Sasha Yaropolskaya and Philippe Alcoy interviewed LeftEast editor Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist who was an activist and participant in several left-wing initiatives in Ukraine before moving to Germany in 2019. Ishchenko currently works at Berlin’s Freie Universität, continuing his research into the Ukrainian revolutions, the left, and the political violence of the far right, which he has been studying for 20 years. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, he has also published extensively in various international media on different aspects of the war. Here, he gives us his views on the course of the war; the changes in Ukrainians’ attitudes towards the conflict; the internal struggles within the national ruling classes; the strengthening of the far right, which is often relativized by the dominant media in the west; and finally, the situation of the Ukrainian working class and the left. Originally published in French at Revolution Permanente.
Here in the west, many reports in the media, at least at the beginning of the war, tend to talk about the enthusiasm of people in Ukraine for defending their country. But now we see images of young men deserting or refusing to serve in the army and go to the front line. Can you explain what is the feeling of people in Ukraine today towards the situation in the war against Russia?
There is no enthusiasm, or at least this enthusiasm is restricted to a much smaller group of people than it was in 2022. At that time it was not just a reaction to the Russian invasion, but to the fact that the original plan of invasion failed in a matter of days. There was not just an outrage that Russia attacked our country, but huge hopes for victory in spring, and even more after the Ukrainian counteroffensive of September 2022, and then expectations of a bigger success of the counter-offensive in 2023. As we know now, Ukraine’s military campaign last year failed and didn’t achieve any of its objectives. Instead, we have the relatively successful advance of Russian forces.
This has had consequences on how the people tend to feel about the war, particularly in the public opinion we have clear trends: when the situation in the frontline was good for Ukraine with chances of improvement, support for negotiations was very low, and when the situation had deteriorated and the hopes that Ukraine might win were weaker, the support for negotiations grew, while the support for compromise and the trust into Zelensky decreased.
There are multiple indications that the enthusiasm of 2022 was pretty fragile, and it is not the first time that we see this kind of dynamic. After the 2004 Orange revolution and the EuroMaidan revolution of 2014, people have had high expectations that quickly gave way to disappointment. A similar dynamic happened after the election of Zelensky in 2019 and then in 2022. One of the lines of interpretation is that those events were the manifestation of the rise of the Ukrainian Nation, according to a very linear teleological dynamic, as an ultimate culmination of the national liberation struggle.
You mentioned desertion. The number of people trying to escape through the border is high. An even better statistic is that the majority of the men under military duty between 18 and 60 years old did not update their contact data for the military recruitment office. These updates were a way to make Ukrainian conscription a bit more efficient and avoid relying on the pretty brutal method that consists of capturing people on the street and instead try to collect the data from all potential conscripts and then start to mobilize them in a more efficient way. If they did not update the data, they would be punished with a high fine and if people don’t pay this fine, there will be even more complications in their work and life. This is quite serious. Yet despite all this, the majority of Ukrainian men ignored this requirement. And if we talk about Ukrainian males abroad, according to estimation, just a small percentage of them update their data, although everyone is required to do this. This means the actual desire to sacrifice oneself for the state is very low.
Military conscription is getting more and more brutal in Ukraine. We’re seeing videos of scenes of public arrests of military conscripts and videos of confrontations with police officers and military officers done by citizens-witnesses to the scene. Is there a parallel to be made with the situation in Russia on the question of military conscription? And is it a subject of fear for the state that pushing for a wide range of conscription could result in a social discontent similar to Russia where for years there is a movement of families of the conscripts and notably the wives and the mothers that mobilize themselves in support of their husbands and sons? In Russia, the regime fears launching a wide conscription effort and has tried to find different ways to avoid big waves of military conscription, but I feel that Ukraine, especially when supplies from the US were low, had no choice and lowered the conscription age, which came with a lot of police brutality. Is this a socially explosive situation?
There is a lot to say here. Unlike in Russia, there was always conscription in Ukraine. So it wasn’t like just one wave of conscription that Putin announced in September 2022 as a response to the Ukrainian counter-offensive. The Ukrainian army was getting the soldiers primarily via conscription. Significantly, volunteers are not the majority of the Ukrainian army, and their number decreased to very negligible since 2022. All those brutal methods of mobilization are an outcome of the low desire to volunteer for the army.
Why is it low? The most generous explanation to the Ukrainian state and also what is repeated in certain circles is that it is simply because the US did not supply enough weapons. The argument implies a very specific idea of the way the war could be won. But it is not certain that if every weapon and supply had been delivered in 2022 a decisive victory would have been achieved. I will not go into speculations, but I don’t think that this is a consensus analysis among the military experts. The other side of the coin is that the supply of weaponry is conditioned by the efficiency of Ukrainian mobilization. So that the change in conscription laws this year was connected to the supply of weapons. That was confirmed by a lot of Ukrainian politicians. The US expects Ukraine to make conscription more efficient. Nowadays the most urgent issue is lowering the age of conscripted soldiers. It has already been lowered from 27 to 25, and now there is a strong push to decrease it even more, to 22 maybe even to 18.
There is an important argument against this. This is the most fertile demographic cohort of the Ukrainian population, and it is also one of the smallest. Basically, if you send those young guys to die in a slaughter, the capacity of the Ukrainian population to regenerate after the war will decrease even more. According to the latest UN forecast, by the end of the century, the Ukrainian population is going to decrease to 15 million from the 52 million that Ukraine had in 1992 after the disintegration of USSR. This is not even the most pessimistic scenario and is based on the rather optimistic assumption that the war is going to end next year and that millions of refugees, especially women in reproduction age will come back and contribute to the reproduction of the Ukrainian population, which is not certain to say the least.
This is an impossible choice. Throughout history, many nations have fought long wars against imperial conquest. Or not necessarily even an imperial conquest, as a matter of fact. Let’s take revolutionary France as an example. After 1789, France was able to defeat the coalition of the strongest European powers up until 1812 when Napoleon was defeated in Russia. But for two decades, France defeated all of Europe. That was the power of revolution. Then, revolutionary Russia after 1917 could defeat the coalition of the strongest imperialist powers because of the power of the revolution and because of the capacity to build an efficient, large and victorious red army. Then, during the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese defeated France and the USA over the course of two decades. Afghanistan defeated the USSR and the USA in a war that lasted from 1979 up until 2021. Theoretically, we could think that a small nation can defeat a much larger enemy, but that requires a different social structure and a different politics.
So all those wars were waged by countries with a large peasant population, which was capable of mobilizing in a large revolutionary or guerrilla war. That population has reproduced over decades despite the genocide the USA conducted in Vietnam, even despite the disproportionate balance of forces. But that was the power of revolution. Post-Soviet Ukraine is a very different country. It is a very different demographic structure, not like in Vietnam, not like in Afghanistan, not even like in Ukraine a hundred years ago, which was a largely peasant country with multiple revolutionary armies, the Red Army, Makhno’s army, the various nationalist warlords, which benefited from the demography of the peasantry. Today Ukraine is a modernized urban society with a declining demography, it cannot wage the war for decades.
And another issue is that there are no revolutionary changes. Paradoxically, we have those three Ukrainian revolutions in 1990, 2004 and 2014, but they did not create a strong revolutionary state that would be capable of constructing an efficient apparatus to mobilize the army and the economy. The idea behind those revolutions is that Ukraine is supposed to integrate into the USA-dominated global order as a kind of periphery. That kind of integration would only benefit a narrow professional middle class and some of the opportunistic oligarchs and transnational capital.
Ukraine still discusses a tax increase, a rather insignificant one, after two and a half years into the war, and that says a lot about the potential trust of Ukrainians in the state and about their desire to defend their state. [Editor’s note: this past week, Zelensky finally signed the tax increase into law.] The class issue is very important because conscripts will come primarily from the lower classes, from the villages. Mainly, from among the poor people who could not bribe the recruitment officers to let them out, and people who didn’t find a way to escape the country.
On the question of political hierarchy and political struggle inside Ukrainian society, we saw the resignation of Zaluzhny, the head of Ukraine military forces, and of Kuleba, the minister of foreign affairs, last year. I wanted to ask you about the political struggles among Ukrainian bourgeois class.
Zaluzhny was a potential political opponent to Zelensky. It was dangerous for him to have a popular general turning into a politician. That was the idea behind sending Zaluzhny as an ambassador to the United Kingdom. With Kuleba there was also the issue of Zelensky’s trust for him. We can analyze this as the construction of a “vertical of power,” an informal way to consolidate the elite and rule the country through the use of both formal institutions, like the democratic constitution and the parliament and via informal mechanisms.
Every Ukrainian president has tried to construct this informal power. Zelensky’s vertical power began to be constructed before the invasion, but the war presented more opportunities and his chief of staff, Andri Yermak, is considered to be the second most powerful person in the country with a huge amount of informal power and the capacity to build an effective informal structure that consolidates power around the presidential office.
The dynamics of those conflicts that sometimes erupt in the public sphere remain mostly beyond the public eye. They are primarily connected to the outcomes of the front line and other military developments. In case of a poor development for the Ukrainian army, those conflicts would intensify and some radical nationalists and possibly some oligarchs might raise their heads and so on.
A lot depends on the position of the USA and EU and the strategy that Trump is going to choose. One outcome if Zelensky is able to end this war in a way that could be presented to the Ukrainian public as a victory, with the receipt of EU membership or NATO membership or some generous funding schemes for Ukraine, for example, even if conceding some territory. However, if the end of the war is going to be perceived as a defeat, Zelensky would probably not have many chances.
What is the role that the far right plays in Ukraine? This has been a very discussed topic in the western media throughout the war. And we have also some liberal western media, which try to present the Ukrainian far right as somehow less dangerous than the western far right because it is fighting on the right side of history by presuming Russia is the bigger enemy. Zelensky’s regime tried to address those sectors of the far right with some official ceremonies for Azov or the celebration of the radical nationalist Stepan Bandera’s birthday. Located in France, as we are, we have difficulty following the evolution of this dynamic as the war progresses. Is the far right a small segment but powerful because of its settlement in the military, or is it gaining some popularity outside of the traditional sectors of the far right? Is the far right playing an important role in the political landscape in Ukraine, or is it exaggerated by the media?
When people in the west discuss the Ukrainian far right, I think they have a wrong point of comparison. For example, in France the far right, mainly the National Rally, Le Pen’s party, is way less extreme than those movements we discuss in Ukraine. Le Pen’s party probably doesn’t use Nazi symbols, and has a more sophisticated attitude towards the Vichy collaboration during the Second World War. They’re trying to detoxify themselves. It’s not like this in Ukraine and you mentioned Stephan Bandera, who is glorified openly; even more so, the Waffen SS is glorified, particularly by people in Azov. The scale of extremism of the Ukrainian far right is way higher than the western one. Recently they had an international conference Nation Europa in Lviv, the biggest city of western Ukraine, to which they invited groups like the Dritte Weg from Germany, Casa Pound from Italy, and similar neo-Nazi groups from many European countries. From Ukraine, all the major far-right organizations participated, including Svoboda party and prominent members of Azov/National Corps. These Ukrainian parties, organizations, and military units are typically called just “far right” yet they build their international relations with the far more extreme and violent groups in the west rather than the dominant far-right parties. By the way, most of the Ukrainian military units who participated in this conference have connections to the Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR).
The capacity for political violence which is ideologically approved for the Ukrainian “far right,” is far greater than in the dominant far-right parties in the west. They have way more weapons and paramilitary movements built around military units capable of political violence. Unlike the major far-right parties in the west who are working on parliamentary status, the power of the far right in Ukraine has always been their capacity for street mobilization and the threat of violence. Significantly, they have not been capable of becoming electorally popular, with one exception in the 2012 elections when far-right Svoboda party won over ten percent of the votes (although they were also capable of gaining a much more significant representation in and have the largest factions in many local councils in western Ukraine). However, the main source of power has come from their capacity for extra-parliamentary mobilization in contrast to oligarchic parties or the weak liberals.
The Ukrainian nationalists can rely on a political tradition that comes back to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which belonged to a family of fascist movements in inter-war Europe. The post-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists have often literally modelled themselves after the OUN. This tradition was kept in the Ukrainian diaspora, especially in North America. The Canadian public is only now discovering how many Ukrainian fascists their government welcomed after WWII. Other post-Soviet Ukrainian political segments don’t have the advantage of a preserved political tradition.
Now Azov has become very legitimate as heroes of the war. They enjoy extraordinary media attention and project themselves as an elite unit, a statement which is ascertained by the media. Many Azov speakers have become celebrities. They also benefited from some whitewashing in the western media who used to call them neo-Nazi’sbefore 2022. Now they easily forget that part of the story.
The final point is that we need to think not only about the nominal far-right but also about the complicity of the Ukrainian and western elite in the whitewashing of Ukrainian far right and ethnonationalism. Not only in Ukraine but in the west as well, discussing this topic today can immediately lead to ostracism and cancelation. For example, Marta Havryshko, a Ukrainian historian who moved to the United States, continues to write critically about Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian ethno-nationalist policies, the Ukrainian far right, and she receives thousands of threats, including death threats and rape threats.
In your opinion, is Azov the principal force of the Ukrainian far right? It has been severely weakened by the battle of Mariupol and Bakhmout. Do you think they will still play an important role in the future, in the recomposition of the far right?
On the contrary, they expanded, they are now two brigades – the 3rd Assault brigade and Azov brigade in the National Guard – plus a special unit Kraken subordinated to the military intelligence. Their political attraction and media publicity has expanded enormously. Their whitewashed legitimacy has expanded too, so they’re not weakened but strengthened. Contrary to the popular myth, they have not depoliticized.
Do you fear that after the war, the far right and especially the one that fought on the frontline will be the only one with an ideological project cohesive enough for post- war Ukraine, given the lack of ideology of the neoliberal project for Ukraine and the weakness of the left?
This totally depends on the outcome of the war, and the range of the outcomes is still enormously wide. A nuclear war is a possible, even if hopefully not the likeliest, outcome. In that case, all of what we discuss right now won’t matter anymore. A sustainable ceasefire soon is also a possible outcome, yet also not very likely. The Ukrainian far-right radicalization will depend on the stability of Zelensky’s government and the stability of the Ukrainian economy. In case of disintegrating state institutions and a failing economy, nationalists will have good opportunities to establish their power because they are a very legitimate, very well-known and militarized political force.
What is the situation of the worker movement? There were some minor strikes in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, especially in the health sector. But it’s difficult to know what the real situation of the working class is in Ukraine. What is the situation and the capacity for the working class to organize itself, and maybe to play a role or at least counterbalance the rising of the far right in the country?
The working class cannot play a role in the current situation. The labor movement in Ukraine was weak well before the war. The last really massive political strike was by Donbas miners in 1993. They demanded the autonomy of Donbas and closer relations with Russia, ironically. But even that strike was so connected to the interests of the so-called “red directors” of the Soviet enterprises, who had lots of power in the immediate post-Soviet years, that they used the strike in order to push for certain concessions from the government. Eventually the strike led to snap elections and a change of the government. But since then, there’s been no really large-scale strike action.
For three decades we’ve seen only small-scale strikes, typically limited to specific enterprises, and at best to some segments of the economy, and very rarely politicized. By the way, it is precisely the inability to start a political strike during the EuroMaidan revolution of 2014 led to violent escalation due to a lack of leverage over the government, which did not want to give any concessions to the protesters. That opened the opportunity for the radical nationalists to push for the violent strategy of the protests. And so, yes, after this full-scale invasion, strikes were banned. The strikes that have happened are probably informal strikes.
What is going to happen after the war again depends a lot on how the war is going to end. But what we know is that the empowerment of the workers’ movement would require some economic growth so that the workers would not laid be off. That requires some successful reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy. Then, in certain very optimistic – but not necessarily probable – scenarios, Ukrainian soldiers coming back to the Ukrainian economy could demand more from the government, something which actually happened after some wars, in particular after the First World War. But now it remains a speculative guess. Much darker scenarios look more likely at the moment.
We also had one question about the state and the positions of the Ukrainian left. Especially at the beginning of war, there were a lot of articles and a lot of pieces speaking from the point of view of Ukrainian leftists and explaining how blind the western left is for not supporting more arms shipments from NATO. In your articles, you try to have a more nuanced viewpoint on war. And I was interested in how the positions of the Ukrainian left, whether organized or individual intellectuals, have evolved after two years of the invasion. And is there a more critical stance against the Ukrainian government and the role played by NATO in the conflict that emerges from the left?
Well, the left in Ukraine has always been diverse. Ironically, the biggest left-wing party in Ukraine, the Communist Party of Ukraine, supported the Russian invasion. The Communist Party of Ukraine was a very important party until the EuroMaidan revolution. It used to be the most popular party in the country in the 1990s. The candidate from the Communist Party got 37% of the votes in the presidential elections in 1999. Even on the eve of EuroMaidan Revolution, the Communist Party won 13% of the votes. Even though their support had declined, it’s significant representation in the parliament effectively supported the government of Viktor Yanukovych. After EuroMaidan they lost their electoral stronghold in Donbass and in Crimea. They also came under repression as a result of the decommunisation policies: the party was effectively suspended, and in 2022 was permanently banned, together with a range of other so-called pro-Russian parties. Petro Symonenko, the irreplaceable leader of the party since its establishment in 1993, escaped to Belarus in March 2022. And from Belarus, he supported the Russian invasion as an anti-fascist operation against the “regime in Kiev”. The communist organizations in the occupied areas merged with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, participated in the local elections organized by Russia in 2023 and even entered some of the local councils. The same merger happened also with the Ukrainian official trade unions in the occupied areas.
So that’s the lion’s share of what has been called the left in Ukraine. At the same time, there were far smaller and younger left groups. They’ve always been critical of the communists and more integrated with the democratic socialists and liberal left in the west. They also had a very different social base than the Communists – closer to the middle-class pro-western NGOized “civil society” in Ukraine. And after the start of the invasion, they could communicate their position much more effectively to the west with a kind of identity politics: “We are the Ukrainian left and the stupid and arrogant western left just doesn’t understand anything about what’s going on in the country.” Of course, this stance has been very problematic, to say the least, and was from the very start. And just in comparison of numbers, the Communist Party had 100,000 card-holding members in 2014. The younger left milieu has not had more than 1,000 activists and sympathizers in the whole country even during the best years of their development, and they have declined since the EuroMaidan. Among the latter left, most supported Ukraine, many actually volunteered for the Army, but they were not capable of establishing a left-wing military unit comparable to the far-right units, even a small one. Many also participated in humanitarian initiatives.
Now, some of them tend to revisit their positions about the war, in particular in response to the brutal conscription. It is really difficult to argue that the war is still a kind of “people’s war” if the majority of Ukrainian men actually do not want to fight. The extent to which they are ready to articulate this position depends also on their fear of repression. It’s difficult to say this within the Ukrainian public sphere- that kind of criticism exists mostly inclosed chats, “friends-only” Facebook accounts, and so on, and is only very cautiously articulated in publications
There are also some criticisms of ethno-nationalism that come from that milieu because it’s become too difficult to ignore how Ukraine has changed in two years with the extent of discrimination against Russian speakers and the enactment of ethnic assimilation policies. For example, Russian is no longer taught in Ukrainian schools, even as an elective, even in overwhelmingly Russian-speaking cities like Odessa, where probably 80% or 90% of Ukrainian children speak Russian with their parents. A recently introduced bill may ban speaking Russian in schools, not just in the classroom with teachers, but even during the breaks in the private conversations of the pupils with each other. The bill has been already endorsed by the Minister of Education.
The third segment of the Ukrainian left is Marxist Leninist, which is a part of what I call a “neo-Soviet revival,” happening in many post-Soviet countries. They are typically organized in kruzhki – literally meaning “circles” – which are proto-political organizations, something more than just Marxist-Leninist reading groups. They’ve been way more popular in Russia, capable of establishing YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. In Russia, Belarus, Central Asia, the kruzhki may involve thousands of young people who have not lived a single day in the USSR but have some criticism of the social and political reality of their countries find some instruments on how to deal with that reality in the orthodox Marxist- Leninism. Notably, they exist and even have expanded in Ukraine too, despite the decommunization, and the rise of anti-Russian nationalism and anticommunist attitudes. Almost from the very start these groups have been both against governments and take a revolutionary defeatist position. In that situation, we may wonder if a social revolution is even possible like it was a hundred years ago as part of the collapsing Russian Empire. But nevertheless, from the very start, these groups raised a criticism of forced conscription, called for internationalism, and didn’t try to legitimate what the Ukrainian state was doing.
