Surviving Russia’s surveillance state

Russia has constructed one of the most comprehensive systems of civilian coercion in post-war Europe, designed not merely to suppress dissent but to eliminate the conditions in which resistance can survive at all. In the occupied territories of Ukraine, this system is working.

There are two kinds of resistance to the system worth distinguishing. The first is operational: intelligence collection, agent recruitment, targeted operations. Under Ukrainian law this is reserved to Ukrainian security services and those formally mandated by them. The second is resistance to the destruction of Ukrainianness itself: the refusal to be remade, the maintenance of identity, language, and memory under conditions designed to extinguish them.

Before occupying a territory, Russian intelligence services compile blacklists of civic activists, journalists, and anyone perceived as loyal to the Ukrainian state. Upon seizure, these individuals are the first to be arrested and moved through a network of more than 100 documented detention sites across occupied Ukraine and into Russian territory. At least 15,250 civilians have been detained since February 2022; the UN found that 92 per cent of ex-detainees reported torture or ill-treatment. Surveillance is near-total: internet traffic is routed through FSB-monitored SORM nodes, biometric SIM registration has ended digital anonymity, and phones are inspected at checkpoints. By September 2025, residents of all four occupied oblasts (Crimea had already undergone passportisation) were formally required to hold Russian documentation or be classified as foreigners in their own homes.

Russia’s suppression is both immediate and generational. An estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly transferred to Russia or Russian-controlled territory since 2014, acts for which the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin in March 2023. For those who remain, Russia has constructed a militarisation pipeline anchored by the Voin (‘Warrior’) programme, providing paramilitary training in weapons handling, tactics, and drone operation for children aged 14 to 17. In Mariupol’s municipal education budget, at least 40 per cent is allocated to ideological activities. Children completing this system will reach conscription age between 2028 and 2034.

Despite this architecture, resistance continues, but it has had to adapt. Russia’s systematic filtration and comprehensive biometric surveillance mean that connected intelligence networks are vulnerability amplifiers: one detained individual becomes the entry point to an entire network. Mariupol entered the full-scale invasion with a pre-existing resistance structure of cell networks and pre-appointed coordinators. Within months, Russian forces had filtered around 150,000 residents. The most survivable resistance proved to be the precise opposite: isolated individuals, coordinated externally from Ukrainian-controlled territory, with no knowledge of one another’s identity.

A further hard lesson concerns ‘non-violent’ resistance. Russian courts routinely sentence civilians to five, ten, or 13 years under terrorism and espionage statutes for possession of Ukrainian symbols or pro-Ukrainian Telegram activity. Once an image of symbolic defiance is published, it can be geolocated within minutes; local CCTV can then be trawled retrospectively to identify the individual. In an August 2025 interview with the author, one Mariupol resistance leader described the cultural pressure from elsewhere to produce photogenic symbolic defiance against the Russian Occupation as ‘perhaps the strangest idea’: under total surveillance and facial recognition, it ‘inevitably leads to arrest. Nice photos for the sake of arrest?’ The most consequential resistance is overwhelmingly invisible: clandestine intelligence collection, passed to Ukrainian forces for precision targeting.

Some Western-funded programmes have failed to understand these risks and made civilians less safe. Digital platforms designed to advertise resistance have in documented cases been technically unsafe, with Russian authorities monitoring activity in near real-time, resulting in arrests and disappearances. The structural problem is that visible resistance wins funding, while clandestine intelligence work, which actually enables military effect, does not. Donor incentives and the survival of Ukrainians in occupied territories pull in opposite directions.

What, then, can external actors actually contribute? The most underused asset is already in place. In polling commissioned by the author, Operativna Sotsiolohiya (n=1,001, margin of error ±3.1%) found that around half of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from the occupied territories remain in regular contact with family or friends still living under occupation, an existing, durable channel running in both directions across the frontline. The policy question is not how to engineer new networks but how to reduce the risks of what is already occurring: guidance on which platforms expose contacts in occupied territory to less surveillance, and positioning IDPs as authorised intermediaries so that someone inside occupied territory is not required to generate their own identifiable contact with Ukrainian official structures. That 76 per cent of IDPs rated Ukrainian government support as ineffective matters here too; the perception travels back through the same channels.

The most effective intervention is also the most straightforward to fund: evacuation. Organisations operating extraction routes from occupied territories are chronically under-resourced, and the IDP networks already in regular contact with family under occupation are an underused asset. An IDP in free Ukraine cannot organise an extraction alone, but they can reduce friction, relay information, and connect contacts with organisations that can act. Outreach through settlement services and diaspora organisations should make that role explicit.

Legal representation will not transform conditions for civilian detainees, but it can mitigate the worst case scenario. A detainee whose existence is documented outside the detention system is harder to disappear and somewhat less likely to be subjected to the most extreme abuse. Funding independent legal organisations to extend that representation and making civilian release a condition of any ceasefire negotiation are achievable and matter. Where direct material support is provided at all, it must be calibrated to survival rather than scale: cash, medicine, communications capability, and clean devices delivered through fragmented, deniable routes, with a realistic operational security assessment against Russia’s documented capabilities as a mandatory condition of funding, not an optional addition.

Effective support requires honesty about what has not worked: visible-output programmes that sacrificed operational security, procurement frameworks rewarding demonstrable activity over survivability, and assumptions from other conflicts that failed on contact with Russian filtration systems. It also requires honesty about what external support can realistically achieve. It can sustain endurance, reduce harm, and maintain the legal and informational channels that keep people safer. It cannot generate decisive resistance, and claims that it can make the crucial difference have already ruined lives. Designing support in this way is not defeatism. It is the precondition for help that actually helps.