Forging a nation: Ukrainian courage and resistance, one year on

Twice a day, during much of Russia’s eight-month occupation of the southern city of Kherson, a Ukrainian partisan known as “Dollar” went to a secret hiding place, unearthed a cell phone, and briefly called Ukrainian forces with intelligence on Russian military positions.

Using that buried phone was dangerous work. Kherson was the only provincial capital to fall when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine one year ago, on Feb. 24.

This shipbuilding hub on the Dnipro River north of the Black Sea proved its patriotic mettle, as citizens boldly staged anti-Russian street protests for weeks. But when Dollar put together his network of Ukrainian spies, those public protests were finished. He decided to fight back, he says, at a time when activists were being taken by Russians “every day” from their homes and were often tortured. Some disappeared.

Dollar – a heavyset man with short gray hair who managed building projects before the war – counts at least two successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian troop concentrations that resulted from the coordinates and vetted intelligence he transmitted over his buried phone.

In his pocket today he carries a medal inscribed with words of gratitude for “assistance to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Yet Dollar was not alone. His decision to resist mirrored that of legions of Ukrainians, though outnumbered and outgunned by Russia on the battlefield, who chose to fight against long odds rather than surrender to Russia’s invasion force of 190,000 troops.

The Kremlin had expected to seize the capital Kyiv within three days and in short order raise the Russian flag across the entire country. Yet the invasion has showcased more than Russian military weakness.

In Ukraine these last 12 months, it has helped to forge anew a Ukrainian nation that had struggled to define and solidify its own identity since gaining independence in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“I know a lot of people from this country who can say, for example, ‘Oh, these politicians are so corrupt, we hate our government,’” says Dollar. “But when the enemy comes, even if that enemy calls himself your brother, these people will unite and kick his [tail]. We are very in love with freedom.”

United around a common cause, and increasingly aware of what it would mean to be absorbed into a neocolonial project that Moscow calls “Russkiy Mir,” or Russian World – especially after a year of conflict that has brought a tide of human suffering and razed entire cities – Ukrainians beam when speaking of their rekindled and refocused national spirit.

From the constantly active 650-mile-long front in the eastern Donbas region and the south, to the sophisticated coffee shops of the west, Ukrainians in uniform and civilians alike often say that “truth” or “God” is on their side. And they voice an expectation – bolstered by promised Western weaponry – that they will defeat Russia, even force its retreat from Donbas and Crimean territory seized in 2014. In Kyiv this week, President Joe Biden vowed that American and European support for Ukraine would not waver.

Role of Russian cruelty

Kherson became a test case of both the Russian World experiment, and of Ukrainian resilience in the face of it.

Russian forces tried to present Kherson as a model city, where citizens welcomed Russian forces and humanitarian aid while being cleansed of “Nazis” and “fascists.” Russian attempts to annex and create a “Kherson People’s Republic” included the exclusive use of Russian currency, issuing Russian passports, and converting schools to a Russian system.

But it was here also that Russian cruelty and later spite, combined with a widespread refusal by Ukrainian citizens to give in to Russia’s program, have provided a window into how acts of resistance, large and small, have added up to a melding of defiant purpose for the Ukrainian nation.

People here feel the Russian spite today, nearly four months after they were liberated, because Russian forces that retreated south across the Dnipro River continue frequent shelling of the city, in “revenge,” residents say, for their failure to conquer Kherson.

One Russian rocket on Tuesday struck a bus stop in the city, killing six people, and Kherson’s streets are eerily empty because of the constant threat of bombardment.

One family that housed four generations under a single roof during the occupation describes how they now pile clothes by their beds at night, ready for when incoming shells force them into a neighbor’s basement – as they do most nights.

Only 95-year-old Olha Belaya sleeps all night in her clothes, which include a bright magenta headscarf and a worn robe held together at the top with a large safety pin.

“I don’t want to die naked,” she says, wryly. “We never thought Putin could be so evil.”

Day-to-day resistance

The risk of Russian attack, day and night, means that they seldom leave the house on a plot that the family has lived on, close to the river, since the late 18th century.

The family rarely articulates sweeping statements about the significance of their day-to-day resistance, but it was in such actions that their sense of nationhood grew.

They refused, for example, to let their youngest, 14-year-old Danylo Ivanov, go to Russian school. They chose instead to continue his studies online with his Ukrainian teacher, who left Kherson because she rejected the Russian curriculum.

Danylo’s aunt Aliona has now moved to Europe, but during the occupation last April, when Russian troops were dispersing protesters with live bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades, she told The Christian Science Monitor about the difficulties of life under the Russian yoke.

“Many of us are now conducting a quiet guerrilla war,” she said at the time, as she described Russian security agents kidnapping local activists and suppressing resistance. She berated one Russian patrol for turning a civilian car they shot at “into a coffin” for a grandmother and her son.

Liberation has not brought peace, and this family describes the “scared panic” with which Russian troops fled in early November. The Russians stole new trolley buses from their station and took boats from the local dock, recalls Aliona’s father, Volodymyr Schulz.

And while Russian troops may have been in a hurry, this family was appalled to witness that, in their final days, their occupiers found time to use the hooks of a crane to rip out the wires of the electrical transformer that served their neighborhood, plunging all into darkness.

“It’s not even 100%, but 1,000% that people’s views have changed against Russia,” says Mr. Schulz.

“We never expected this war would happen, or such a level of destruction,” adds his wife, Olena Schulz.

Shelling, and patriotism

Throughout the occupation, Mr. Schulz refused to speak to Russian soldiers – in part because his son, Sasha, was a soldier. “I didn’t want to make a sin on my soul,” he says. “With my son in the Ukrainian Army, how could I talk to them?”

Soldier Sasha has been home four times in the past year, and Mr. Schulz took pictures of teen Danylo wearing his uncle’s armored vest and helmet, and holding his rifle. That was a moment of excitement for the youth, who is not allowed outside for more than 20 minutes at a time, because of the risk of Russian attack. At home Danylo makes plasticine figures, plays with his keychain and toy insect collection, and has read every book in the house several times – especially an atlas of the natural world.

The family home isn’t far from an old factory that is a frequent Russian target, “but they are not very precise, so anything can happen,” says Mr. Schulz, noting that neighbors were wounded on an adjacent street in December. “Of course we’re scared, but when the shelling starts, we run straight to the basement.”

“That’s how we live. When we wake, we pray to this icon,” says Ms. Schulz, pointing toward an Orthodox icon sitting on a shelf. “We can’t think about the future. We have no plans.”

“We thought after they left, there would be peace, but they are destroying Kherson every day, every street,” she says.

As Russia continued its strikes, says Mr. Schulz, “of course, I became more patriotic.”

And so did Dollar, the partisan who speaks with disgust at the number of pro-Russian “traitors” who were exposed – among citizens, in the police and intelligence services, and in local government.

One of his own sets of delivered targeting coordinates, of a Russian unit – which he says was confirmed repeatedly by his spy network and himself – resulted in friendly fire striking a neighboring residential building, instead. Dollar is convinced that, somewhere along the chain of information he gave to Ukrainian forces, a pro-Russian sympathizer changed the coordinates.

But Dollar’s pride in Ukraine deepened when one Russian special forces base that his network had been surveilling for weeks – the Restaurant Faris, on the northeast edge of Kherson – was destroyed by two American-supplied HIMARS rockets on November 5, killing an estimated 20 to 30 paratroopers just days before Russia withdrew from the city.

Dollar comes from a long line of Ukrainian partisans, including his grandmother, who served as a courier in the Ukrainian resistance against Nazi occupation during World War II. Her uncle was a commander of the Ukrainian resistance forces.

“I am coming from very old [resistance] roots,” says Dollar. “I don’t need to learn how to love my motherland.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this article.