The Kremlin “faces increased partisan activity in southern Ukraine,” Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said Wednesday during a conference in Washington, DC.
Ukraine has also conducted limited counterattacks near Kherson, further straining Russian forces.
The region is critical to Russia’s hold on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and controls access to the Crimean Peninsula. It’s unclear how many Russian forces are in or near Kherson, but an occupation against a hostile local population requires far more soldiers than a peaceful occupation of a territory.
Russia’s leaders have prioritized the military campaign at the expense of the appearance of government. “It’s clearly not something they can invest in right now,” a US official said.
Trio of assassination attempts
The first attack in Kherson occurred on June 16 when an explosion shattered the windows of a white Audi Q7 SUV. The vehicle was left badly damaged, but the target of the attack survived.
Eugeniy Sobolev, the pro-Russian head of the prison service in occupied Kherson, was hospitalized after the attack, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
Less than a week later, a second pro-Russian official was attacked in Kherson. This time the attack succeeded. On June 24, Dmitry Savluchenko, the pro-Russian official at the Kherson Region Ministry of Youth and Sports, was killed, RIA Novosti reported. Serhii Khlan, an adviser to the head of the Kherson civilian military administration, called Savluchenko a “traitor” and said he was blown up in his car. Khlan proclaimed, “Our partisans have another victory.”
The car of a third pro-Russian official was set on fire in Kherson on Tuesday, according to Russian state news agency Tass, although the officer was not injured. It is unclear who carried out the attacks.
There appears to be no central command directing an organized resistance, officials said, but attacks have increased in frequency, particularly in the Kherson region, which Russia occupied in March at the start of its invasion.
A source familiar with Western intelligence was more skeptical that resistance from partisan attacks could evolve into a more organized campaign capable of dealing with the attacks and providing weapons and instructions
So far, the resistance has not affected Russia’s control of Kherson, the source familiar with Western intelligence stressed.
But in the long term, the US anticipates that Russia will eventually face counterinsurgency from the local Ukrainian population.
“I think Russia will have major challenges in establishing any stable administration for these regions because likely collaborators – more prominent ones – will be assassinated and others will live in fear,” said Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, a Washington-based think tank.
Complicate Russian governance
On Tuesday, Russian-appointed authorities in the Kherson region arrested the city’s elected Ukrainian mayor Ihor Kolykhaiev hours before they announced plans for a referendum on joining Russia. The pro-Russian military-civilian administration accused Kolykhaiev of encouraging people to “believe in the return of neo-Nazism.”
Kolykhaeiv’s adviser said Russian authorities also confiscated hard drives from computers, ransacked safes and searched for documents. Earlier this month, Ukraine’s military said “invaders” broke into Kherson State University and kidnapped the rector.
The Russian Armed Forces gradually adopted the ruble as the local currency and issued Russian passports.
In Mariupol in May, pro-Russian authorities celebrated the so-called “liberation” of the city. The Russian-aligned Donetsk People’s Republic changed street signs from Ukrainian to Russian and installed a statue of an elderly woman grasping a Soviet flag. Meanwhile, the iconic Mariupol shield in Ukrainian colors has been repainted in Russian colors.
Despite Russia’s efforts to eliminate Ukrainian history, ethnicity and nationalism from Kherson and other occupied territories, the Ukrainian population has shown resilience.
“The occupiers and local collaborators are making louder and louder statements about it [the] The Kherson region is joining Russia,” a Ukrainian official said last week, “but every day more and more Ukrainian flags and inscriptions are appearing in the city.”
Attempts to violently erase Ukrainian culture and dictate Russian hegemony have had the opposite effect in some cases, according to a senior NATO official.
“There were reports of assassination attempts on some of the quislings who were installed as governors and mayors [and] Business leaders,” the NATO official said. A quisling is a traitor working with an enemy force, named after a Norwegian official in World War II who worked with the Nazis. “That almost certainly put off Russian sympathizers or Russians or whatever.” I’ll get in there to fill those posts before I even take them.
As an occupying power in Kherson — particularly one that seems intent on maintaining control — Russia must provide basic services like clean water and garbage collection in the areas it administers. But the US appreciates that acts of resistance make it difficult to provide governance and basic services, one of the US officials said.
The US knew there was a “serious resistance network” in Ukraine that would be able to take power if and when the military failed, the official said. Before the invasion, the US assumed that the insurgency combined with guerrilla warfare would emerge after a brief period of intense fighting in which Russia gained the upper hand. But the war has now dragged on for months, and many analysts are predicting a much longer conflict.
A senior US official warned a Russian counterpart before the conflict that they would face an insurgency if they invaded Ukraine and tried to occupy territory, the official said. But the warning fell on deaf ears and the invasion continued, fueled in part by hubris and bad intelligence.
Russia believed its armed forces would be welcomed with open arms and would quickly crush any resistance, erroneous fantasies that quickly fell apart but did little to change Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculations.
Kofman says it’s unclear what kind of governance framework Russia will try to create to exercise control, but there is no doubt that it intends to keep the territories. After facing prolonged, bloody uprisings in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the Kremlin knew to face another potential uprising in Ukraine.
“You saw it coming,” Kofman said. “That’s why they set up filter camps and expelled a large part of the population from the occupied territories.”
CNN’s Tim Lister, Barbara Starr, and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.