The Traitorous Spooks Helping Putin Crush Their Own People

SOLEDAR, Ukraine—Explosions filled the skies over the apartment complex we’d just been standing in. They were thermite cluster munitions fired by Russia’s multiple long-range rocket systems, spreading white-hot fire over their target. That day, their target was us.

Thick globs of flame, hot enough to melt steel and concrete, slowly descended on the civilian apartment buildings of the town of Soledar, one of the crucial battlegrounds of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s forces have been battling to capture the territory for more than six months.

The city was a hellscape of destroyed buildings, with the constant booms of incoming and outgoing artillery fire. Ukrainian army units were moving from basement to basement desperately searching for cover, while quadcopter drones scouting for enemy positions buzzed up above us. If we’d still been in that block, we could have been incinerated.

About 15 minutes before the blast, Darren Roberts, a British army veteran and volunteer aid worker, had been giving medical attention to Alexander, a 24-year-old Ukrainian civilian who had been hit by Russian shelling and wounded in his shoulder and his arm. We found him topless and swathed with homemade bandages, lounging on a bench in his courtyard talking to his mother.

In the five hours we had been in the town, we had seen perhaps ten civilians sitting around in the open, watching the destruction. Dozens more were staying in underground basement shelters; some had not seen daylight in months.

Despite the carnage, hundreds of civilians in Soledar—originally a small city of just over 10,000 inhabitants—are reluctant to leave. Many want to remain in their homes, unwilling to be intimidated by the Russians. Others, like the elderly and infirm, have no choice. The loosely organized group of volunteers—who agreed to be followed by The Daily Beast—were helping evacuate those who were in no physical shape to attempt to leave on their own.

Russian War Chiefs Publicly Fight Each Other for CreditUNCIVIL WAR

Dan Ladden-Hall

British aid workers Andrew Bagshaw, 48, and Christopher Parry, 28, disappeared from this very town last week on a similar evacuation run. The Russian paramilitary organization Wagner, which has been leading the recent assault in Donbas, posted pictures of their passports and claimed to have found the bodies of one of them on Wednesday.

Others, it appeared, had more nefarious motives for remaining. As the volunteers were desperately trying to convince Alexander and his mother to leave, three men drove up to the courtyard on mopeds and started taking photos of our group with their phones. Immediately, Darren turned to us, looking genuinely fearful for the first time

“We need to get out of here now,” Darren told the group, and bustled all of us into our cars. “They are likely spotters for the Russians,” 31-year-old Bryce Wilson, an Australian video-journalist turned volunteer who was organizing this evacuation run, told The Daily Beast. The group high-tailed it to an arranged meeting point called “Oasis,” named after a small corner shop bearing the name on the western outskirts of the town.

Shortly after we arrived, the Russian artillery started raining down on the place we’d just left—and we quickly realized that the men on mopeds had likely sent out our positions.

Whether they realized that our group was made up of journalists and volunteers is unclear. The journalists were all clearly decked out in press vests, but the volunteers were all military-aged men clad in body armor. Russian authorities have frequently claimed that groups of “foreign mercenaries’” were fighting on the Ukrainian side, and it’s possible they thought we were one. Perhaps they didn’t care either way.

“I’ve spoken to the Ukrainian military about this, and they have specifically told us they have problems with guys on mopeds who will take photos and send them to pro-Russian forces,” Wilson later explained.

Russia’s claims that the people of Donbas are being “liberated” by the invasion after being subjecting to a “genocide” by Ukrainian nationalists is a baseless piece of propaganda. But that’s not to say that there aren’t some in the easternmost regions of Ukraine who have fallen for the Russian narrative. And in the meantime, they were doing their bit to help the invaders.

The Ukrainian government has attempted to crack down on such “traitors” from the early days of the war, with President Volodymyr Zelensky signing anti-collaboration legislation into law quickly after the invasion began on Feb. 24. Scores of citizens have since been arrested under the law, including 400 in the Kharkiv region alone, according to the Associated Press. Ukrainian authorities have even arrested SBU officials on charges of treason, and reportedly have plans to compile a public “registry of collaborators” in the country.

Authorities in the Donetsk region often stop cars near the front lines to check residents’ phones and make sure they have not been communicating with the other side. The Russians are said to offer hefty cash rewards for details on Ukrainian military positions and troop movements.

According to Wilson, a source in the Ukrainian military had described a case in which an adolescent boy would travel around the region, hitching rides to various regions and claiming he was lost. When he was later detained, authorities allegedly found evidence that he had been scouting military positions and sending them to the Russians.

Though many who have collaborated with the Russians in formerly occupied territories like Kherson or eastern Kharkiv likely did so under duress, others apparently have no compunctions about betraying their country.

Locals warned journalists of pro-Russian saboteurs when I visited the Luhansk region in May, claiming to have seen them slash the tires of Ukrainian army vehicles in order to stop them from ferrying troops and supplies back and forth through the region. One pro-Russian civilian from Lysychansk told a France24 crew that they “want to be reunited with the Russians, they are our friends, not the Germans in Europe!”

When Ukrainian troops withdrew from the city of Lysychansk, their last stronghold in Luhansk, they instituted a four-day curfew to ensure that none of the civilians remaining could reveal that they were retreating to the approaching Russians.

This week, the Russian Wagner group announced the complete capture of Soledar and said that they had encircled and destroyed the Ukrainian defenders. The U.K.’s defense ministry have confirmed that they believe Wagner has almost full control over the city, marking Russia’s only major battlefield success in the last six months. Meanwhile, Ukraine has notched up significant wins in Kharkiv and Kherson—prompting Ukrainian officials to redouble their calls for better artillery support and tanks.