Ukraine-Russia War: Fear of Russians disguised as locals is slowly gripping Ukraine.
Irpin:
The commander of Ukrainian special forces inspected the remains of a bridge that his teams had blown up at the entrance to Kyiv and explained his strategy to fight the Russian “saboteurs”.
“Our agents live with the locals,” said Spear unit commander Victor Chelovan.
“If strangers come to our village, people send us signals, call us, and we go out and look after these saboteurs.”
The fear of Russians disguised as locals is slowly gripping Ukraine.
It hit Kyiv when Russian paratroopers crashed into a local airfield on the city’s northwest edge last Thursday in the first hours of their invasion of Ukraine.
The exact number who landed – or who survived the Ukrainian counter-attack – is unclear.
But residents of the neighboring village of Irpin have been telling strange things in their forest since then.
“We have people who look like locals shooting at other locals,” said Irpin resident Andrey Levanchuk.
The 39-year-old financial advisor was using a dangerous-looking crossing made of pipes and wires to get to the other side of the small but surprisingly fast Irpin River.
The regular bridge over it was blown up by the Ukrainian army to block the Russian advance.
“These are Russian paratroopers who hide in the woods, enter people’s apartments, take off their clothes, change and try to walk around in civilian clothes,” Levanchuk said.
Military analysts believe that Levanchuk’s inclination about strangers in the woods may be correct.
local lookouts
Mykola Beleskov of Kyiv’s National Institute for Strategic Studies said Russia was “collectively employing different types of special forces” to try to capture the Ukrainian capital.
“They’re trying to mix air strikes, artillery and infiltration commandos, which basically provide support to move very slowly,” he said.
The Russian advance on the historic city seemed imminent when the paratroopers arrived.
But the Ukrainian army put up strong resistance at the northern entrance of the city and then recaptured the airfield.
Then they started blowing up bridges and putting up barricades across the city to stop the invasion by any means.
Kyiv residents, such as 19-year-old student Ibrahim Shelia, further took matters into their own hands.
Shelia and her friends begin digging a ditch in front of their building to lob Molotov cocktails into Russian tanks.
Yet he also decided to keep a close eye on people who look like they’re not.
“The other day, along with our friends, we stopped a car, which some locals had informed us about,” Shelia said minutes before entering the night curfew in Kyiv – with the aim of better fighting the intruders. Another solution from
“There were four people with two maps of Ukraine, two laptops and all had two Ukrainian passports: the first was the new version, the second was the old one,” he said.
“We called the police immediately. Everyone was arrested and taken away.”
“Kill the Leaders”
The mayor of Irpin also said that his men had picked up some Russians after information from one of the local villagers.
“Of course there are vandals out there,” said Mayor Alexander Markushin, inspecting the remains of his city’s main bridge.
Some policemen nearby argued about how long it might take to repair their city crossing in Kyiv after the war had ended.
But the commander of the special forces did not have time for idle talks and tried to steer the conversation towards danger.
“There are three types of saboteurs,” he said.
“Russian special forces and GRU (military intelligence) were stationed here before the war. Their main job was to aid the Russian offensive,” he said.
Chelovan said the second group was sent to “destabilize daily life” with various attacks.
“The third group is intelligence agents whose sole goal is to kill various Ukrainian leaders,” said the commander.
A group of volunteer soldiers were trying to maneuver a new batch of Kalashnikovs across the floating river as he spoke.
“But most importantly, they are trying to kill the leaders of the mass resistance movement,” Chelovan said.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)