So asked Ben Meiselas of the MeidasTouch podcast of Joe Biden in December in a rare one-on-one sit-down, conducted during Biden’s lame-duck period, as he and the nation awaited President Trump’s return to the White House. By then, Biden resembled a shambling zombie from the film 28 Years Later, and he squinted and slurred his way through an incoherent answer that boiled down to: Nope, no regrets.

His rant sounded quite Trumpian in its detachment from reality, including a claim that his term would end with an Israel-Gaza peace deal. Yet the hangdog-faced podcaster didn’t challenge it or follow up. He simply nodded and moved on to the next scripted question he had written down in a notebook. Meiselas looked like a man who had won the lottery to interview a sitting president and didn’t want to blow it. You could almost see affirmation in Meiselas’s eyes: You’re doing great, Mr. President. Keep going.

Welcome to MeidasTouch, the popular “news-influencer” show where every hour feels like amateur hour. It’s essentially a booster club for Democrats disguised as just-the-facts-ma’am independent journalism. Since Hollywood and establishment media failed miserably to help elect Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, the Democrats have been desperately searching for their own Joe Rogan — a charismatic and outsider everyman who resonates with young men and can gently steer them toward Team Blue. What they’ve got instead with MeidasTouch is nearly the polar opposite: it’s anti-Trump infotainment starring three earnest Millennial brothers — Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas — with little charisma and no chill, peddling content that appeals to news-addicted liberals.

The MeidasTouch bros claim that their brand is “pro-democracy,” but somehow that only aligns perfectly with one side. It’s no coincidence that years before they interviewed Biden on their podcast as journalists, the Meiselases were raising money for him. Launched in the spring of 2020, MeidasTouch almost immediately became a DIY SuperPAC helmed by the three Long Island brothers: Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer (Ben), a video editor for the Ellen show (Brett), and a marketing executive (Jordan).

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We’re still distracting ourselves to death

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Their early batch of anti-Trump digital ads spoke the language of outrage fluently, and the brothers positioned themselves not just as commentators, but combatants in an existential bloodsport. The prize: America’s soul. Within months, they’d raised $5 million for the 2020 election cycle. A Rolling Stone investigation concluded that MeidasTouch’s anti-Trump ad campaign “was a huge waste of donor money, and its tweets weren’t persuading swing voters.” MeidasTouch responded by threatening to sue Rolling Stone and demanded that the magazine apologize and pay its legal costs. (The MeidasTouch brothers didn’t respond to UnHerd’s request for comment.)

Their digital network grew steadily over the four years that followed — but exploded once Trump took office for a second term. In the first quarter of 2025, MeidasTouch was the fastest-growing YouTube channel in terms of net new subscribers. It made splashy headlines in February, notching 57.5 million downloads and surpassing Rogan’s 51.5 million for the No. 1 podcast. The bros got there by posting multiple times daily, all rapid response 10-minute segments featuring the search-engine-friendly word “Trump” in the title.

Their success is proof that a media empire can be built almost solely on white-hot Trump hate. To listen to it is to enter a world where the president is a mindless buffoon, an Inspector Clouseau type who destroys democracy like it’s a vase accidentally knocked off a pedestal, but also even more than that: a moral aberration, a threat to civilization itself that must be denounced at every turn lest it be “normalized.”

Every YouTube thumbnail is a scream declaring Donald’s impending downfall — “Trump gets publicly HUMILIATED in the WORST TV appearance of all time” or “Trump LOSES IT as MAGA Burns IT ALL DOWN” — repackaging every political development into content gold. The hyperbolic headlines rarely match reality, but the dopamine loop is deliberate and constant. Play the video. Share the tweet. Feel the rage. Repeat. They’re like the #Resistance’s unholy marriage of the dystopian online-game-show host MrBeast and MSNBC — equal parts law school, cable news, and YouTube reaction video.

MeidasTouch is part of a sprawling digital-media #Resistance ecosystem, in which every news cycle presents a fresh reason to panic and post. The historian Heather Cox Richardson writes Substack essays that feel like bedtime stories for liberals about how history’s lessons all point to Trump trying to wrench America back to the pre-Civil War era. The Bulwark dresses up neocon-friendly centrism in moral urgency against MAGA. Well-dressed progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen condenses news stories into slick TikToks.

These are the town criers for the terminally online, warning us that Trump is coming (again), and only your retweet and subscription can stop him. There’s no room for dissent, no appetite for introspection, no curiosity about voters who drifted from the Democratic Party and why they might have done so. The hate machine needs both conflict and clarity. In a recent video, Brett Meideles said that Trump makes problems worse 99.9% of the time, but then quickly corrected himself. Oh, actually, it was 100% of the time.

Their growing audience has often been dubbed “BlueAnon,” because they’re also prone to conspiratorial thinking — similar to the Right-wing variety, QAnon — when it suits them. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 41% of Democrats still believe Trump didn’t legitimately win in 2024. About a third think the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., might have been staged. They’re also the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners, doomsday preppers more likely to holster their weapons in farmer’s-market tote bags than camo. This isn’t just fringe paranoia; it’s become the dour mood of a base that now sees even The New York Times or NPR as suspiciously neutral. In their eyes, objectivity itself has become complicity. They want media that picks a side, and MeidasTouch is happy to oblige.

The irony, of course, is that the same people who decry disinformation and cultishness on the Right have created a mirrored pathology: an all-consuming fixation on Trump, his every utterance, tweet, and indictment. If Trump is indeed the Boomer ego in human form — a gaudy, narcissistic amalgam of generational hubris — to his critics he remains the gravitational force around which their media diets, anxieties, and identities orbit.

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For many Millennial children of aging liberals, it’s become a running joke; there hasn’t been a family dinner or phone call in years without Trump somehow being invoked. “We’re providing a comforting place where we’re channeling people’s feelings during a real difficult time,” Meiselas told the Times. Still, MeidasTouch is hardly providing comfort — it’s churning out addictive ragebait and telling viewers to “Join the Meidas Mighty,” the podcast’s version of Swifties for Trump haters.

Flattening all Left-of-center commentary into anti-MAGA rants is a copout. Instead of grappling with the real and urgent reasons why Democrats are so unpopular in 2025 — housing costs, health-care failures, stagnant wages — their content is the podcast equivalent of jamming fingers in their ears and yelling “Trump!” at the top of their lungs. It’s red meat for the haters, but it doesn’t build coalitions or expand the base. If anything, it drowns out the figures and institutions that are trying to do the slow, difficult work of organizing around positive policy change. Their brand of algorithmic outrage might rally clicks, but it does not build up alternatives to Trump World.

Once this kind of hyperventilating partisan media was the sole dominion of the Right with the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. Now, sadly, it looks like the future for centrist liberals. America has plenty of legitimate beef with the old, fussy mainstream media. But we’ll miss it when it’s scrapped for parts and replaced by the new algorithmically optimized online media machines.

Where art thou, Brian Williams?

On the one hand, it’s a marvel to behold the indefatigable Vermont socialist getting the band back together for his barnstorming “Stop Oligarchy” tour — one that first drew sizable crowds in the Midwest and is now drawing tens of thousands on the second leg across the Mountain West, co-headlined with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Sanders has been decrying the evils of oligarchy for decades, and now, with Elon Musk all but co-presidenting with Trump, he looks like a prophet.

On the other hand, there is very little that Sanders (even with AOC by his side) can accomplish. The Democrats are the minority party and act afraid of their own shadow, while Sanders is a not-so-spry 83 years old and stooping more by the year. The experience of seeing Sanders rail against capitalism and the One Percent doesn’t quite hit like it did a decade ago, It’s akin to catching a Rolling Stones show in 2025 — it’s great to hear the timeless hits and all — but the thrills are fleeting. You ask yourself: Are you still Feeling the Bern, or is that just actual heartburn?

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Why Trump loves corrupt Democrats

By Ryan Zickgraf

That’s a legitimate question, because it isn’t just Bernie who is getting long in the tooth — so are his supporters and those currently raging against the Trump machine. A decade ago, I described the Sanders run as a “punk-rock presidential campaign,” a middle finger to the political establishment that was far and away most popular with bright-eyed but downwardly mobile college students and 20-somethings. That dynamic played out in the 2016 Democratic primary, in which Sanders thumped Hillary Clinton among under-30 voters, including 83% of young people in New Hampshire.

Not anymore. Today, those packing into high-school auditoriums to cheer Bernie or busy marching in the streets aren’t quite replicating Lollapalooza; it’s more like a particularly raucous school-board meeting. The same Millennials who helped make Left populism cool in the 2010s and marched for a racial reckoning five years ago are now slouching towards middle age. Meanwhile, white-haired dissidents at Tesla protests in 2025 outnumber those too young to rent a car. It’s a changing of the guard — but, ironically, back to the old guard.

The youth have been missing for so long, it’s a wonder that progressives don’t print their faces on milk cartons. College campuses have been quiet, noted Inside Higher Ed, even among institutions where activism is practically an intramural sport. “I haven’t seen a whole lot, which is kind of uncharacteristic of our campus”, observed a student at American University in Washington, DC.

In online forums, political organizers are also making noise about the missing youth. “The last two Tesla protests I went to — the majority were elderly, and I appreciate their support, but why no young people?”, reads a viral post in the subreddit for the 50501 movement, the online group coordinating the anti-Trump capital city protests and others. “If at age 30, I’m the youngest showing up, there’s a problem”. Another post suggested that there were more elderly Trump voters opposing the president’s overreach than young liberals.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the most significant impact made by the Resistance thus far has been a consumer boycott by older Democrats refusing to buy Teslas — it’s not as if many 20-year-old baristas and other members of the precariat are the ones withholding their Cybertruck purchases. Otherwise, with young people gone, the Big Dad Energy at 2025 rallies isn’t enough to make a major impact. The size of the Sanders rallies are impressive, but other protests have largely been a fraction of the size they were during Trump’s first term.

Where did the kids go? The best answer is that most of them didn’t vote at all. The peak of the hyperpolitics era is behind us, and election turnout in November trended downward for young adults. They’re growing more disillusioned with all institutions — the courts, the media, and politicians — no matter which party they’re affiliated with. A new analysis of Gallup data found that less than a third of under-30s trust the government, a new low. In my reporting, I have spoken to many young people who view all politics as toxic, a form of entertainment that didn’t change the world, but ruined a lot of personal relationships. Why doom-march in public when you can doomscroll from the comfort of your home or, better yet, soothe your crippling anxiety with ASMR videos. 

When the youth did vote, they leaned Republican. According to data whiz kid David Shor, Trump won a majority of those under the age of 26 except women of color — a massive change from both 2016 and 2020. They voted for a political revolution over the status quo but from the right, much like the children of Sixties hippies who became Reaganite yuppies. As it turns out, Gen-Z loves Eighties nostalgia of all kinds, whether it’s bubblegum synth-pop, Stranger Things, or the market-friendly politics of Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton character from the sitcom Family Ties. 

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But there has been a reluctance to demonstrate even among young Leftists. Some of that is undoubtedly a result of the chilling effect of the campus crackdowns on those protesting America’s role in the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration’s disturbing persecution of demonstrators accused of “un-American activity”, such as Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student activist student detained by ICE and facing a revocation of his green card.  

Yet there has also been an ideological drift among activists who now reject the Sanders coalition as sellouts who supported “Genocide Joe”. Many under-30s Leftists are delusional anarchists who barely mention Medicare for All, minimum-wage hikes, or the universal programs popular in Bernie World. They view Gaza as the Mother of All Causes, the most important battleground in the intifada against Western “colonizers”. All other causes are somehow related, from trans justice to Long COVID to fat shaming. Are you autistic? “Learn how police abolition and neurodivergence advocacy are connected”, reads a flyer from a recent Stop Cop City event. No wonder most normies aren’t grabbing their keffiyehs and joining up.

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The Left won’t let go of woke

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But if there’s someone that can relate to dropping out of politics — it’s Democrats writ large. Outside of Sanders and a handful of others, party leaders have been MIA during the first wave of the Trump administration’s decimation of the federal government, perhaps to some undisclosed White Lotus hotel to mourn the false promise that they could slowly coast to permanent victory against conservatives by simply letting them die off. Since the George W. Bush years, liberals clung to the arguments made by John Judis and Roy Teixeira in their polemic The Emerging Democratic Majority, that America’s changing demographics — more college-educated professionals and young single women and minorities — would lead to Dem dominance.

Judis and Teixeira have now recanted — and so should the Democrats. They will have to figure out how not to be a party everyone hates more than the horrid Millie Bobbie Brown robot movie. If the Democrats want to get there — and, let’s be honest, no one’s quite sure where “there” even is anymore — then short of sending Bernie Sanders through a time machine to a decade when his brand of righteous fury felt less like a nostalgia act, they may have to craft an appealing majoritarian agenda and a credible leader this side of a nursing home to champion it.

An opposition party with any sense of its populist roots would strike fast. The looming return of inflation is sinking consumer confidence. The job market is freezing up. And new data show that the richest Americans account for 50% of household spending. To “pay” for tax cuts, House Republicans are contemplating slashing Medicaid, which provides health insurance to more than 80 million low-income Americans; the GOP would sooner penalize its new working-class base than disobey its C-suite masters.

Democrats, in short, have a chance at redemption — provided they embrace a populist spirit to counter Trump’s billionaire-led pseudo-populism.

Yet enfeebled only begins to capture their coalition’s pitiable state. Instead of mounting a cohesive strategy, elected Democrats are rehashing their Trump I playbook, only more lamely, with protests staged by fired civil servants and lawsuits against executive orders that subvert or violate existing laws and regulations. Neither tactic has demonstrated real conviction. By their own admission, congressional Democrats are unfocused, torn over whom and what to stand for.

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The Left has forgotten its philosophy

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It’s a dismaying symptom of how little progressives have learned from the 2024 election, and how they fail to see the populist opportunity. Consider the target-rich environment created by Musk and DOGE. The Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vast role in the new White House amounts to direct oligarchic capture of the American state. He is quite literally deleting agencies that could regulate his current and future enterprises or empower labor unions at his foundries.

But the Democratic leadership is still patently afraid of channeling Americans’ frustration with the system, as Trump did. They have become too dependent on fighting Trump through the courts and government agencies to truly seize the populist case against him: to wit, a majority of inflation-stung working-class Americans backed Trump in 2024 because he pledged to protect entitlements and to lower costs, and because he courted organized labor — not to deregulate Wall Street or cripple collective bargaining.

Democratic paralysis betrays a fear of the electorate. Ardent liberals still thrill to the promise of “enlightened” judges striking down Trump’s actions, viewing every ideological battle through the lens of what jurisprudence, not retail politics, can do to improve the nation’s moral fiber. A politics that leads by injunction, however, isn’t grounded in persuasion and popular mobilization. And it disregards the problems Trump exploited to win the election, from soaring living costs and rising consumer debt to progressives’ ill-conceived policies on migration and public safety.

Nor have they shown much desire to counter the impression that upscale cultural stances have supplanted the party’s focus on egalitarian development and progressive redistribution. Not exactly free of their own conflicts of interest, most Democrats sound stilted and insincere when it comes to discussing the role of power and money in US politics outside Trump’s orbit.

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It’s no surprise, then, that Democrats are plainly flailing in their battle to change “the narrative.” At this stage, formulaic denunciations of Trump and his most zealous appointees won’t do; on the contrary, the cartoon epithets and rehearsed preachiness offered by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, the party’s congressional leaders, have only magnified the liberal establishment’s petrifaction over a dying order.

One wonders why Democrats haven’t revisited the formative speeches and ideas of liberal icons like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Robert F. Kennedy or populists like William Jennings Bryan, who sparked the party’s renewal in the Gilded Age. With the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders — who, at 83, is barnstorming the Farm Belt — progressives seem to be waiting for another Covid-level crisis to torpedo Trump’s support.

That is yet another reminder of how insular modern progressivism has become. Restraining the executive branch through the courts is, to be sure, a time-honored tradition across the political spectrum. But to truly countervail Trump II requires unstinting support for more Americans’ active participation in civil society, including those citizens without college degrees. An older breed of progressives who won office through their alliances with small farmers, consumer-protection leagues, and trade unionists understood this well; a judicial blow against vested interests, malfeasance, and corruption, though important, wasn’t a substitute for arrangements and institutions that gave ordinary people a genuine voice in their community affairs.

In a bygone era, Democrats’ lawyerly instincts were directed primarily against monopolists, local magnates, and unscrupulous business practices. At the state and federal level, they recognized that the law could apply intelligent restraints against market power, while also stimulating the development that their downtrodden base demanded of them.

Later in the postwar era, Democrats joined with liberal Republicans to enact laws that codified principles of nondiscrimination on questions of race, national origin, sex, and disability. Although the corresponding growth of the federal bureaucracy served as a pretext for Reagan conservatives to roll back these social protections, Democrats were hardly the high-handed bureaucrats they were depicted as by their “small-government” adversaries.

In fact, until the mid-Nineties, when they began to lose their populist bona fides in the South and greater Midwest, Democrats tended to view Congress as the best vehicle to defend and advance the interests of working people from all regions. Their support of a strong federal government, whose departments for regulatory oversight and social insurance expanded between the New Deal and Great Society, was complemented and balanced by an understanding of each region’s needs. They didn’t, accordingly, view politics as a zero-sum contest that largely revolved around the legitimacy of decisions made by the executive branch and judiciary.

Since Trump’s ascent, however, the legal stratagems of Democrats and their media allies have allowed them to ignore the root causes of populist discontent, economic and cultural. This has had the unintended effect of aiding Trump’s claim that a multipronged “deep state” is undermining his authority, thwarting the will of the people.

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In turn, progressives have backed themselves into a corner, disconnected, even in deep-blue cities, from the very people they profess to serve. Thanks to their uncritical defense of all things branded “woke,” Democrats are now viewed by working-class voters of all races as litigious, censorious, and elitist. Indeed, the Democratic Party is seen as the very opposite of the one whose unifying thread, from Bryan’s heyday through the Seventies, was its respect for the dignity — and judgment — of the common man and woman.

It will take much more that clever rhetoric to change perceptions. Democratic allies sermonize about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law at the same time that they repeat the self-defeating, self-righteous notion that all voters who have rejected the party’s Soviet-esque succession of leaders are rubes and bigots. Such attitudes are, in a way, akin to Trumpian defiance, but with none of the obvious political benefits.

A party that preys on its base’s fears of right-wing authoritarianism ought, at the very least, to be plowing money toward candidates who can speak to middle America. Yet Democrats are seemingly content to allow competitive elections to dwindle so long as they retain control of the nation’s largest urban and commercial centers (which, not incidentally, tend to have low turnout in local elections). This signals that Democrats are wary of being accountable to downscale and left-behind Americans. But disaffected workers, especially those who make a conscious decision to withhold their votes, aren’t foolish: they know the liberal establishment is much less concerned about democracy than it pretends to be.

The party’s deepening identity and ideological crisis also explains its strangely Janus-faced view of grassroots democracy. Democrats face a distinct burden as the normative “party of government” in an age of stark inequality, unabashed clientelism, and staggering corporate patronage. As social trust and approval of major institutions have plummeted in the last two decades, Democrats have failed to restore confidence in basic public administration at the federal and local level, much less inspire hope that government can once again implement reforms that directly benefit millions of citizens. The economic experiments of Bidenism excepted, today’s Democrats have become rather guarded about government’s purpose, even as they cry foul over Republicans’ indiscriminate attacks on social programs, civil servants, and scientific research.

The Trumpian assault on government as such may finally spur Democrats to confront all which ails American workers. Or not. Democrats and their professional-class base seem primed to relitigate the same battles over “big government” that were fought in the Eighties and Nineties, rather than uncritically examine why so many Americans, both rural and urban, feel disenfranchised.

Ever since becoming the favored party of the coastal establishment (and, until Trump’s 2024 campaign, Silicon Valley), Democrats grew too comfortable running a globalized economic system, playing both its cautious reformer and its custodian. That blinded them to the contradictions that now percolate their philosophy of governance, above all, the friction between the egalitarian aims that made Rooseveltian liberalism triumph and the party’s yearslong fixation with becoming — rather than taming — the American elite. Enthralled by esoteric beliefs about self-actualization, social justice, and cultural progress, many imagine they are part of a forward-thinking vanguard, even as the areas they govern show signs of acute distress.

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Attempts to check Trump will prove dismal so long as Democrats fail to confront why they are no longer seen as champions of the public interest. While blue-collar Trump supporters may soon rue the powers granted to an unreconstructed GOP, they aren’t necessarily confused or hypocritical in their desires.

Many Americans clearly long for more effective, transparent, and responsive government in a manner that doesn’t conform to the worldviews of either progressive or conservative intellectuals. Depending on the issue, it could mean more state capacity and oversight or more impartial respect for individual rights. Progressives, therefore, might consider actually engaging with the societal complexity in which they so often claim expertise, and immerse themselves, as few have, in the actual lifeworld of the forgotten and dispossessed.

Revamping the #Resistance along familiar lines is and will remain tempting. Trump’s betrayals and broken promises are already accumulating, and they should be attacked without fear at every opportunity. But this must be connected to a broader reckoning with the American crisis. Yet if the consultant class and the Democratic establishment had their way, the party would continue to ignore the rampant failures that have rekindled Americans’ Jacksonian mood.

Countering Trump ultimately requires an unflinching account of America’s precipitous decline — as well as a cogent vision of radical reform, and accountable governance, for the 21^st century.

This message, from a pro-democracy activist inside Kherson, reached me via an intermediary on Wednesday evening. It’s getting harder by the day to find out what’s going on in the region — especially inside the city. A lifetime ago, back in mid-April, in a village just beyond Mykolaiv, I stood in the garden of a house destroyed by Russian shells, listening to the sound of incoming Russian fire overhead, and looked southeast. There, just under 100km away was Kherson. The Russians had occupied parts of the city on 2 March and had been fighting it out with the Ukrainians ever since. Today, the Russians control most of the region; and they are making their presence known. But from Mykolaiv and, critically, inside Kherson itself, the Ukrainians continue to resist.

Right now, the global media is filled with talk of the battle for the Donbas. But it is in the south, with its long coastline and large grain stores, where the war for Ukraine will be won or lost. And it is in Kherson, now under Russian occupation, where we will find the answers to so many questions vital to that victory or defeat. Can the Ukrainian army fight back with sufficient effectiveness to retake a major city from the Russians? Can the country hold out while its grain is stolen and its ports are blockaded? And, perhaps most importantly of all, how real and how strong is Ukrainian resistance under Russian occupation?

***

“We need to understand that the situation is different across the region,” Sergiy Danylov, Deputy Director for the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, tells me. He continues: “The south and west parts of the Kherson region are a catastrophe. There have been mass killings and rapes — it’s a second Bucha there. Some villages were just totally demolished by the Russians.”

Geography is key here, as it is across Ukraine. Kherson is bisected by the mouth of the Dnieper River. On its right bank — what can loosely be called its Mykolaiv side — things are slightly better. Mykolaiv is still in Ukrainian hands, and it is from there that the army counterattacks. Its left bank is on the Mariupol side — the large city that is in Russian hands — and it is here where things are particularly grim.

Repression, though, is the same on both the left and right banks. Last week saw more mass “filtrations” — that most sinisterly prophylactic of words that in reality means that occupying forces violently interrogated locals and then deported many to Russia. It’s a system designed for both simplicity and cruelty: cars and trucks and troops arrive in the villages, and then either take locals to a special “facility” or dig a large hole and stuff them in it. The goal is always the same: to turn them into collaborators.

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By David Patrikarakos

Yet at the same time, the Russians also try to ingratiate themselves. Key to their efforts is the concept of what they call “swift justice”. The principle is simple: justice through the courts can take forever, so why not let them deliver it instead? Of course, it’s also a way of legitimising violence. Soldiers now accept “complaints” from locals and when they break into houses and administer more beatings, they can say they are merely responding to citizen requests.

It’s a system that is easily open to abuse. Danylov heard a story from one of the villages of a man who went to the checkpoint and made a complaint to the Russians: his neighbour had refused to give him any booze. The soldiers went to the man’s house and imprisoned him for 15 days (on what charge it’s hard to fathom). In another village, a local criminal robbed a house, and the Russians came round to his place and beat him severely. “They are trying to say this is good because if you try to go through the courts it will take years whereas they deliver justice quickly. They are trying to ‘bribe’ the locals through things like this,” says Danylov.

Is it working? Partially. Their attempts to build a positive image are gaining some traction but they cannot mask the perennial problem of Russian soldiers: their behaviour. My sources inside Kherson are clear: the occupying forces are robbing people’s houses; they are always drunk, often from first thing in the morning; people are disappearing every day, especially in the port city of Genichesk. Just ten days ago, two women living in the Arabat Spit — a Crimean tartar and a Ukrainian — were taken from their homes and haven’t been seen since.

According to a resident in Kherson, checkpoints are an epicentre of Russian violence. In the beginning of the occupation, they were almost ubiquitous across all the towns and villages. Now most have gone. But one at the entrance at the so-called “Island” neighbourhood of Kherson city — with its shipyards, oil harbour and many businesses — abuse is rife. Recently, a woman approached driving a car with tinted windows. She refused to scratch the tinted film off the windows, so her car was impounded, she was beaten, and her windows smashed in with a rifle butt.

It would be unfair, however, to say the soldiers are just there to drink and beat people up; they also want to make money. Checkpoints are not just places of violence and intimidation, but of extortion as well. An informal tariff — based around different classes of vehicle — has come into effect. To get your car through without the endless queuing will cost $500 or more. A bus costs $2,000, a truck $20,000. Sometimes cars are allowed to leave without paying, and every so often the Russians shell them with BM-21 Grads — just to teach them a lesson for going back into Ukraine.

The Russians have also appropriated a network of petrol stations previously owned by OKKO and Shell. Prices there are now in roubles, which is the only currency they will accept. They’ve even manually set an exchange rate at 1 hryvnia to 1.5 roubles (the normal exchange rate is above 2). All this has come by the order of former Rada Deputy and ex-mayor of Kherson Volodymyr Saldo, who immediately supported Russian occupiers when they arrived and has become the head of the Kherson administration.

The Russians are trying to control all aspects of life, too. If you want to receive your salary into a bank account, you need to open an account in the bank the Russians have set up in the former Raiffeisen Bank building. “I saw huge lines of people there,” says one resident. “The catch, though, is that if you want the account, you also have to get a Russian passport, which people don’t want.”

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“There is almost no cash in the city, which looks increasingly as it did in the Nineties, when there was a huge deficit and people traded stuff to each other out of the trunks of their cars. Then you could buy almost everything, but at two-to-five times higher than the normal market price. At the same places you can exchange USD and euros. In many shops, where they had previously specialised in one product, such as meat or vegetables, now you can buy everything from bread to cigarettes to vodka and home products — almost all of them from Crimea. But people don’t buy them a second time because the quality is awful.”

All of this combines to diminish pro-Russian feelings across the region. From the first days of the occupation, protestors hurled insults, not flowers, at incoming Russian troops. Now the resistance has morphed into two distinct strands. The first is violent; the second is what they call the “fight for the symbolic environment”. This centres on placing pro-Ukrainian graffiti and leaflets throughout key areas and destroying pro-Russian flags and symbols. In both camps, of course, there is the social ostracisation of collaborators.

Everywhere they’ve occupied the Russians have relied on collaborators. They don’t have enough people to both police the local population and staff all the administrative positions necessary for governance. Yet the number of collaborators appears to be small: if someone joins the local Russian government they get a Russian passport, and in Kherson, as of last week, only 23 people have received a Russian passport from direct collaboration out of a population of several hundred thousand in the city.

One of the first people the Russians try to recruit are school principals. Schools are vital to the system of occupation: where you have daily control of children, their parents are usually forced to follow. “Unfortunately, already two kindergartens have agreed to collaborate,” says the pro-democracy activist. “Also, we know that School #30, one of the most prestigious in the city, has agreed to switch its curriculum to the Russian one.”

Yet most remain reluctant to collaborate, despite the Russians pushing hard. In the towns of Melitopol and Kakhovka, those who refused — from a pool of mostly middle-aged women — were gathered together and put in a basement without food or access to a toilet, and then driven 30km from the city and dumped by the side of the road. They were told they had to return by curfew, or they would be killed on the road.

In the village of Bekhtery, the principal refused to collaborate and was beaten so badly she was left almost disabled. The head of the local council agreed to collaborate and tried to convince all teachers and civil servants to cooperate as well. Those who refused were betrayed to the Russians who sent patrols round to their houses to beat them up. “Collaborators are constantly looking to expand their influence,” says the pro-democracy activist. “They raid businesses and pressure new people to collaborate. Just yesterday, around 70 Lada Priora cars arrived that will be used to patrol the city. The fact that the collaborators seem so relaxed, opening new shops and petrol stations, makes some people think they will stay for a long time and that maybe the city has already been traded to the Russians.”

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But while the collaborators may be making hay, they are nervous. “They move around the town in bullet proof jackets and with a lot of bodyguards,” he continues. “They are afraid of assassination. The city resembles the wild west days of the Nineties.”

Posters are now going up across the city, many with images of individual collaborators accompanied by personal messages.”Kiril, we’ve got something for you,” reads one with an image of the man’s head above drawings of a noose, a gun and an exploding car. A similar poster shows an image of a corpse half-covered in dirt: “A lot of Russians are already wormfood. You’re next.” Graffiti splayed across a central street in the town of Hola Prystan reads: “AFU [the Ukrainian army] is nearby. Orcs be afraid. Hopry [short for Hola Prystan] is Ukraine”.

“I am proud of our younger generation,” says the pro-democracy activist. “They are constantly spraying patriotic graffiti around the city: blue and yellow stripes in parks and neighbourhoods; they fling paint against the many propaganda billboards now erected around the city.”

Then there is the more direct action. As the Russians have taken almost full control of the region, Ukrainian resistance has grown in proportion. On 16 June, Eugeniy Sobolev, the pro-Russian head of the Kherson prison service, was hospitalised after a bomb shattered the windows of his white Audi. Just under a week later, on June 24, Dmitry Savluchenko, the pro-Russian official in charge of the Department of Youth and Sports for the Kherson region, was blown up in his car. Serhii Khlan, an adviser to the head of the Ukrainian Kherson Civil Military administration, called Savluchenko a “traitor” and announced that “our partisans have [won] another victory”.

These actions are boosting morale inside Kherson. “Attempts to physically eliminate collaborators are very popular,” the activist continues. “Everybody wants to oppose the Russians and is waiting for the quick return of the Ukrainian armed forces. There are even cases of poachers shooting Russian soldiers patrolling the river at night. That’s why the ‘liberators’ now move only in convoys of three or more boats. They are afraid. I think that it’s only by these sorts of methods will we have success. They need to feel constantly afraid for their lives.”

It’s hard to assess just how widespread violent resistance is. Most of the cases remain unpublicised because the Russians don’t want to appear weak or vulnerable and the partisans don’t want to jeopardise their security. In many small towns, there are a lot of cases of youths with knives stabbing drunken soldiers. No one says anything because it’s bad both for the Russians and for the kids.

“Usually those engaging in violent acts are young or middle-aged men, most of them are without any special training or preparation,” says Danylov. “But there are more sophisticated actions as well.  A few weeks ago, several Russian soldiers were invited for a drink, and all had their throats cut. I cannot imagine that these people were not trained, but there is never any public confirmation. Clearly, though, there are contacts between the security forces and locals. It’s impossible for an ordinary person to get explosive materials in Kherson itself — so these bombs are being delivered by professionals in one form or another.”

And so far, this resistance has been effective. The occupying forces have tried four times to organise a referendum in Kherson on joining Russia, but because of the initial protests and now the armed resistance, it has proved impossible. As the pro-democracy activist tells me: “People are resisting all the time as much as they can. And that resistance is increasing every day.”