This is the part of the war that scares governments the most: not missiles, not speeches, but ordinary people inside the country deciding the state can’t control everything anymore.

Based on public reporting, a Russian partisan brief covering late May into early June describes a run of actions that aren’t symbolic. They’re practical. They aim at the wiring of modern war: communications, fuel, and loyalty. And if even half of it is true, it’s a reminder that big armies don’t only lose on front lines. They also lose when the back end starts to rot.

One group, ATESH, is said to have sabotaged cellular towers near Perm. The claim is that this knocked out Russian electronic warfare systems in that area, and that the disruption helped Ukrainian drones hit major oil and chemical facilities. The details are hard to verify from the outside, and war reporting is messy. But the basic logic checks out: take away connectivity, blind and confuse the systems that rely on it, and suddenly cheap drones become much more dangerous.

That’s not “resistance” as a moral pose. That’s resistance as engineering.

And it’s also the kind of thing that drags regular civilians into the blast radius, even if nobody wants to admit it. Cellular towers are not “military” to the people who live near them. If you’re a nurse trying to call your kid, or a truck driver relying on navigation, you don’t experience this as a clever battlefield move. You experience it as your life getting worse. The partisans will say that’s the point: war makes normal life impossible, and pretending otherwise is how the Kremlin keeps everyone quiet. Critics will say it’s reckless and invites harder crackdowns. Both can be true.

Another action in the brief comes from Black Spark, described as remotely detonating a diesel tank car in Krasnodar. The framing matters: they weren’t just “hitting fuel.” They were targeting infrastructure tied to oligarchic wealth and the war economy. Again, I can’t confirm the specifics. But the intent is clear: make the war expensive and annoying for the networks that profit from it.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. When you hit fuel supply, you don’t just hurt the military. You mess with farmers, deliveries, bus routes, heating, generators, and the thousand small systems that keep a region running. Imagine you’re a small business owner whose shipments get delayed for days, or a family that can’t get basic supplies because transport is snarled. Are you mad at the state for starting the war, or mad at the people blowing things up? That depends on what you already believe—and that’s why sabotage is political, not just tactical.

Then there’s the Kuban Partisan Detachment’s recruitment appeal aimed at civil servants and military personnel. That’s the most destabilizing piece, even more than explosions. Because it’s not asking for sympathy. It’s asking for defection. It’s telling bureaucrats and soldiers: you’re not a cog, you’re choosing to be a cog, and you can choose to stop.

If you want to know whether internal dissent is real, watch who they’re trying to recruit. Not just angry young activists. People with access. People with routine. People who can slow paperwork, misroute supplies, “lose” documents, tip off someone before a raid. A government can handle a few vandals. It struggles with quiet disobedience inside the machine, because it’s harder to see and harder to punish without breaking itself.

This is where I land: these actions look effective, but they also feel like the start of a darker phase. Not because I think resistance is wrong in principle. In a war like this, resistance is inevitable. But because sabotage scales in both directions. Once it works, everyone copies it. The state responds with more surveillance, more suspicion, more collective punishment. And then you get a feedback loop where daily life becomes a security state project. That doesn’t just hit “regime supporters.” It hits everyone, including people who are already scared and keeping their heads down.

There’s also a moral trap here that people outside Russia sometimes ignore. It’s easy to cheer “partisans” when you’re not the one who might get questioned at a checkpoint because your phone pinged the wrong tower, or your neighbor got arrested and now everyone on the stairwell is a suspect. It’s easy to call it “internal collapse” when you don’t live there.

At the same time, the Kremlin’s whole bet has been that the war can stay distant for most Russians. That you can run it like a subscription: pay your taxes, watch state TV, don’t ask questions, and the violence happens somewhere else. Sabotage is a direct attack on that bet. It says: no, you don’t get to outsource this.

So what happens if these kinds of operations keep landing? Ukraine gains battlefield advantage without having to win every mile the hard way. The Russian state tightens control, but also reveals fear. Oligarch-linked systems get more expensive to run, and corruption gets louder because everyone starts skimming more to cover risk. Regular people get squeezed and pushed to pick sides, even if they hate both sides.

The unknown is how much real support these groups have, and how durable it is when repression rises and daily costs hit home.

If you were a Russian civil servant reading that recruitment appeal, would you risk your job and your freedom to quietly sabotage a war you disagree with, or would you decide that staying inside the system is the only way to protect your family?