00:00Thank you very much for being with us. We've been discussing this evening Vladimir Zelensky's speech at Davos, where he was critical of his European allies for not acting quickly enough in their own defence, but of course in defence of Ukraine.
00:13The situation now is approaching its fourth anniversary. That's the full-scale invasion by Vladimir Putin's Russia launched in February 2022. The situation about what happens next, of course, is still up on the air with much discussion as to how Ukraine's resistance will be financed.
00:31Let's get more on how Ukrainians themselves on the ground are resisting and what threats they are coming across in their everyday lives under Russian occupation.
00:41Our guest is Jade McGlynn, head of the Ukraine and Russia programme at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security at King's College in London.
00:48Dr. McGlynn, thank you very much for being with us. Here in France, the word resistance is full of meaning in the sense of World War II.
00:57Thank you. We'll get on to discussing that after this report by Amonti Francis. Thank you.
01:04These Ukrainians are picking up Russian passports. Now living under the occupation of Moscow, they were forced to do so or be classified as foreigners.
01:14The requirement came into effect this past September in the occupied regions of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Luansk.
01:22But there are signs of resistance. This spray-painted Ukrainian letter, which does not exist in the Russian alphabet, has become a symbol of defiance.
01:32In her report, Thresholds of Survival, Jade McGlynn, a research fellow at King's College London, says thousands of Ukrainians are resisting inside the occupied regions, both peacefully and with violence.
01:45Between December of 2024 and October of 2025, she documented a total of 248 incidents, including car bombings, sabotage on infrastructure and at least 34 assassination attempts on Russian officials.
02:00With much of social media blocked, those in the resistance depend on secret telegram chats.
02:06But the dangers of resisting are dire. Surveillance is widespread across the occupied territories, and the Kremlin has introduced an app called Max that fuses banking, messaging and public services, requiring users to provide their biometric data.
02:24The Kremlin's objective, McGlynn says, goes beyond simple surveillance.
02:28She says the goal is to transform the population and erase Ukrainian identity.
02:33The acts of resistance across the occupied territories happen in the shadows.
02:38According to McGlynn's sources, only about 20 percent become known by the public.
02:43Francis there, we saw Dr. McGlynn in his report. Let's bring her in now live to talk more about her findings.
02:50Dr. McGlynn, thanks for being with us. As I was saying earlier, resistance, as a word, has full meaning in France after World War II.
02:57I'm wondering what the sense of it is in Ukraine. How are people resisting?
03:03Thank you. No, of course, there has, I'm sure, an incredibly emotional and symbolic connotation for French people.
03:12In Ukraine, I think that, unfortunately, the resistance is really not covered as much as it should be, and also in the West, in terms of the forms the resistance takes.
03:20It's often, perhaps, not as heroic as we remember, let's say, the World War II French resistance, but probably is much closer to how the World War II French resistance actors experienced it themselves.
03:33It's arduous. It's incredibly lonely.
03:36You're under, particularly with new technological innovations, under pretty much constant forms of surveillance that you always need to try to avoid.
03:45And the risks are incredibly high. I mean, there are 15,250 Ukrainian civilians who have just been abducted.
03:52The vast majority of them disappeared, many into black sites.
03:55There's a little more than disused garages or basements.
03:58And this can be for as little as a Facebook or a Teleron post that was written, you know, several years previously.
04:06So the stakes are very high.
04:08However, the brutality of the occupation, particularly in the post-2022 areas, and also, you know, the extreme economic and infrastructure, infrastructural collapse that many parts of the occupied territories are experiencing, naturally does fuel resistance.
04:24And in terms of resistance, I think you've hinted at this already.
04:29If you can't meet in a clandestine manner anywhere because of surveillance, because of the way technology is used these days, it must be incredibly difficult to unite and have any kind of coherent movement.
04:43It really is difficult.
04:45And of course, the occupation is focused on destroying social bonds between people.
04:48I mean, this is quite a standard feature, you know, in the Stalinist period, too, the attempt to make people not trust one another.
04:56What we've seen among the networks that have survived since 2022 has been a shift.
05:01So if in general, in NATO and Western doctrine, there's a focus on a cell-based approach, which has a very clear command structure, everyone in the cell knows each other.
05:10Well, under Russian filtration measures and surveillance, these cells were destroyed very, very quickly because it was easy enough to identify who might be in the cell, you know, patriotic or civil society figures.
05:23And of course, once you'd identified one member of the cell due to interrogation methods, you've pretty much, unfortunately and sadly, identified the other members.
05:32Now, how it functions is according to a puzzle model most of the time where agents do not know one another.
05:38So, again, a very lonely existence.
05:40But unfortunately, it does have to be that way so that you don't have what's called a sort of cascading compromise where you find one member of the network and then the rest of the network is compromised because, you know, torture and other brutal interrogation methods will be used to extract information.
05:55And that brutality, Dr. McGlynn, is something that clearly in your research, you discover the extent of that and it doesn't discriminate that they will be brutal to men, women, children.
06:05Yes, yes, yes, there have been a number of reasonably for the occupied territories, well documented cases of children, teenagers, you know, being identified rather incredibly as the leaders of these, you know, incredibly violent resistance movements, which is just, you know, it's completely not possible, completely implausible.
06:25And then they die in mysterious circumstances, but later on, you know, normally after about nine months or so of really arduous work by, you know, Ukrainians and I must say also actually Russians who are trying to find out, you know, as easily as in incredible difficulty what is happening there.
06:45It will turn out that these teenagers were in fact, you know, they died under torture or certainly in detention.
06:50So there have been a number of such cases or of pregnant women being forced to give birth in what we would describe as black sites.
06:57So some of the disused garages that I discussed earlier, the conditions are very brutal.
07:05I mean, last year there was sort of a journalistic collective that wrote about the death of Victoria Roshina, a Ukrainian journalist who went into occupation to document, you know, what was happening to civilians and was then herself abducted.
07:19And her very mutilated and malnourished corpse was eventually returned around sort of almost, it was around 18 months after she first disappeared.
07:32And again, that's quite normal. People just disappear.
07:34And it's pretty impossible to know what's happened to them sometimes for as many as two or even three years.
07:40It's absolutely horrific what you've said in your report, the phrase, the distinction between violent and nonviolent resistance is largely collapsed.
07:50Does that mean that basically anything that any any kind of resistance, it could be as simple as looking at a photograph, looking at a website, looking at social media or even something bigger?
08:01It results in the same violent response from the Russians.
08:05It means that it results in the same violent response.
08:08So at the end of November 2025, Russia published its new nationalities policy.
08:13And in that, it has a number of incredibly specific metrics about its intentions to Russify the occupied territories.
08:19But it also makes it very clear that any expression of Ukrainian or pro-Ukrainian identity or sympathy in the occupied territory should be treated as extremism and indeed is treated as extremism or as terrorism.
08:31Therefore, to send a picture of yourself, for example, saying, you know, this Crimea is Ukraine, which, you know, may be the legally recognized status of Crimea to Russia, that is separatism, terrorism, treason.
08:46And, you know, we'll carry with it the risk of a very long prison sentence or, you know, much worse, violence.
08:53Dr. Zubin, I need to stop you there. I'm really sorry.
08:56I hate to. No, no, what you're telling us is fascinating.
08:59But sadly, time is against us.
09:01Jade McGlynn, thank you very much for joining us and sharing your findings in the research that you've published about resistance within Ukraine.
09:08Thank you for being with us on France 24. We really appreciate it.
09:11We take now a show.
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