You can find the first part of the article here.
You became most well-known for blowing up railways. How did that come about?
We traveled to the cities where there had been heavy fighting in the summer of 2014 – Savur-Mohyla, Izvaryne... We gathered a lot of ammo and equipment there: unused mortar and artillery shells. We collected and hid all of them and recovered them at night. We used them to make IEDs [improvised explosive devices] which we layed and detonated on the roadside. At that time, we used commercial electric mining detonators, which were plentiful in the Donbas coal mines and readily available through the black market. Eventually we began to attack railways with them.
In May 2014, I looked for connections with the Ukrainian military in the local area. They didn’t trust us much. There was a lot of betrayal. They gladly accepted intelligence from us but didn’t help with weapons or ammo. I found serious contacts only in Kyiv...
At that time, an Anti-Terrorist Operation regime was in effect and combat forces could move between the occupied territories and those under Ukrainian government control – though both sides checked them.
Yes, so I went to Kyiv and found contacts among military intelligence officers from the Main Intelligence Directorate [Hur]. On their orders – they trusted me – I traveled around the Luhansk region carrying out reconnaissance operations. As a mechanic, I was really good at assembling IEDs or fitting mines with timer mechanisms – so I began working to make them. I signed a contract with HUR in December 2014, so we stopped doing independent operations. From then on we only carried out sabotage missions under their orders.
How did that work? How did you carry out the operations?
From Russia, two railway lines ran into occupied Luhansk and one into Donetsk. We were given simple tasks: a specific location was designated where the railway had to be paralyzed. We mined it in different places blowing up railways three or even four times a month. The explosives were equipped with timer mechanisms, set to detonate after 5–6 hours – which gave us time to plant them and leave.
One especially successful operation I can tell you about – I always liked trolling the Russians –we timed major operations to coincide with Soviet or Russian holidays. In 2015, on the Feb. 23 Soviet Army Day, I planned a railway demolition. At that time, the battle for Debaltseve was underway and the Russians were receiving ammunition resupply by rail from Taganrog.
Carrying weapons, ammo, explosives, food and went there on foot, moving at night, sleeping in the brush by day. We reached the Ilovaisk–Khartsyzk section of the railway and laid many mines linked in such a way that after the first exploded and the Russians came to repair the line, they triggered more mines. We paralyzed the delivery of shells for over a week.
How many railway demolitions did you carry out in total?
Look, I can only talk about the ones we did under orders from the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But in total, I planned and executed 30 missions. It wasn’t just mining – there were attacks on collaborators, assassinations of Russian officers. Sometimes we failed – due to ambushes or technical problems.
How did you get captured? Why did the last operation fail?
It happened near Luhansk airport. The civilian airport was bombed, but the military airfield, a former a military academy, had been seized by the Russians. It was basically an aviation museum where they set up a headquarters with Russian intelligence forces securing the perimeter. Our leadership told us the Russians were planning to fly in planes at night, so we were tasked to cut the power or damage the tower. It was too dangerous to go onto the airfield, so we decided to blow up the power line running from Russia. Since it was open steppe and risky to move in a group, I went alone. I took part of the mechanism and headed out to Luhansk airfield at night. I set a mine with a timer on one of the pylons.
Then I made a mistake. We were trained to return the same way you came. But there were still old minefields left by Ukrainian paratroopers a year earlier. I was walking near the Krasnodon–Molodohvardiysk–Luhansk highway when a Russian convoy transporting shells approached. I thought they’d see me in their headlights, so I moved into tall grass to hide – and hit a tripwire. I heard the pop of a detonator, dropped to the ground, and covered my face but the resulting explosion wounded me –I was captured.
Did they realize right away who you were?
At first, they thought I was a local. I was in civilian clothes, and had a passport with local registration. But the next day, my mine detonated. They followed the trail in the grass to the explosion site and found a hat with my hair. Then they got into my smartphone and found military apps. They realized I had ties to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
And then what?
Then the brutal interrogations began. Well, they didn’t torture me too much – I was dying anyway. They performed surgery, amputated both arms. My intestines were torn, my stomach was open, my face mangled. But every time I came out of anesthesia, I remember a man standing over me, pointing a pistol at my head and saying in Russian: “Well, Vladimir Palych, names, passwords, safehouses, your commander’s name.” I recognized the Russian accent immediately – we don’t talk like that here.
What cover story did you come up with to protect your group?
I didn’t expect to get captured, so I had to improvise. To divert suspicion from my group, I told them about several other minor operations in which I claimed I was acting alone. It worked. They checked and saw they didn’t know about those attacks, so they believed me. I got lucky.
Iryna Herashchenko said that when she met with the Luhansk separatists in Minsk, their representative – a traitor managing exchanges – said that if they had known who Zhemchuhov really was, they would never have exchanged me alive. So, I managed to deceive them. I confessed to a few minor sabotage acts, and they thought that was the maximum a civilian could manage. But in fact, we were many – and we did much more. Of course, there was nothing in my smartphone or at any residence that could expose the entire network.
What happened to the network? Did it keep operating without you?
The network avoided trouble. I held out for nearly two days – which was enough time for them to realize something was wrong. When the Russians came to my apartment the next day, my neighbors noticed so my comrades either went into hiding or fled. Since I didn’t give anyone up – not even the network’s existence – they were able to return and continue their resistance activities. After my exchange, I stayed in contact with them. All those comrades kept working; the last one left only in February 2022, when forced mobilization began. Nearly everyone left to avoid being drafted. Two men remain – they are now working for the security services inside the occupation administration.
So your network — we can say — is still working. Eleven years on.
Well, yes, you could say so. Those two are still gathering intelligence.
Do you regret that path, that period of your life?
In May 2014, I was 43. I was psychologically and physically strong. I knew I might die or be wounded. I started hating Soviet power back in 1991 while serving in the Soviet army. Then, in 2008, during the war in Georgia, I began to hate the Russians themselves. I never wanted to live in Russia. I always wanted to live in Europe. During interrogations, when the FSB pressured me – “Zhemchuhov, you’re Russian! How could you go against Russia?” – I shattered their worldview. I said: “We don’t choose our parents – my father was Russian, came from Russia to Donbas in the 1960s to build mines; my mother was Belarusian. But I was born and raised in Ukraine. And you, Russians, came here – my blood brothers – to kill, rape, loot. You said we were brotherly peoples and then crossed the border at night and started killing us. You stabbed us in the back. I’ll never forgive you for that.”
They must have been shocked.
They were already shocked in the hospital, when they brought in Russian propagandists to film me kneeling, begging forgiveness from the Russian people. I refused. Even the guards began to respect me.
One of them – a traitor, a former police officer from Luhansk – came to me one night. He said he was impressed by my resilience and asked what he could do for me. I asked him to call my wife. He dialed her number, held the phone to my ear – since I’d lost my hands – and covered me with a pillow so no one in the hallway could hear. That’s how I found out my family knew everything, that Ukraine knew about me, and that the government was fighting to get me exchanged. That gave me strength.
Tell us about the partisan movement now, during the full-scale war.
When President Zelensky came to power [May 2019], he issued an official statement ordering HUR to cease sabotage operations. However, funding for intelligence gathering in the occupied territories was increased several times. This led to a decline in partisan activity specifically. But prior to that, in 2018, martial law had been declared in Kherson Oblast, and at that time, several partisan units were created there.
When, in 2022, everyone was saying that a major war was approaching, some changes were made to the legislation, and in January, a new law, “On the Fundamentals of National Resistance,” was passed. It stated that civilians were obligated to resist the occupiers. However, large partisan units could not be organized in time. The units that had been created in Kherson Oblast became victims of betrayal within the SBU and the local Territorial Defense leadership – they were quickly captured. The last large partisan unit in Kherson, consisting of 12 people, was captured at the end of the summer in 2022. After that, the partisan movement shifted to small groups – three people per group.
Some partisans, such as the Roma in Zaporizhzhia Oblast who stole Russian armored vehicles and filmed it on video, gave themselves away through careless use of mobile phones – some of them were killed, and others were captured. After that, a new wave of partisans emerged in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. These were people who had evacuated to Ukrainian-controlled territory and were quickly trained through a short two-week program in three areas: digital security, tradecraft (secrecy), and demolition/sabotage. These small partisan groups – usually one, two, or three people – started operating on a schedule of one sabotage attack per week.
In response, the Russians used the Chechen scenario – they brought in security forces and launched mass raids and terror campaigns. At that point, we lost many partisans and others went into hiding. Now we are operating on a schedule of one sabotage attack per month; unfortunately, we cannot do more, as we are trying to preserve our partisans.
In total, in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Khersonregions, more than 2,500 partisans have been captured or killed over the past three years. Another approximately 50 were lost in the Kharkiv Oblast, and about 100 more in northern Ukraine during the first month of fighting in the spring of 2022. These are the losses we’ve suffered.