A Ukrainian gym owner and a group of his regulars told The Daily Beast how they helped drive Russian forces out of Kherson by moonlighting as informants.
, city resident Kostyantyn Babenko, 49, received a WhatsApp message from one of his old friends in the Armed Forces of Ukraine asking him for a favor. Communications like these were no small thing—by now, Babenko’s hometown had beenDue to the risky nature of their relationship, Babenko’s friend only sent him a short, secretive message stating the name of a building in Kherson city. Babenko immediately knew what to do.
Despite these dangers, Babenko, together with a loose network of collaborators, served as an informant for the AFU throughout the Russian occupation, and frequently reported the details of Russian troop positions, military vehicle movements, weapons transfers, and more to his contact and other members of the Ukrainian military. On several occasions, his intelligence gathering resulted in Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian positions with American-made HIMARS rocket systems.
Before the war, Babenko admits that his feelings toward Russia were ambivalent. But after witnessing the brutality of the Russian invasion and the daily indignities of their presence in his city, he, like others, felt he had to do whatever he could to oppose the occupiers, which ultimately led him and his friends to collaborate with the AFU.
Aleksandrova and Babenko described an array of security precautions they took to avoid any chance of detection by Russian soldiers, including only communicating with their AFU sources through WhatsApp, which uses end-to-end encryption, with disappearing messages turned on. When transmitting the location of a valuable military target, they would send only a screenshot of a map with a cross at its location and nothing else.
Throughout their time working as informants during nearly nine months of occupation, Babenko and Aleksandrova did not experience any close calls with Russian forces. But Sergei recalled how on one occasion, Russian forces nearly discovered his communications with the AFU on his phone and other incriminating evidence he had at home. He was only able to avoid arrest thanks to a tip from a friend.“Periodically, [Russian soldiers] would come and they would enter homes and search for phones.
“Their role was truly important in how they helped us,” Gumenyuk said. “They upheld civilian morale, [said] that Ukraine will return, that they just have to wait a little, that we are all Ukrainians, that we’re all united.”
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