Self-Organization and the New Left in Ukraine
The author (right) on Kyiv’s Independence
Square. December 2013.
In early December 2013, I found myself on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), holding a sign reading “Don’t Believe Politicians—Self-Organize!” as part of a protest with a small group of student activists. Weeks before, then-president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych had refused to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. This Association Agreement would have integrated Ukraine’s economy more closely with the EU’s, and most people hoped that, by extension, Ukraine’s democratic political system would be strengthened. At the last minute, when he was already in Vilnius to sign the agreement, Yanukovych refused. European governments had implored him to release his former political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, from prison so she could seek medical treatment in Germany. Yanukovych would not approve her release, and in Vilnius, he announced that he would instead accept a Russian proposal to join Vladimir Putin’s Customs Union (along with Belarus and Kazakhstan). Putin also promised Yanukovych $5 billion in cash aid instead of the loans and development grants that EU institutions were offering.
While Yanukovych had worked to consolidate power as president, he did not have the authoritarian control that Putin did in Russia. When he refused to sign the Association Agreement, hundreds of people came to Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti to protest his decision. The initial protests were largely driven by student activists, including those with whom I was doing research in Ukraine. As a whole, students hoped eventual European accession would improve the quality of Ukrainian education as well as allow them the chance to study more easily in European universities. Ultimately, the protests would move far beyond this focus on Europe, and hundreds of thousands of people would join students in their condemnation of the use of violence against protesters.
Who Is the Left in Ukraine?
Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. In the early part of the 1990s, leaders focused on building the new government, as well as navigating the country’s relationship with major powers—the United States, the European Union, and, of course, Russia. After generations of Russian influence, beginning during the Russian imperial period and continuing through the Soviet Union, Ukrainian national identity was also a key focus after independence.
As an anthropologist in Ukraine to study the student activist movement, I was interested in higher education reform and how student activist groups navigated an increasingly authoritarian, pro-Russian government in Kyiv. The activists who contributed to my research were born around the time of Ukrainian independence. They did not experience the lived realities of state socialism, but they did grow up in the chaotic period of the 1990s. Most of them did not grow up around political ideas that would be considered part of an ideological left, because Ukrainians were distancing themselves from socialist ideas. However, they were all able to find their way to various leftist political positions by the time I met them in 2012 and 2013.
Many of them told me they developed their political ideas in 2004. The presidential elections of that year featured well-documented electoral fraud that worked in favor of the very same Viktor Yanukovych whose decisions would push mass protests almost ten years later. Known as the Orange Revolution, mobilizations in 2004 brought pro-European leader Viktor Yushchenko to power. But Yushchenko was unable to implement most economic reforms because of power struggles with his former allies—such as Yulia Tymoshenko—as well as his former rival, Viktor Yanukovych. While these protests are called a revolution, they were organized around one specific political candidate, and his failures led to the widespread disappointment of its participants.
This disappointment was key to motivating young students who participated in my research to find other avenues for political engagement. Some of them became active within their universities, finding their way to others who wanted to advocate for students’ rights. Others noted the rise of right-wing violence in the 2000s and wanted to fight against its perpetrators. Still others were involved with punk music and discovered leftist ideas within that scene. And some were readers of leftist political thought, ranging from Marx and Engels to Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin to leftist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.
Together, the Ukrainian left that was active in 2013 was a diverse group of people with different motivations and different interests in political action. While they did not present any kind of unified leftist position when the protests began, they were able to influence how the protests developed through their idea of self-organization.
Leftist Roots of Self-Organization
From the beginning, leftist student activists saw the political potential in these protests. In their earliest days, I joined leftists to hand out fliers that advocated for self-organization alongside self-determination, arguing that Ukraine’s status in Europe would not be economically equal to other countries, even its neighbors such as Poland or Czechia. These fliers urged protesters not to fall into political camps but to reject the exploitation of the global capitalist system that pitted different groups against one another instead of creating the space to unite against the ruling elites.
Leftists had reason to intervene in these early days. Even as they wanted to support the protests in late 2013, they also wanted to make sure that participants did not simply rally around one political figure, who would surely be a disappointment in the long run. Leftists advocated for self-organization because it avoided existing political parties and empowered people of various political beliefs to participate in the protests.
At its most basic level, self-organization is the idea that if something needs to be done, and someone is able to do that thing, then they should simply do it. They should not wait for a political figure to intervene on their behalf—even if the thing that needs to be done is the responsibility of a political figure or institution. This way, self-organization does not need the support of political parties but has the potential for more horizontal political participation.
Leftist students had been self-organizing throughout the 2000s, creating a foundation for the practice. Ukrainian universities had official student unions, but these institutions were typically the mouthpieces of the university administrators, who were nearly always appointed by the Minister of Education. In other words, official student unions were most likely to represent the Ukrainian government’s position. They were not there to advocate for student rights. When student rights were routinely violated, leftist activists from the independent student union Priama Diia (Direct Action) self-organized to advocate for students in the face of these university administrations. They fought for anything from lower student fees and higher student stipends to 24-hour access to dormitories. While they did not win every fight, they became a strong political force, and their independence from existing political structures lent them legitimacy.
Pro-European student protesters gather at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, November 2013. Photo by E. Channell-Justice.
When the Kyiv protests on Maidan began, these leftist students and Priama Diia activists promoted self-organization because they wanted to use their experiences working outside the political system to be more effective. They also were aware that their leftist political beliefs were not usually welcome in Ukrainian political society. Often accused of affiliation with the Communist Party or with nostalgia for the Soviet Union—both of which were almost never accurate descriptions of these activists—self-organization was a tactic leftists could share that would allow them to participate without being defined by leftist political beliefs.
Against a Police State: How the Maidan Protests Responded to Violence
On the night of November 30, 2013, riot police (Berkut) beat and arrested students who were camped out on Maidan. Until that night, most of the protest signs and chants had been about Ukraine being part of Europe. The attack on students prompted more people with varied backgrounds from across the city to come to the square to condemn the police for their actions. Leftists created banners calling Ukraine a “police state,” language that resonated with protesters because it was calling out the Yanukovych regime and his allies while not having a particular right, left, or center political position.
A sign reading “We are against the police state” hangs outside of the occupied City Hall in Kyiv. Photo by E. Channell-Justice.
Fighting against the police state allowed for a broader participation of self-organized activists in a variety of spheres. Student activists, for example, rallied at different universities over the next months of protests, ultimately forcing administrations to agree not to punish students for participating in the mobilizations. When Maidan activists occupied the Ukrainian House (a convention center just outside the central square), students created the Student Assembly in that building to plan demonstrations and student-led interventions. In late February, when the mobilizations turned violent around Maidan Nezalezhnosti, students occupied the Ministry of Education and Sciences after Yanukovych’s pro-Russian minister of education, Dmytro Tabachnyk, fled the city. In all of these, students did not allow the participation of political figures or parties. Indeed, early efforts of political parties to co-opt the student protest body into party-based action was unsuccessful and unwelcome.
Leftists and activists in Priama Diia traced self-organization to leftist political ideas, sometimes even referencing Marx or Kropotkin. Self-organization in the case of the Maidan protests was a political intervention that criticized the capitalist elites and the disenfranchisement of citizens. However, over the course of the protests, groups that were very far from leftist political views began to use the language of self-organization. Claiming to be “self-organized” was a way to position oneself or one’s group outside of the existing political structures, so references to self-organization ranged from the occupation of buildings around the main square to ecological protests to legal aid hotlines to the formation of brigades that participated in the violent uprising in February and, later on, in the war in eastern Ukraine.
Another important characteristic of self-organized initiatives, particularly for leftists, was that they only lasted for as long as they were necessary. This avoided their institutionalization and also kept self-organization flexible and able to meet changing needs. In January and February 2014, amidst ongoing clashes between protesters and riot police, leftists organized Varto u likarni, the Hospital Guards. When injured protesters were taken to hospitals, they were often arrested or pushed to sign false confessions about illegal actions. The Hospital Guards protected protesters from these police, and they also helped coordinate a hotline that assisted families in finding missing loved ones who were in one of Kyiv’s hospitals. This initiative was exceptionally successful because it was responding to a very particular need, was detached from any political ideology or party, and because it was a way to support protesters without participating in violence. And, as a self-organized initiative, it disappeared when it was no longer necessary at the end of February.
Self-Organization after Maidan
When the protests ended, an interim government was established in Kyiv. The interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov, had been active in the Maidan protests and was a member of one of the opposition parties during Yanukovych’s presidency. While the interim government attempted to create some kind of unity and stability before the presidential elections in 2014, Vladimir Putin took advantage of the opportunity caused by the chaos. First, in February, unmarked Russian troops invaded the Crimean Peninsula in southern Ukraine, officially part of Ukraine’s territory since 1954. After swift repression of dissenting voices, including the indigenous Crimean Tatars, an illegal referendum on March 16 changed Crimea’s status to be part of Russia. These developments emboldened pro-Russian separatist groups in Ukraine’s eastern regions, and Russian actors immediately intervened to support these groups. Fighting in the east forced thousands of people to leave their homes in and around the large cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Over the course of its independence, Ukraine’s Armed Forces had progressively deteriorated without the institutional support of the Soviet military-industrial complex. In the wake of the Maidan protests, without a strong standing army, it was brigades (sotnia) that formed during the protests to fight the Berkut that volunteered to fight against separatist and Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. These groups also considered themselves to be self-organized; by definition, they were. Something needed to be done (fighting against separatists and Russians to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine), someone could do it (brigades that formed on Maidan, many of whose members had previous military experience), so they simply did it. This broad notion of self-organization also meant that brigades with far-right political views considered themselves to be self-organized. Because of their distance from both the discredited Yanukovych regime and the ineffective Turchynov interim government, these brigades gained support and credibility. While not exactly political activist groups, volunteer military brigades filled a huge gap that was left by the absence of a functional armed forces in 2014.
Additionally, self-organization framed actions that were not political at all. When thousands of people were forced to leave their homes in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the interim government in Kyiv could not organize to help them. Instead, ordinary people self-organized to help newly displaced families and individuals. In the city of Dnipro, for instance—a popular destination for newly displaced people because of its relative safety and its proximity to the eastern regions—ordinary Ukrainians found housing for new arrivals and created a registration system so that when humanitarian aid eventually appeared, it could be distributed. Later on, most of these self-organized initiatives were integrated into Ukrainian state policy or international organizations’ interventions, but the initial response to mass forced displacement was entirely self-organized. All kinds of people, such as my Ukrainian language tutor in the western city of Lviv, who had supported and participated in her local Maidan protests but who would never consider herself a political activist, volunteered for a hotline that helped find host families for newly displaced people from Crimea.
Over the next eight years, self-organization was in the background of Ukraine’s political development. Various government ministries developed policies and programs to serve internally displaced people, integrating self-organized projects and their organizers into official positions. Activists who participated in the Maidan protests established civil society organizations that advocated for judicial reform and anti-corruption policies. And reforms in the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) ultimately led to the integration of the volunteer brigades of 2014 into the Territorial Defense Forces, a branch of the UAF officially established in January 2022. Viewed one way, it seems that self-organization was entirely integrated into the Ukrainian state between 2014 and 2021. Viewed another, self-organization is the foundation of post-Maidan Ukraine, even if the political figures and institutions that make up that state come from the same political establishment that existed before 2014.
Everyone in Their Place: Self-Organization and the Full-Scale Invasion
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the scale of the attack was unexpected and unprecedented. However, so was the Ukrainian response—at least to those who had not really paid attention to the lessons of Maidan. Because of this experience of self-organization, not just during the protests but also in the wake of Russia’s first invasion, people already knew what to do. They knew that they couldn’t wait for someone else to save them—although they would also take on the task of advocating for extensive military and humanitarian aid—but instead, they acted in any way they knew how. Many of the people who were student activists when I started my research are now in Territorial Defense Units and are fighting on the front lines or serving as combat medics. Others have worked at gathering and delivering humanitarian aid in cities close to the front lines. Even President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked people to help Ukraine win by doing what they do best: “Kozhen na svoiemu mistsi,” everyone in their place to do whatever they can.
We have also seen self-organization across Europe in response to the waves of millions of refugees that crossed the border in the first months of the war. In May and July of 2022, I went to Warsaw to work with groups that helped refugees, including at a shop that provided free groceries and basic need products, as well as secondhand clothing, to Ukrainians who had been displaced by the full-scale invasion. The shop served hundreds of refugees weekly, and it was staffed entirely by volunteers. Its founders included a Ukrainian woman who had been living in Poland for many years, as well as Poles who simply wanted to do something that needed to be done; many volunteers had full-time jobs and worked at the free shop on the side. The shop received donations from people around Warsaw who wanted to give, as well as from international groups. However, in the summer of 2022, as many Ukrainian refugees returned to Ukraine and the shop was no longer sustainable by volunteers alone, the physical location closed. Volunteers packed up what was left and drove the goods to the Ukrainian border so they could be distributed within Ukraine as humanitarian aid. Some volunteers from the shop continue to work together to help refugees who plan to stay in Poland, for instance helping with finding jobs and Polish language classes.
Self-organization in response to the full-scale invasion can also be considered to exist outside of politics. Both in Ukraine and in Poland, self-organized initiatives are functioning side by side with state actors who work on behalf of Ukraine. For instance, the Polish government created a special status for Ukrainian refugees so that they could access education for their children, work legally, and receive cash benefits (the last of which ended in the summer of 2022). Self-organization in response to refugees is not serving to criticize or challenge the Polish government; instead, because the need has been so great, each person is doing what they can when something needs to be done.
Certainly, as the war continues, the expectation of sustained self-organization changes. Can people continue do what needs to be done in perpetuity? Will Western governments continue to act however they can to support Ukraine? Self-organization can be draining, as it relies on ordinary people to do extraordinary work. However, it also created the foundation for a new idea about Ukraine after 2014.
How to Understand Russia’s Imperialist Attitude Toward Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, the Kremlin launched a “special military operation” with the stated aim of completely eliminating Ukraine’s independence as a state and society. The decision by Russian president Vladimir Putin came as a surprise to many observers, as few experts had envisaged such a scenario. Their predictions were often clouded by the prevailing belief that Russia had no “objective motivation” for engaging in a war of this magnitude. Soon after, when Russian forces encircled Kyiv, those who had initially argued that these troops would not cross the Ukrainian border began to argue that Russia simply had no other alternative. They claimed that the invasion was due to pressure from “the West.”
Those who support this view adopt, sometimes unconsciously, a neorealist approach to international relations. This approach is based on several fundamental principles, one of which postulates that states are rational actors operating in a hostile and ruthless world, where there is no authority to protect them from each other, and so they seek to maximize their chances of survival. According to this perspective, the Russian state was behaving as a rational actor, and war was a logical response to objective threats from outside. The invasion of Ukraine was thus be a reaction to the “expansion” of NATO, which posed a real danger to Russia. If this had not been the case, then why would Putin have started a conflict that could involve the entire West? According to this reasoning, the scale of Russian military aggression must correspond to the severity of the perceived threat. Otherwise, Putin’s decision would be irrational and therefore impossible to explain.
At this point, it is pertinent to note the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO in 2023, doubling the length of the organization’s border with Russia. It is all the more interesting to note that no Russian military presence has been reported along this new border. If Russia really sees NATO as a threat, why don’t we see a build-up of Russian troops or propaganda portraying Finland as a military threat with Finns as enemies? Clearly, Finland’s accession to NATO, despite its 1,340 km long border with Russia, does not seem to be a major concern for Putin. On the other hand, Ukraine, which was not at the time officially a candidate for NATO membership, was perceived as being so hostile that it must be destroyed militarily. This difference in treatment raises questions about the reasons for this disparity.
It is not new that by focusing exclusively on the structure of the international system, advocates of neorealist analysis tend to underestimate the impact of internal national factors on the behavior of states on a global scale. When Russia invaded Ukraine, adherents of this view struggled to make sense of the situation, resorting to post-event explanations that aligned with their theory rather than acknowledging factual realities. But the political implications of this entrenched mindset are too significant to ignore or leave unchallenged.
From our perspective, in order to fully grasp the motivations behind Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine, it is crucial to look at the internal dynamics of Russian politics. This involves examining the way in which power is exercised between the state, economic actors, and society in Russia, as well as the influence of ideologies and, more generally, imaginaries. As stated by Alexander Wendt, one of the core social constructivist researchers in the field of international relations, actors act towards objects based on the meanings that the objects have for them. Ideology significantly influences how political elites perceive their interests, especially within authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia, where information is monopolized.
It is worth remembering that Russia under Putin has not always adopted a hostile stance towards the West. Initially, the president was open to cooperation, even going so far as to establish partnerships with NATO and participate in joint military exercises. Some argue that Russian elites genuinely aspired to integrate their state into the international community but were disappointed by an arrogant and hostile West. However, we believe that Putin’s stated willingness to cooperate with the West at that time could be better compared to that of a criminal group seeking to establish connections with corrupt law enforcement agencies.
In the early 2000s, Putin aimed to secure his hold in the post-Soviet space made up now of the independent nations of the former Soviet Union. In return, he was willing to offer the Western “policemen,” whose hegemony he did not yet challenge, a kind of “bribe.” This included the sale of fossil fuels at bargain rates, the opening of the Russian market to foreign investment, as well as the injection of substantial funds, often of obscure origin, into Western companies. To some extent, the Europeans accepted these arrangements: Russian money has flowed through financial circuits without much question about its sources, while gas and oil have flowed to new pipelines. Leaders of the time, such as German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French president Nicolas Sarkozy, or Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, were conciliatory. However, achieving an absolute monopoly on the post-Soviet backyard proved complex. The United States had not been as involved in this agreement as the European Union. Moscow had also failed to offer its neighbors a truly mutually beneficial model of cooperation: local mafiosi in power in the former Soviet republics have struggled to perceive the benefits of submitting to Russia, a much larger and more predatory mafia cartel. In addition, the people of these countries regularly voiced their dissatisfaction with the autocratic and corrupt leaders supported by Putin. In sum, Putin failed to establish effective mechanisms to maintain control over what he perceived as Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.
In 2011, ordinary Russian citizens took to the streets to protest the rise of authoritarianism: Putin had violated the Constitution and was seeking a third presidential term. From that point on, the Russian authorities began to promote an ideology that portrayed Russia as surrounded by enemies, with Putin being the only one capable of protecting the country from this existential threat.
The control of Putin’s elites over Russia itself was now threatened. At the time, the regime was trying to suppress any democratic impulse inside and outside the country. Two years later, faced with the failure of its Eurasian economic integration project, the Maidan revolution in Ukraine, and a decline in its political legitimacy in Russia, the regime had shifted from an approach aimed at luring corrupt elites in the states of the former Soviet Union to a strategy of direct control of the territories of neighboring countries, often to the detriment of Russian private sector interests. After the revolution in Ukraine in 2014, Crimea was annexed and the Russian army was deployed in Donbass region of the eastern Ukraine. The message was clear: “Any attempt to overthrow authoritarian rule will be severely repressed.” In 2015, Russia backed Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who was engaged in a brutal war against his own people. In 2020 and 2022, the dictators of Belarus and Kazakhstan benefited from Russian support to violently suppress popular movements in their countries, where the influence of the West, especially NATO, was not an issue on the agenda.
But why has Ukraine become the main target of Russian aggression? First of all, Ukraine is one of the few countries in the post-Soviet space where a popular revolution has not been followed by the return to power of forces politically and economically linked to Russia. Moreover, Ukraine is a country with which ordinary Russians share a great cultural and linguistic proximity. If a country similar in so many ways to their own succeeds in building a democratic and prosperous state, Russians might ask the question: “If Ukrainians, people like us, don’t need an authoritarian and repressive state to lead a normal life, why would we Russians need it?”
In addition, Ukraine, which was the second most powerful Soviet republic after Russia, has considerable strategic assets, including its geographical position, fertile land, natural resources, relatively developed industry, and a skilled workforce. Russia’s political elites believe that integrating Ukraine into an alliance with Russia and Belarus would make the bloc a major power in world politics. Putin regularly evokes this idea when addressing Ukrainians, stressing that “together we have always been and will be much stronger.” However, the drive to maintain control over Ukraine has much deeper motivations.
The Russian president firmly believes that the distinct national identity of Ukrainians is an artificial construct created by enemies. Once separated from Russia, the Ukrainian state, he believes, inevitably becomes a strategic base for hostile forces in the West who use it “as a battering ram” to undermine Russia from within through subversive ideologies, thus hindering Russia’s – that is, Putin’s – aspirations to occupy its rightful place in this world. According to this view, independent Ukraine, simply by virtue of its separate political existence, is transformed into an “anti-Russian project” and becomes an immediate threat to Russia’s very survival, which can only endure as a great power.
The “historic” arguments of this kind put repeatedly forward by Putin in his public speeches should not be seen as ideological junk resulting simply from opportunistic political choices. They have their origins in the collective imaginary forged over time: Ukraine’s role in the identity narrative of Russian state elites was shaped in the particular historical context of the nineteenth century.
Indeed, the Russian leadership of Tsarist times believed that the assimilation of Ukraine was crucial in order to strengthen external power and ensure the internal stability of the Russian state. First, in order to compete with modern colonial empires that adopted policies of nationalization in their “home countries,” Russia also needed to create and consolidate a “national” community, a Russian nation composed of Orthodox eastern Slavs – Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians) and Belarussians. The integration of Ukrainians into this “nation” built from above was therefore seen as an essential step to increase Russia’s power on the international stage.
Second, the Tsarist elites sought to preserve their autocratic regime in a world disrupted by democratic movements, especially after the revolutionary upheaval of 1848 that shook Europe. The Russification of the populations of the western frontier was seen as a way to protect them from the influence of subversive ideologies, thus contributing to the internal stability of the regime. Third, as an ever-expanding continental empire, Russia faced a chronic shortage of loyal populations capable of populating the newly colonized regions of Asia and the Caucasus. Therefore, the assimilation of a vast demographic reservoir of Ukrainians became crucial to maintaining the cohesion of this heterogeneous empire, as this Orthodox Slavic population had to fill the ranks of potential settlers in an empire where ethnic Russians were in the minority.
The current ideology of the Russian state is strongly influenced by the nationalist political imaginary that took shape in the nineteenth century. It continues to be based on the conviction that the assimilation of Ukrainians into the “Russian nation” is a vital necessity for the very survival of the Russian state. It is therefore impossible to understand Russia’s war in Ukraine if we limit ourselves to considering only the military and economic aspects of security. What is mainly at stake is the ontological security of the Russian ruling elite, with Ukraine occupying a central position in their identities and in their representations of the world.
Increasingly, we hear arguments suggesting that in order to end the war, “the West” should address Russia’s security concerns, such as guaranteeing that Ukraine or other post-Soviet countries will never join NATO. However, what leads us to believe that simply keeping Ukraine out of NATO or even dividing its territory will appease Putin?
The existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine, whether within its internationally recognized or significantly reduced borders, is unacceptable to a regime whose ruling classes are convinced that Ukraine is a creation of enemies who use it as a basis to corrupt Russians with ideas of individual rights and freedoms and thus destroy the imperial body of a thousand-year-old Russia.
But let us set aside all moral and ethical questions and consider for a moment that the key to world peace lies in the acceptance of the principle that only the “great powers” have the right to sovereignty, while the others are destined to remain in the great powers’ “sphere of influence,” i.e. to remain colonies or neocolonies. This is what many international relations experts and “pragmatic” politicians tell us, either explicitly or tacitly. But a crucial question arises: where does the Russian sphere of influence that we are supposed to respect end?
We have bad news. Putin’s Russia’s sphere of influence knows no bounds. For the ruling classes of an autocratic “great power,” who live in constant fear of popular revolution, the only way to ensure security is expansion, often in defiance of the demands of a “rational” international strategy.
Russian state ideology and its ruling circles’ imaginary are essential elements to keep in mind if we want to understand the logic behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and especially if we are looking for possible solutions to end this conflict and ensure lasting peace in the region.
Hanna Perekhoda, from Donesk, Ukraine, is a doctoral student in history at the Institute of Political Studies, University of Lausanne. She is a member of Sotsialny Rukh in Ukraine and a founding member of the Swiss Comité Ukraine. This article is based on talks she gave before various Ukraine Solidarity groups in Europe and the United States in 2023.
“Tensions are building in Ukrainian society as a result of neoliberal policies imposed by the government”
After two years of war, how do you see the situation in Ukraine?
After two years of war, the situation is both the same and different. The war goes on, but there are changes in the context—both internal and external. All of these changes were predictable from the very beginning in the highly likely scenario of prolonged war—which doesn’t mean that many, including myself, didn’t have hopes for less likely positive scenarios.
We have been witnessing different tensions accumulating in Ukrainian society—most of those are caused by the predictable neoliberal policies, imposed by the government with the pretext of wartime necessity. Using the justification of economic hardship and the ideology of “free market” capitalism, instead of supporting the universal social rights, already damaged by the economic crisis, the government defends the interest of business at the expense of workers’ rights and social support for the pre-existing and newly emerging underprivileged groups. These steps go totally against the logic of all those relatively effective centralized and, to an extent, socially-oriented policies implemented elsewhere during the war.
Due to these policies, which are the ideological continuation from previous years, the general mobilization of the population’s efforts and the relative unity of Ukrainian society is under the process of steady erosion. After the first months of mobilization to defend their communities, many people are now hesitant—and some object—to the idea of risking one’s life. There are many reasons for this. For example, the relative localization of the threat from Russia, the unrealistic expectation of a quick “victory,” promoted by a part of the political establishment and some mainstream opinion-makers, and the consequential disappointment, and numerous contradictions of interests, individuals’ situations and choices in the structured chaos of the prolonged war. However, the feeling of injustice plays a prominent role. On the one hand, there is the feeling of injustice in relation to the process of mobilization, where wealth or corruption lead to predominantly, but not exclusively, working-class people being mobilized, which goes against the ideal image of “people’s war” in which all the society participate. And some cases of injustice within the army add to this. On the other hand, the lack of a relatively attractive and socially just reality and prospects for the future play an important role in individual choices of various kinds.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of society decided to abstain from the struggle against Russian aggression, quite the contrary: most understand the gloomy prospects of occupation or frozen conflict, which may escalate with the renewed efforts. While the majority oppose many actions of the government and may even hate it (a traditional attitude in the political reality of Ukraine for decades), there are stronger public sentiments that are highly unlikely to change in the future: namely, opposition to the Russian invasion and distrust in any potential “peace” settlement with the Russian government (which violated and continues to violate everything, starting from bilateral agreements, and ending with international law and international humanitarian law). However, a socially-just vision of policies during the war and of post-war reconstruction are prerequisites to channel individual struggles for survival into a conscious effort of community and social struggle—against invasion and for socio-economic justice.
The external context has steadily changed too. There have been new military conflicts in different parts of the globe, which are, like the Russian invasion, further symptoms of the “burning” periphery caused by declining Western hegemony and the consequent new struggle for “spheres of influence,” as well as regional and global hegemony. These escalations, as well as some major failures of Ukrainian diplomacy ,for example, the use of “Western civilization” rhetoric, which alienates people beyond the Western world, and right populist trends in many countries, have their negative impact on international support of Ukrainian society.
In the light of these dynamics, it is extremely important to develop internally and support externally the workers’ movement and other progressive forces in Ukraine. It is also important for the Ukrainian progressive movement to build connections and mutual solidarities with national liberation, labor, and other progressive struggles in other parts of the globe. I don’t believe there is a chance to reverse the tide of the global imperialist and neocolonial revival or right-wing populism in the near future. But we have to develop the left infrastructure for the coming struggles. We came to this gloomy stage somehow unprepared and we have to do our best to preclude such a scenario in the future.
What is the situation of Commons[1] and your projects?
We continue working despite all the circumstances, including the most painful—the loss of a prominent economist, our editor and friend Oleksandr Kravchuk, the loss of a prominent gonzo-anthropologist, our author and friend Evheny Osievsky, and some other friends, colleagues, comrades, some of whom were killed in action. Additionally, some of our editors and authors volunteered for the army, others are overloaded with fundraising, providing supplies for humanitarian needs, and supporting left and antiauthoritarian volunteers. Yet others are scattered across the country and across the borders as internally displaced people and refugees, managing individual survival and sometimes being or becoming single mothers due to displacement and war.
During the first year of the full-scale invasion, we considered three tasks to be important for us as a left media—to engage in leftist debates on the Russian imperialist invasion, to describe the realities of war and its impact on people in Ukraine as well as on Ukrainian refugees abroad, and to intervene with a critical perspective on ongoing and planned policies and reforms by the Ukrainian government. With time passing, by the end of 2022, we considered that most of the people had made up their minds and few can be convinced to change their position—though we are grateful to those who continue interventions in the leftist discussion from the position of solidarity with Ukrainian people. On our side, we summarized our position in an issue, available online and in a printed version (revenue from selling goes to Solidarity Collectives): a collection of the text from our web-site, which we consider the most important.
We rethought the flow of these debates and decided where to apply our efforts. We felt that too few direct bridges were built directly between the Ukrainian experience and the experiences of other peripheral countries going through wars, debt dependencies, austerities, and struggles against those. So, the project “Dialogues of the Peripheries” emerged and some of our editors consider it to be the main focus for us in the near future. Though, of course, other topics remain and we continue to write about problems and struggles in Ukraine, about history, culture, the ecology, and different important spheres. We continue to describe the self-organization of people in Ukraine—either as volunteer initiatives or trade unions. In 2023 we managed to do it in a series of video-reportages “Look at this!” and even made a short documentary about the movement of nurses in Ukraine.
I must emphasize that all this would be impossible without our editors and authors, as well as without support from many left organizations, initiatives, and people from abroad.
What do you hope for the year 2024?
There are different levels of hope. I have my personal hopes; I also have a dream that I share with most of the people in Ukraine—that the war will end in a way that will be favorable for a democratic and socially just future in Ukraine or at least in a way that will not preclude productive struggles for such a future. My personal hopes and society’s shared dream are connected, of course. In summer 2023 I returned from Germany to Kyiv which I considered to be my city for some years, and I don’t want to go anywhere else anymore. I’m not naïve and understand that most probably our dream for a favorable end of the war in 2024 is just a dream. But one needs a dream to build one’s hopes on it.
As for Commons (Spilne in Ukrainian), we hope to continue our work, to write and to discuss what is important for us, and to be useful to progressive struggles in Ukraine. We hope to continue with the Dialogues of the Peripheries, to inform Ukrainian readers about contexts, problems, and struggles in other countries; to build connections and understanding with people in other peripheral realities, hoping to contribute to mutual solidarity in progressive struggles.
Interview by Patrick Le Tréhondat, February 3, 2024
Oksana Dutchak is a sociologist and researcher in the fields of labor issues and gender inequality and an editor at Commons. She lives in Kyiv.
[1] See “Commons: A Ukrainian left-wing collective intellectual”
