June 19, 2026

The Trap Closes: How Russia Suppresses Resistance in Occupied Ukraine and How We Can Still Help

Jade McGlynn Non-Resident Research Fellow

Resistance to Russian occupation in Ukraine is real, documented, and ongoing, but it must operate under conditions of heavy surveillance and at risk of arrest, torture, and death. Some of the western support designed to sustain resistance has instead made the situation worse. This article asks what honest, effective support looks like: not what we wish resistance could be, but what it can actually survive, and what we can do that helps rather than harms.

The answer requires confronting the comprehensive architecture of Russian repression, the structural failings in how western governments have funded resistance support, and clarity about what external actors can legitimately do: operational resistance is a function of Ukrainian security services, not NGOs or western contractors. What remains is still meaningful: support for the resistance to the destruction of Ukrainianness itself. For the Baltic states and their neighbours, this is not a distant policy question. Russia’s occupation methods have been refined and extended from those used during the Soviet occupation. The logic—filtration, administrative entrapment, identity criminalisation, generational capture—is well documented.[1]

The Architecture of Suppression

Before occupying a territory, Russian intelligence services compile blacklists of civic activists, journalists, teachers, and anyone perceived as loyal to the Ukrainian state. Upon seizure, these individuals are the first arrested, moved through a network of more than 100 documented detention sites across occupied Ukraine and into Russian territory, subjected to torture, and pushed through fabricated criminal prosecutions. Since February 2022, at least 15 250 civilians have been detained; the UN found that 92% of ex-detainees reported torture or ill-treatment.[2]

Operational resistance is a function of Ukrainian security services, not NGOs or western contractors.

Russia has simultaneously weaponised religious institutions: since the full-scale invasion, at least 67 clergy have been killed and over 640 religious buildings damaged or destroyed, while the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been deployed as an enforcement arm of the state, banning or criminalising non-ROC denominations that refuse subordination.[3] Internet traffic is routed through FSB-monitored SORM nodes, biometric SIM registration has ended digital anonymity, and mobile phones are inspected at checkpoints. Passportisation completes the entrapment: by September 2025, residents of all four occupied oblasts were formally required to hold Russian documentation or be classified as foreigners in their own homes.[4]

Capturing the Next Generation

Russia’s suppression of resistance is both immediate and generational. Nearly 20 000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly transferred to Russia or Russian-controlled territory since 2014, acts for which the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin in March 2023.[5] For those who remain, Russia has constructed a militarisation pipeline anchored by the Voin (‘Warrior’) programme providing paramilitary training in weapons handling, tactics, and drone operation for children aged fourteen to seventeen.[6] In Mariupol’s municipal education budget, approximately 63.8% is allocated to ideological activities.[7] Children completing this system will reach conscription age between 2028 and 2034.

Occupied populations do not maintain resistance conditions indefinitely.

Occupied populations do not maintain resistance conditions indefinitely: social trust erodes under coercion, institutional memory is replaced, and identity is restructured from childhood. The case for effective support now is that this process, once consolidated, is very difficult to reverse.

The Adaptation and Limits of Resistance

Despite this architecture, resistance continues but has had to adapt. The NATO Resistance Operating Concept, derived from assumptions about durable clandestine networks with persistent communications and identifiable leadership, was designed for a different kind of adversary.[8] Russia’s systematic filtration and comprehensive biometric surveillance mean that connected cell networks are vulnerability amplifiers: one detained individual becomes the entry point to an entire network.

This was most evident in Mariupol, which entered the full-scale invasion with a pre-existing resistance structure of cell networks and pre-appointed coordinators. Within months, Russian forces had filtered around 150 000 residents.[9] The most survivable resistance proved to be the precise opposite: isolated individuals, coordinated externally from Ukrainian-controlled territory, with no knowledge of one another, a ‘puzzle’ model designed for endurance and compartmentalisation.

Russia’s systematic filtration and comprehensive biometric surveillance mean that connected cell networks are vulnerability amplifiers.

A further hard lesson concerns non-violent resistance. Russian courts routinely sentence civilians to five, ten, or thirteen years under terrorism and espionage statutes for possession of Ukrainian symbols or Telegram activity. As one Mariupol resistance leader put it, the pressure to produce photogenic symbolic defiance was “perhaps the strangest idea”: under total surveillance and facial recognition, it “inevitably leads to arrest. Nice photos for the sake of arrest?”[10] Once an image is published, it can be geolocated within minutes; local CCTV can then be trawled retrospectively to identify the individual, a threat vector documented in arrest cases across occupied territories.[11] The most consequential resistance is overwhelmingly invisible: clandestine intelligence collection, passed to Ukrainian forces for precision targeting.

Some western-funded programmes have failed to understand this risk and made civilians less safe. Digital platforms designed to advertise resistance have, in documented cases, been technically compromised, with Russian authorities monitoring activity in near real-time, resulting in arrests and disappearances.[12] The structural problem is that visible, photogenic symbolic resistance is fundable while clandestine intelligence work, which actually enables military effect, is not. Donor incentives and survival of Ukrainians in the occupied territories pull in opposite directions.

Under Ukrainian law, operational search activity—intelligence collection, agent recruitment, targeted operations—is reserved to Ukrainian security services and those formally operating under their mandate. Western-funded NGOs cannot substitute for that function, and attempts to do so have cost lives. The role available to external actors is categorically different from operational resistance support; conflating the two is where most of the harm has been generated.

The most consequential resistance is overwhelmingly invisible: clandestine intelligence collection, passed to Ukrainian forces for precision targeting.

How We Can Still Help

The question for external actors is what they can contribute to resistance understood more broadly: the resistance to the destruction of Ukrainianness itself. Western governments bear direct institutional responsibility for programmes they fund. Due diligence on operational security, assessed against Russia’s documented capabilities, not generic best practice in the west, should be a mandatory condition of any future funding. Three areas of support are both meaningful and achievable.