to leave them vulnerable to mock trials from them”.
By ‘them’, Anatoly means Russian soldiers, for whom he makes no attempt to conceal his contempt.
We’re driving down a road off one of the main motorways back to Kyiv. We’re not much more than about 20 kilometres away from the city. In March, when the plan to take Ukraine’s capital in just a few days failed and the Russians resorted to ‘Plan B’, surrounding the city, country roads like this one, and towns and villages around Kyiv started filling up with Russian military equipment.
Or rather, they would have done, if it hadn’t been for people like Anatoly.
Anatoly nods at the tree that he’s been peering at this whole time, and gets out of the car.
He hid the first mine just beneath it. Under the next tree, a second one, and a third one a few metres away. A shrub acted as a kind of target marker, and Anatoly himself had sat in a trench a hundred metres from the road.
There’s a cable lying in the grass that’s been there since March, leading from the road to this small trench about the size of a person, dug into the ground. He’d used the cable to detonate homemade explosives.
Anatoly’s companion had hidden in a tree with a pair of binoculars. Some local hunters had given them a radio set, which they used to communicate.
“I sat in the dugout all day and all night. A column made up of 11 military vehicles drove by first, but we let them go because we wouldn’t have affected them much,” says Anatoly. “But the next day, two armoured vehicles drove by. They’d been patrolling the area daily… my mate with the binoculars radioed that our ‘clients’ were on their way, so we got to work”.
“I missed the first car,” he remembers. “When the second one was in line with the first landmine, I ducked down and detonated it. Three landmines blew up at once… I waited five seconds before jumping up and running off parallel to the road.”
Anatoly smiles as he tells the story, but it was no laughing matter at the time. The second armoured vehicle was completely destroyed in the explosion, but the soldiers driving the first car turned around and opened fire on Anatoly.
“They missed, thank God,” he laughs.
Before the war, Anatoly was a businessman living in a small town in the Kyiv region. In terms of military experience, all he had was the usual military service. On the 24th February, “when it all began”, he turned up at the military recruitment centre without any draft papers. The army wouldn’t take him at the time. In fact, the military recruitment centres were overwhelmed by the number of volunteers who came flocking to their doors, and had to send most of them home.
On the other hand, in the early days of the war, the Ukrainian authorities handed out ’Kalashnikov’ sub-machine guns without the usual strict protocols in their thousands to pretty much anyone who wanted to defend their cities outside of the formal structure of the armed forces.
Together with a few other people, Anatoly organised a ‘makeshift’ roadblock. Hundreds of similar roadblocks began to appear all over Ukraine as men who hadn’t been recruited into the army tried to defend their towns and cities in this way, with or without weapons, against Russian soldiers in general and sabotage and reconnaissance groups in particular.
Anatoly spent a week at that roadblock. After a while, it became clear that the Russian attack had been stalled, and that they were unlikely to reach Anatoly’s hometown, so the men began independently to advance towards where the front line was at the time.
That’s when they met the ‘elves'.
“They helped us out by giving us some weapons, and taught us a few different things,” Anatoly says, vaguely.
That was the moment when his life changed completely.
Orcs (noun, plural) - a derogatory term for Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. This name comes from the fictional monsters in J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings. It caught on at the start of the war as a result of the aggression, belligerence and tendency towards looting and pillaging that the Russian soldiers were displaying, in part, in the Kyiv region. Ukrainian authorities also use the term; on 25th February, a post from Ukraine’s ground troops about “orcs from Mordor” appeared on Facebook, and president Vladimir Zelensky also refers to Russian soldiers as ‘orcs’ from time to time.
Elves (noun, plural) - the enemies of the orcs in Tolkien’s literary universe. Refers to Ukrainian soldiers, and is even used by some Russian Telegram channels, in a derogatory tone. Soldiers helping to organise and provide for the resistance forces on Ukraine’s territory can also be called ‘pixel elves’ (after their camouflage pattern).
Partisans and the underground
Up until now, Ukrainian military schools never paid any attention to the organisation and activities of the resistance movement, Nikolai* says. Things like guerilla fighting, or the underground - all of that reminded Ukrainians more of WWII period with tactics employed by partisans against occupying forces of the Nazi Germany or the Ukrainian rebel army which was fighting both, the Germans and the Red Army.
But everything changed in 2014. “That was when we realized that you can’t defeat an enemy like Russia using standard methods,” says Nikolai. As early as 2014, pro-Ukrainian members of underground movements have tried to organise acts of sabotage in Crimea, as well as in the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘peoples’ republics’ not controlled by Kyiv. But this was not done on a systematic basis.
When the front line in the Donbas became more stable, the Ukrainian leadership decided to take charge. At first, it was mostly informal, but last summer - before the Russian invasion - Ukraine’s parliament (Verkhovna Rada) passed a national resistance law. Under this law, a new government body the Special Operations Forces was tasked with managing partisan fighting in Ukraine. In August 2021, the SOF announced on Facebook that they were beginning to train new Ukrainian partisans.
In fact, as the BBC’s sources in Ukraine said, other security agencies are also drawn into supporting ‘partisans’, such as the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s intelligence service and the military.
Nikolai, who agreed to chat to us, is a high-ranking officer in one of Ukraine’s special agencies. Part of his job is to organise and to provide for resistance movements on Ukrainian soil.
The resistance movement, he says, is made up of three key elements.
Firstly, there are proper guerilla fighters. These are former civilians who have taken up arms to carry out raids, acts of sabotage or attacks against occupying forces. Anatoly and his companion who blew up Russian armoured vehicles just outside Kyiv are, in that sense, classic partisans.
Secondly, it is the underground movement. These days, members of the underground movement stay living in their hometowns even after Russian forces have moved in. They might even get in with the occupying authorities. All the while, they send valuable information to Ukrainian military about what’s going on, sabotaging the work of the ‘new authorities’, and even organising combat missions themselves in their local areas.
The local underground resistance was behind a whole host of attempts on the lives of the officials within the occupying administrations in the Kharkov, Kherson and Zaporizhie regions, Nikolai hints.
The third element are the supporters. These are people who are pro-Ukraine, but do not themselves take up arms. Instead, they help the partisans and underground resistance by donating money, food, clothing, even giving blood - people do what they can.
“There are plenty of fearless people. Our aim isn’t to exploit their bravery but rather to manage it in such a way that they are able to secretly use what’s available to them for the good of the resistance movement, the Ukrainian army and our [national] security in general,” says Nikolai.
How to become a partisan
Some of the current partisans and underground resistance members had been ready even before the Russian invasion, Nikolai says. When Russia invaded Ukraine, they were able to start their work immediately, and they’re the ones who are the most active now, he admits.
“But there are others who don’t have any [of that] experience. We have special ways to deliver them weapons, explosives… we put together instructional videos, and people literally learn on the spot how to carry out an ambush, or how to sabotage something without hurting themselves in the process, but still make the biggest possible impact on the enemy. Everyone learns more in the process, both soldiers and [members of] the resistance movement”, Nikolai explains.
According to him, the ‘systematic work’ of organising the partisan and underground movement is still ongoing, focused mainly in the areas likely to be targeted next by a new Russian invasion.
“For now, all our efforts are concentrated on the left bank area (East of the Dnieper river), but also in the Kyiv, Zhitomir, Odesa and Mykolaiv regions,” says Nikolai.
How do the ‘elves’ find such partisans and underground resistance workers? First and foremost, says the officer, personal connections are very useful.
That’s actually how we found Anatoly, says Nikolai: “Our lads had gone towards the front line, and started talking to their relatives and friends, and friends of friends, and found more people that way… Anatoly immediately said: count me in. I know the area well, I’ve got a few colleagues who do too, and we’re all prepared to fight off the Russians, but we could do with some gear.”
The ‘elves’ quickly trained up Anatoly and his friends, and helped them organise their first ambush. Nikolai took us to the very place where it happened.
“The armoured car was destroyed as a result, with a squad onboard killed. After the explosion, they (the partisans - BBC), knowing the terrain, made their way back to us, and after they’d had a rest we started preparing for the next operation,” Nikolai says.
He goes on: a number of his friends were in the military, and would have liked to ambush the enemy themselves, but the ‘elves’ realised that actually, those people could be more helpful if they concentrated their efforts on training people like Anatoly - that way, there could be dozens of ambushes of the same kind, not just one.
On top of all this, Nikolai says, once they’ve been trained, each partisan cell becomes a relatively independent unit. For example, such partisans are able to then recruit other Ukrainians who are prepared to fight the enemy on the home front.
“We’re normally able to keep in regular contact [with partisan groups on occupied territory], although sometimes the signal can be patchy, but it’s there. We don’t tend to work with specific orders, like ‘do this exact thing in this exact place (and at this exact time)’. Instead we send them a task, and they work out amongst themselves how best to go about doing it, and when. Or they might even see the perfect window of opportunity to carry out a mission which we haven’t even set them”, says Nikolai.
Armed with an axe or a hammer
There’s a housing complex just a few kilometres outside the Kyiv ring road. The blocks are standard multi-storey new-builds. Alexander*, who lives here, takes us down into the large cellar space beneath one of the buildings.
In the early days of the war, this cellar became a shelter for those who hadn’t had time to leave the city. At the beginning of March, when Russian shells were exploding close by, at one point there were about 300 people living down here, including children.
At the time, some of the local men were using roadblocks to control entry into the complex, and took turns manning them, armed "with an axe or a hammer,” says Alexander - he’s the one who had taken charge on the spur of the moment of these makeshift self-defence measures for their area.
“I only later understood just how careless we were. But even then, we knew that we would do everything in our power to stop anything bad from happening. We really felt ready to take on anything”, he recalls.
One day, a group of men in military uniform arrived at the roadblock. They asked to speak to the commander. The ‘elves’ thought the housing complex had an excellent strategic location, and its defenders were clearly very motivated, and so they offered to help Alexander with ‘special equipment and training’. After conferring with his colleagues, he agreed.
By that point, they’d been able to evacuate almost all the women and children from the cellar into safer areas of Ukraine.
So, the cellar was converted into a fully-fledged operations base. On the advice of the ‘elves’, they kitted it out with a 2000 litre barrel of drinking water, provisions for a few hundred people, and even a pharmacy. Fortunately, one of the members of this home front defence unit turned out to be a qualified doctor. The rooves of the blocks of flats became surveillance points. The woods around the complex became home to machine gun nests. A room just off the cellar was designated for storing weapons.
“We were tasked with throwing everything we had at the enemy if he were to come close, using what the guys had given us, and what amazing weapons they were. After an attack, we would regroup and head in the direction of Kyiv in order to get further instructions and new weapons. As one of the ‘elves’ said, your task is to hold your position, blast the living daylights out of as much as we could, and then get out of there. That’s what we were preparing for. The guys helped train us,” says Alexander.
And so, in March, Russians heading for Alexander’s housing complex never made it. The base in the cellar continues to function today, though the ‘elves’ have taken back the weaponry.
To this day, Alexander and his team continue refining their tactical training at the army base of a military unit stationed nearby.
“I think we’d be stupid not to be preparing for a second invasion. If I’m honest, what I’m most afraid of, and what gives me nightmares is if the 24th (February) were to happen all over again, and we’d grown weak in some way, and my team weren’t ready,” says Alexander.
For that reason, even though the housing complex gives every impression of a peaceful place today, with no traces of the war in sight, Alexander still carries out ‘training sessions’ for his team from time to time. They regularly top up the cellar stores of food, water and medicines for several hundred people. The firing points in the woods are also still maintained, ready and operational.
“Nobody’s taken anything down, because we all know the war isn’t over,” says Alexander.
Fully prepared to go back
At the end of March, Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced that troops were “regrouping as planned after successfully fulfilling all objectives in the Kyiv area”. However, Ukrainian and Western experts say that the real reason for the Russians’ retreat was the heavy losses that they had sustained, partly at the hands of local resistance partisans.
For Anatoly, meanwhile, gone are the partisan days when he would sleep with a grenade at hand, so that the enemy wouldn’t take him alive. The man has since signed a contract with the regular armed forces of Ukraine. We caught up with him during his planned rotation.
If the Russians make another attempt on Kyiv, says Anatoly, he’s fully prepared to go back and defend his hometown, and become a partisan once more.
“The more there are of us, the faster we can finish this. With cars being blowing up all over the place, they [the Russian military] shouldn’t feel safe anywhere. Not in any town, not in a single city. And for people like us, that’s our job,” he explains.
Isn’t he frightened?
“I am,” Anatoly replies. “Anyone in their right mind would be frightened when people start shooting at you and there are mortar bombs buzzing around your ears. What I’m way more scared of is my children being enslaved. The idea that they’ll lose their freedom - that’s what I’m constantly afraid of.”
* names changed for security reasons
Read the full story in Russian here.
Translated by Elsa Haughton.
Pictures by Magerram Zeynalov.