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Emblazoned with the tagline “Together we turn our enemies’ lives into hell!”, the educational website run by Ukraine’s special operations forces offers must-know tips and tricks to train Ukraine’s behind enemy lines guerilla forces.
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Ukrainian special operations forces have created a website to train the country’s guerrilla and partisan fighters, publishing an educational course on how to conduct insurgency operations behind enemy lines.
Titled “Citizen resistance on occupied territories!”, the 19-page Ukrainian language handbook details how everyone can conduct sabotage and civil resistance operations from pencil pushing bureaucrats to Priests.
Indeed, the document provides a roadmap into how Ukraine has structured their guerrilla warfare strategy, with the country’s insurgency operations conducted via three concentric nodes:
- The underground: the organizational structure that oversees the conduct of operations within occupied territories;
- The guerrilla forces: now civilians with military experience who engage Russian soldiers and conduct armed operations;
- Civilian resistance: those civilians who can enable the underground and guerrillas to successfully conduct their operations through simple acts of resistance and sabotage.
Among those professions given advice as part of the SOF handbook include:
- Government managers
- Government office workers
- Pharmacists, doctors or nurses
- Warehouse managers
- Police officers
- Priests
- Teachers
- Mine workers, and
- Agricultural workers.
In the document, advice given to government workers includes suggestions to “misunderstand” orders and “ask endless questions,” while priests have been encouraged to take up employment as postal workers to administer to parishioners.
Meanwhile doctors have been encouraged to over prescribe medications to their patients in order to facilitate the transfer of medical supplies to the underground.
The educational document also contains a series of recommendations for civil disobedience.
Recommendations range from the mundane, including setting off-fire alarms in everyday locations such as shopping malls to distract Russian forces, clogging toilets, unscrewing lightbulbs.
Through to more destructive suggestions, including the sabotage of electrical systems, engines, and impairment of conveyor belts in mining operations.
In addition to the sabotage manual which can be found here, the Center also provides regular news updates of how civilian actors have undertaken bouts of civil disobedience to disrupt Russian occupiers, as well as analyses of how to protect yourself throughout the unrest and latest updates detailing trending guerrilla methods.
One article teaches Ukrainians to use VPNs to bypass Russian-blocked websites, while others illustrate how to avoid being misrepresented by Russian media outlets as supportive of the invasion, or even what to do if you see a Russian drone.
One of the news items even seems to discuss acts of violence undertaken against collaborators, detailing how partisans blew up the car of Russian collaborators in Kherson – though the targets survived.
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Liam Garman
Editor – Defence and Security, Momentum Media
