The agent had been watching for weeks, carefully observing the movements of Russian patrols, surveillance blind spots and the irregular arrival of the cargo trains.
Slipping from the shadows, he planted homemade bombs on a railway track used to bring weapons and supplies to Moscow’s troops in eastern Ukraine. “Boom, boom, boom”, he heard as he disappeared into the night.
Recounting his recent mission in occupied Donetsk, the civilian working for the Ukrainian resistance told The Telegraph: “The goal was simple: disrupt transport on that route. I did everything so that the line simply became unusable long enough to stop traffic.”
He knows his brave act isn’t war-changing, but it provided “a bit of extra time for our troops on the other side of the front”. Combined with the efforts of at least 2,000 other agents working for Atesh, a pro-Ukrainian underground resistance network, “it adds up”, the 30-year-old agent said.
His testimony is a rare look inside the dangerous sabotage missions carried out by men and women behind enemy lines to derail Vladimir Putin’s war effort.
“Makiivka is my town. I know who walks where, where the streetlights don’t work, where dogs bark for no reason and I don’t stand out,” the agent added. It is because of exactly this – his intimate local knowledge – that an ordinary civilian has become such a valuable asset in the occupied territory.
It is the “invisible enemy” Putin may not be prepared for if Ukraine is forced to surrender land – including perhaps the rest of the Donbas, under the terms of a peace deal being pushed by Donald Trump, the US president.
Atesh and its agents The Telegraph spoke to argued that a ceasefire will not bring peace but mark a new stage in the shadow war being waged by Ukrainian resistance movements.
“I’m not a soldier and not a hero,” the first agent said, but “this is my land … and we will not let them erase the part of Ukraine that still lives inside people here.”
Atesh (“fire” in Crimean Tatar) has been spying on Russian military movements and disrupting its logistics since it was formed in the summer of 2022 in annexed Crimea. The movement quickly spread across occupied Ukrainian territory and deep into Russia, infiltrating Moscow’s military.