(Kiev) To unmask a Russian “infiltrator”, all the inhabitants of Kiev now know the technique: make a suspicious person pronounce the word “palyanytsa”. A vowel too strong and it’s over. In Russian, it’s a strawberry. In Ukrainian, it is the traditional bread known to all.
Posted at 11:59
And no Russian, he thinks about this trick as old as Soviet wars, can pronounce that word correctly.
At checkpoints manned by armed volunteers, the method also has its modernized version. For a week now, anyone suspicious has been asked where the nearest branch to a certain “Monobank” is. The online bank that has… precisely no agency.
Pasha, a taxi driver from Kiev, invented his own. He begins the refrain of “Oleinïi, Oleinïi” a 100% Ukrainian and recent hit. “You start and you see if he can continue,” he told AFP.
At the heart of this first phase of the war, the hunt for Russian “saboteurs” sent by Moscow or acting from within to help the enemy according to Kiev, plunged Ukraine into a climate of maximum suspicion in one week.
On social networks, every day, images of “undercover” saboteurs appear.
On February 26, the bodies of three men in Ukrainian uniforms shot dead were presented to AFP on the spot as those of Russian infiltrators disguised as local soldiers.
And since last Thursday, in the village of Irpin, northwest of Kiev, a few kilometers from the Antonov military airport where Russian paratroopers were airlifted on Thursday in the early hours of the invasion, strange things have happened.
The population says they live in fear of attacks from a remnant of Russian forces moving, according to them, in the woods, attacking civilians and acting “undercover”.
“We have people who look like people from here but who start shooting at the inhabitants” of the locality, says a resident, Andrïi Levanchouk, a bank employee.
“Already established”
Sent to the area to contain these mysterious infiltrations, Viktor Chelovan, a collaborator of the Ukrainian Minister of the Interior, the head of the special forces unit “Lance”, assures AFP that the population “is making reports” and that his men “deal with the saboteurs”.
According to Commander Chelovan, some groups of “saboteurs” are made up of members of “Russian special operations forces, which try to destabilize daily life in our towns and villages, as well as rear military bases”.
He also mentions the presence of cells of the Russian secret services and the GRU (military intelligence), “already established here before the war” and responsible for “helping to prepare the invasion”.
A third group is made up according to him of “intelligence agents whose sole purpose is to kill various Ukrainian leaders”, he says.
In 2014, the Ukrainian rout in Crimea, annexed without resistance, was partly caused by the rallying in Moscow of two Ukrainian commanders, who surrendered with their entire ships to the enemy forces.
Since then, Kiev claims to have carried out purges in its ranks, from the army to intelligence.
“The Russian spy ring was set up years ago. We haven’t eliminated it yet, there’s still work to do,” National Security Advisor Oleksiy Danilov said on February 22, the day before the Russian invasion began. wall street journal.
Since the start of the Russian offensive, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior has flooded the press every day with portraits of captured Russian “infiltrators”, such as this man arrested with explosives in his backpack in a Kiev shopping center.
“Nostalgic”
According to Mykola Beleskov, a military analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in the Ukrainian capital, Moscow “is trying to combine different levers, from air strikes to artillery to these infiltrated commandos, which are essentially a means of supporting a very slow progression of their troops”.
In Kiev, you see these “saboteurs” everywhere. They are said to scatter mines along lawns at night and mark the roofs of certain buildings. These recurring rumors, impossible to confirm, feed a certain paranoia.
Ibrahim Ibrahim Shelia, a 19-year-old student who stayed in town to defend the “block” from the bottom of a trench, a residential tower where a few families stayed, has already made his assessment.
“In this neighborhood, I think there are maybe 10% of saboteurs”, in other words the “traitors”, the pro-Russian Ukrainians or the nostalgics of the Soviet Union and “Great Russia”, he says .
“We stopped a suspicious car and saw four people in it who had two marked maps of Ukraine, two laptops”, expired Ukrainian passports and “phones in airplane mode or phones without an internet connection”, he relates.
Had they watched too many spy movies or flushed out a cell of Russian agents? The men were handed over to the police, without their fate being known.