Civilians as Ukraineʼs “secret weapon” and an elderly Russian artistʼs vendetta. The worldʼs leading media about the war on December 15

The Russian occupiers successfully used the large household appliance store in Kherson as a hospital, barracks and food warehouse. Until one summer morning Ukrainian rockets hit it. It was one of the many successful strikes by the Armed Forces of Ukraine against Russian positions in the Kherson region that day ― and one of those that became possible thanks to the resistance forces in the temporarily occupied region, writes The Wall Street Journal in the article Ukraine’s Secret Weapon Is Ordinary People Spying on Russian Forces. This attack was successful because several young men took pictures of the location that day and downloaded data to the Telegram bot, which is used by the UAF to determine the targets of the strikes. They communicated with each other in a secret group called Ruzzians Go Home, created on February 25 exclusively for the Kherson resistance forces. According to Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, there are many such groups of activists in all temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. "It will be exactly the same in Donetsk, Luhansk... Our boys and girls are everywhere," the publication quotes him as saying. "These people see how Russian tanks go, where groups of occupiers go to have lunch, where they rest, wash their things, and share information with us. Without them, the army would have no way to quickly find this out," a special services officer involved in the work of the resistance told the WSJ. Usually, it took the Ukrainian army 15 minutes to hit a newly identified target ― and even less when the Buk or other means of the Russian air defense system were detected, because such targets are a priority. The assistance of civilians was not limited to the identification of targets and the transfer of coordinates. The publication talked, in particular, with Igor, who in peacetime was a toastmaster at weddings. When the Russians came, he "retrained" as an explosives planter under the occupiersʼ cars. "The police left the city, so we had to take matters into our own hands," he explains.

Reuters tells about the struggle of an 84-year-old pensioner from a Russian provincial town and local security forces. Vladimir Ovchinnikov is from Borovsk, with a population of 12,000, which is 115 kilometers south of Moscow. He was a local celebrity for a long time: he painted murals on the walls of the city with images of famous Russian figures and victims of Stalinʼs repressions. On the twenty-fifth of March, a month after the start of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ovchinnikov painted a new mural, because of which his relations with the majority of the locals went to pieces. The picture showed a girl in a blue and yellow dress, on which a bomb is flying from above, and the caption "STOP!". The public protested. Police said the work discredited the Russian army and painted over it, forcing the artist to pay a $500 fine. In response, he created a new work with the signature "Insanity". It was also painted over, like Ovchinnikovʼs subsequent murals ― for example, with the inscriptions "Shame" and "Fiasco". They do not dare to imprison an elderly man known throughout the region ― so they simply destroy his fresh work. However, as the artist assures, he still has a lot of strength ― as well as hatred for the current Russian regime, about which he has no illusions even after learning the details of his familyʼs past. Ovchinnikovʼs grandfather was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1919, and his father disappeared during Stalinʼs purges in 1937.