Trust Is the Main Currency of Wartime

On my screen is a figure I cannot easily place: hood pulled low, face in shadow, voice run through a synthetic filter into the flattened, robotic tone many of us know from short-form videos. It's hard not to smile at the distortion, and impossible to forget the risk behind it. Then the connection drops - a small, familiar symptom of life under occupation, where infrastructure and surveillance work together to make communication fragile.

A message appears from a number I don't recognise, and vanishes as soon as I've read it: "Let's reconnect the day after tomorrow, fifteen minutes, OK?" Russian occupation authorities monitor spikes in online activity, especially on popular video-call platforms, and too much traffic in the wrong place can bring questions - or worse. "Will you text me?" I ask. "I'll send a pigeon", she replies. It's a joke, but a bitter one: in some occupied areas of Ukraine there has been no real internet access for years.

I'll call her Iryna. She belongs to Angry Mavka, an all-women underground resistance movement that grew out of occupied Melitopol in 2023. We have never met. Trust between us has been built the way you'd handle something both fragile and vital - one careful message at a time, over more than a year. War compresses the process of deciding whom to trust, which in peacetime might take months, into hours or even minutes. It never makes that trust less precarious. One wrong question, one detail shared in the wrong format, and a relationship built over a year can collapse in an instant.

In this landscape, trust is not a feeling but a resource. One that Russia's occupation apparatus has spent more than a decade trying to exhaust, adding over four years of full-scale war to ten years of digital and physical control in Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Iryna's caution is not paranoia; it's survival discipline. She keeps two phones and one rule: never sterile. One phone lives at home, the other goes outside, and the two never cross roles. Her Signal chats exist only on the home device, histories wiped as soon as they've done their work. And - the detail that surprises people who've never lived under occupation - a phone that looks too clean is itself a problem. You cannot walk through occupied territory with a device that screams "nothing to see here". So Iryna keeps a couple of Russian tabloid channels subscribed, the kind of thing an occupying soldier expects an ordinary resident to scroll past. She has learned which feeds can live on her street phone and which must be confined to the one that never leaves the house, and what kind of digital noise makes her look like she belongs.

Standard cyber-hygiene advice falls apart here. "Use a VPN", people say - as if no one will ever take that phone out of your hand and scroll through its apps. "Use Signal" assumes you'll never be stopped on the street and told to unlock your device, or that there will always be enough connectivity to send a message when you need to. One contributor to the underground diary project Iryna helps run travels deliberately to a neighbouring town whenever she has something worth recording, because her own has lived without mobile data for years.

Then, in September 2025, the ground shifted again - for a woman I'll call Olena, who works in an unrelated, apolitical industry in occupied Kherson region. Her office was ordered, "voluntarily", to install MAX, the Russian state-aligned messenger that has been mandatory pre-installed software on phones sold in Russia and the occupied territories since 1 September 2025. Her manager spent half a meeting praising it as a "new-generation ecosystem" that would soon handle food delivery, taxis, music - "even trainers", he said. Five times, by her count, he used the phrase "monitoring for loyalty". Technical analyses suggest MAX can record microphone audio, harvest contact lists, weaken VPN protections and delete messages remotely; its servers stay whitelisted even when the rest of the internet is throttled. Distracted, Olena tapped the install link during the meeting itself. By afternoon she'd been called in and questioned, obliquely but pointedly, about her "outside interests" - he mentioned, almost in passing, that family "is a meaningful unit of society too". She went home and read through the app's permissions: location, contacts, IP address, behaviour across every other app on the phone. "Hello, comrade major," she wrote in her diary that night. "Now officially in your phone".

None of the women who built this underground started out knowing how to run a secure channel or vet an anonymous recruit. They learned the way most people learn anything now - search engines while they still worked, trial and error in between. Telegram became the platform of choice not because it's perfect but because it was already there, already trusted for news and rumour long before Russia tightened its grip on everything else. New recruits are filtered first for age, never ideology: no minors, ever, however persuasive a fifteen-year-old sounds in a chat window. Teenagers in occupied territory have already seen what small, real money in exchange for information does to people their age[K(1] , and the women behind Angry Mavka refuse to mirror that model.

Most analysis of foreign information manipulation looks at the attacker - the bot farm, the state broadcaster, the coordinated campaign. Iryna and Olena, and the whisper network that connects them to dozens of women like them, are the view from underneath: population-level resilience with no institutional shield overhead, no training budget, no visible authority behind them. Just a chain of women who keep deciding, individually and repeatedly, that the truth is worth passing on - one hard-won relationship of trust at a time.

Author's note: the individuals described are composites drawn from documented patterns of resistance in occupied Ukrainian territory. Names, operational details and identifying specifics have been altered or generalised to protect people who remain under Russian control, in line with source-protection and information-security requirements.

About the author: Dr Olha Mukha is a Ukrainian cultural analyst, philosopher, and curator working at the intersection of cultural diplomacy, human rights, and non-violent resistance research. She heads the IED at the Territory of Terror Memorial Museum in Lviv, co-founded the London-based think-tank Resilience & Reconstruction, and is a member of PEN Ukraine. She curatedUnseen Force , a project documenting non-violent resistance in Ukraine's temporarily occupied territories; participant of IWM Vienna's Documenting Ukraine programme. She is a co-author ofStories from Ukraine: Believers , and has published more than 80 academic and cultural works.