Come to the report back / solidarity meeting: 7pm, Wednesday 25 May, Marchmont Community Centre, Kings Cross, London. More and register here.
On 3 May, I travelled with other British trade unionists on a delegation organised by the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine to Lviv.
In Ukraine’s far west, Lviv is less than 50 miles from the Polish border and many hundreds of miles from the battlefronts in the east and south. As a result, Lviv feels eerily peaceful and “normal”, compared with the horrific images of destruction from elsewhere in the country. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might suppose you were in any other elegant old Austro-Hungarian city with its pretty cathedrals, Renaissance architecture, and streets lined with restaurants and cafés doing a decent trade.
A deeper look reveals the truth, though: the military roadblocks here and there, the enlistment points, the soldiers in uniform waiting for trains and buses, the sandbags built up around monuments and sheets of metal bolted over churches’ stained glass to protect them from bomb damage.
And then there’s the air raid sirens, which sound several times a day. We’d been told in advance what the protocol was (get two walls between yourself and the outdoors, head for a basement if possible) but we’d also been told that virtually everyone in Lviv ignores it. This isn’t quite as reckless as it sounds: whenever a missile is detected heading for Ukraine, alarms sound in every city it could potentially hit. The vast majority of times the sirens go off, nothing is heading for Lviv. “Reassuring!”, we thought, until we learnt that missiles had hit the electricity and rail infrastructure on the outskirts of town the day before we arrived. Two were injured and electricity was cut off to part of the city.
On our first night at the hotel, we heard the sirens and dutifully made our way to the basement. No one else was there, and eventually some faintly amused security guards turned up to investigate. We reckon they thought we were up to mischief down there.
Many Ukrainians we interviewed told us that this surreal contrast between Lviv’s relative normality and the horror elsewhere is a terrible thing to endure psychologically, especially if you have recently lived through a siege, or if, as was true of many we spoke to, your friends and relatives are still being shelled or living under occupation. Lviv’s population has been swelled greatly by refugees looking for safety, many of them now living in awful, cramped conditions in cellars or small rooms.
At a conference we heard from Ukrainian trade unionists. Oleksandr Skyba, a rail worker from Kyiv’s Darnitsya depot and activist in the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers and Transport Builders, described the incredibly dangerous conditions that he and his colleagues had been working under when Russian forces attempted to besiege the capital. Many rail workers have died. In a theme that would crop up again and again at the conference, Skyba described how the work of the union had become centred on keeping its members alive - moving humanitarian supplies, rescuing workers in peril, providing food and support for the many railway workers now fighting in the territorial defence units and the armed forces.
Oleksandr later told us how he and the union had been visiting members now enlisted in the armed forces to try and make sure they had basic training in first aid and military skills, including identifying mines.
Other themes emerged from the speeches by trade unionists. Many pointed out how clear it was to workers that their independent organisations stood little chance of survival under Russian occupation. A miners’ leader who joined us via Zoom from Kryvi Rih, not far from the front line, alluded to the total crushing of trade unionism and all other forms of independent civil society in the Russian puppet-regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk. Serhii and Oksana, trade unionists in the health sector, reported that health workers in the occupied zones had been forced to leave their unions and ordered to join Russian ones instead. This piece of coercion was tied up with the occupiers’ demand that the workers sign new, worse employment contracts. Some of these workers managed to contact their old union.
Before the war, health workers were already suffering from low pay and poor conditions. Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a presidential decree to increase health workers’ wages but cuts to the sector’s budget meant this never materialised.
Vasyl Semkanich from the Independent Trade Union of Miners in the city of Chervonohrad told us how decades of Russian political intervention had made the Ukrainian economy dangerously reliant on imported fossil fuels from Russia. But he didn’t want to absolve Ukraine’s native ruling class. He also pinned blame on the Ukrainian oligarchs, who drag the country’s energy sector further and further from public interest and scrutiny and use it to line their own pockets. He talked about his union’s demands for the industry to be brought into democratic public ownership.
To get a sense of where the socialist left finds itself in Ukraine, we spoke to activists from Sotsialniy Rukh (Social Movement). On the one hand, the war has presented enormous challenges. When the government introduced martial law, the right to strike or organise demonstrations was closed off. The Zelenskyy administration also cut taxes on corporations and diluted workers rights in what it described as an attempt to stabilise the economy. Social Movement are calling for the restitution of the rights that have been suspended, and positively demanding an expansion of labour and social legislation, levelled up to par with the EU.
Social Movement have been able to make progress by pointing out the unfairness with which some aspects of the war are being managed and by telling workers how to invoke their rights. They highlight how the bosses’ selfishness and disregard for workers’ living conditions will weaken Ukraine’s chances in the war. Pilash said that while Zelenskyy’s popularity is very high because of his role as commander-in-chief, many ordinary Ukrainians view the meaner and more unjust policies of his government as somehow unconnected. In this way, popular opinion can be both very pro-Zelenskyy and simultaneously critical of the government.
In enormously difficult conditions, Social Movement and other genuine leftists are struggling to outline an egalitarian and democratic alternative that the Ukrainian public can grasp, clear and distinct from both the corrupt present and from the dictatorial Soviet past.
I spoke briefly at the conference, along with Ruth Cashman from Unison. We outlined the aims we felt needed to be taken up by the trade union movement and left internationally: for arms for Ukraine, for the abolition of the country’s international debt, for the opening of borders to refugees, for our unions to make meaningful and practical links with the Ukrainian labour movement. Some aid convoys are coming from European unions, but more needs to be done.
We need to confront the sluggishness and bureaucratism of a union movement that has been badly demoralised by decades of defeat, and the legacy of the Stalinist politics, still present in our movement, which can see imperialism only when it comes from NATO, and turns a blind eye to the aggression of Russia or China.
That will be a difficult task, but a necessary one. We talk a lot in the labour movement about international solidarity and mutual aid. If any of that is real and sincere, we need to act on it now. The Ukrainian left is in a life or death struggle. We owe them any help we can give.
• Extracted from here
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