Ivanna Khrapko, youth chair of the Ukrainian Federation of Trade Unions, spoke to Martin Thomas while visiting the UK recently with the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.
Our army is trying to kick out Russian soldiers from our territory — very successfully in some regions.
Terrible crimes have been found in the liberated territories. A lot of people died. When the territories were occupied, we lost contact with our union members there. We’re trying to make contact again. I don’t know the results yet.
The Russian army is bombing areas in the south of Ukraine. Our comrades in Mykolaiv tell me that the centre of Mykolaiv was bombed yesterday afternoon. The Russians bombed our trade union building.
The Russians have a big nuclear power plant occupied. We have contact with our comrades there, and they tell us Russian soldiers are taking people to the basement.
Putin says Ukraine doesn’t want to negotiate. But Putin is doing a fake referendum in the occupied areas, with soldiers controlling votes, and people brought in from Crimea to vote. Putin talks about negotiations, but he announces military mobilisation in Russia, and threatens to use nuclear weapons.
The east of Ukraine, especially, has a lot of Russian people who’ve been living there for a long time. It’s mostly old people who lived there in the USSR time. Middle-aged and young people have tried to leave the occupied areas.
But there are also people who couldn’t leave, or were afraid to lose their homes. They need money to live, so they went to work, and in a sense they started to “collaborate”. There were also partisans who stayed in the occupied territories. Then there are some politicians who really collaborated.
I have no picture of the areas taken back as regards measures against collaborators.
The unions have started to collect warm clothes for winter. The official average temperature in flats is 14ºC. And the Russian army has started to destroy infrastructure.
Personally I’m afraid of winter. My parents in their village can collect wood. I live on the 14th floor of a block of flats. The price of heating will go up. But I know how hard it is for the soldiers.
Our government is pushing new laws on work time to remove workers’ protections. Some politicians were pushing this change before the war, but then we had demonstrations and strikes and pushed them back.
Where factories are still working, now employers can sack you without reason or consultation with the union. Before they had to consult with the union. How workers are on individual contracts, of variable length, one month or three months, and some on zero-hours contracts.
There’s a risk of more changes to the law. Our government has a very bad attitude to the trade unions.
To resist, we can do demonstrations, mobilise international support, and use social media.
These measures will make more people want to migrate, too. But when I applied for a visa to come to Britain, I had to go to Warsaw. I was asked to wait two weeks, so I paid some money to speed it up. Then my papers had gone to Berlin. They were sent back to Berlin, and a friend collected them for me.
We ask trade unionists in Britain to continue to share information about what has happened in my country and continue to press your government to support Ukraine with weapons so that we can defeat Russia and end the war faster.
The refugees in Britain need support; and our unions need support in our fight against our government’s new legislation.
I visited the Liverpool dockers’ picket line this morning and took them a letter of support from dockers in Odesa and Mykolaiv.