Partisan Attacks increasing inside Russia

Inspiring statistics were collected by the edition “Layout.” The data of a journalistic study suggests that in May, there was a sharp surge in partisan activity in Russia.

From January 1 to May 12, at least 57 guerrilla attacks took place on the territory of Russia, as well as in the annexed Crimea, on railways, objects of the Ministry of Defense and energy facilities. Almost 25% of them occurred in only 13 May days.

The statistics included only attempts to destroy state facilities, whether they were successful or not. That is, those cases were not taken into account when the security forces reported the arrests of citizens who were allegedly preparing a “sabotage” but had not yet committed it. Also, there are no cases in the statistics when telephone scammers forced people to commit arson in exchange for the return of stolen funds (by the end of April, Mediazona counted 16 such stories).

Thus, in January and February, citizens protesting against the war carried out 12 guerrilla attacks each. In March, their number fell to seven, and in April, it rose again to 12. In May, in 11 days, there were at least 14 attempts to destroy state property.

The most common type of action is the burning of relay cabinets on railways. Since the beginning of the year, 36 such cases have been reported. The second most popular were the arson of military registration and enlistment offices, and there were 9 of them. Saboteurs also damaged railway lines, undermined a gas pipeline, set fire to police cars, the FSB building, a warehouse of the National Guard, and a center for collecting humanitarian aid for soldiers.

In May, the scale of sabotage increased. On May 1 and 2, two railway tracks were blown up in the Bryansk region, two freight trains derailed. On May 1, in the Leningrad region, unidentified persons blew up a power transmission line pylon and mined another one. A week later, a mothballed Su-24 bomber was set on fire on the territory of the Chkalov aircraft plant in Novosibirsk.

Since the beginning of the year, sabotage has been committed in 26 regions (including the annexed Crimea). Most of them happened in the Moscow region – nine, five – in the Novosibirsk region, four each in the Leningrad region and St. Petersburg.

It is not clear whether the operation to destroy the propagandist and war criminal Vladlen Tatarsky, the most striking partisan action of recent times, was included in the statistics of Nestka.