Illustration: #OleksandrShatokhin
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The Russian military captured Ukrainian cities, confident that they would be met as liberators. However, in reality, the locals greeted them with shouts of "Occupiers!", sang the national anthem of Ukraine, threw themselves unarmed under armored vehicles, and held mass protests.
As soon as the Russians took control over a city or a village, they committed arbitrariness. They kidnapped officials from the municipal council and local government, activists, and teachers. Thousands of people began to go to the central squares with demands to release the prisoners and leave their city. "Kherson, Melitopol, Enerhodar, Berdiansk are Ukraine!" chanted the locals. At the beginning of March, peaceful protests took place every day as more and more people gathered. Then the Russians began to shoot even more actively at civilians, grab people from the crowd and hunt down rally participants.
Active citizens were persecuted: it was possible to not return home from a protest - the occupiers took away mobile phones and set up special filtration camps. Many of the protestors were captured, but the fate of some is still unknown.
To create the image necessary for Russian propaganda, the Russian military tried to organize pro-Russian demonstrations, for which they lured people with humanitarian aid. Despite the food and medicine shortages, only a few dozen people attended such events, while thousands attended the pro-Ukrainian protests.
After peaceful rallies became impossible in the temporarily occupied territories, a resistance movement began there. Partisans put up patriotic posters and threatened the collaborators and occupiers in the cities, hung Ukrainian flags, sabotaged railways, blew up bridges important for the Russian army, and killed invaders. Therefore, the Russian military can't feel safe in any occupied city in Ukraine. Ukrainians prove this daily through their actions: Kherson, Melitopol, Enerhodar, Berdiansk, and hundreds of other towns and villages are part of Ukraine.