Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko, The Bullet, 12/4/24

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a Ukrainian sociologist who was politically active and took part in several left-wing initiatives in Ukraine before moving to Germany in 2019. Ishchenko currently works at the Freie Universität in Berlin and continues his research on the Ukrainian “revolutions,” the left, and the political violence of the extreme right, which he has been studying for 20 years. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, he has also written extensively in several international media outlets on different aspects of the conflict. He was interviewed by Philippe Alcoy and Sasha Yaropolskaya for the journal Révolution Permanente.

Philippe Alcoy, Sasha Yaropolskaya (PA-SY): Here in the West, there is much reporting of the enthusiasm of Ukrainians to defend their country. Yet today, we see images of young men deserting or refusing to serve in the army. Can you tell us how the Ukrainian population currently feels about the situation of the war with Russia?

Volodymyr Ishchenko (VI): There is no enthusiasm, or at least, this enthusiasm is limited to a much smaller group of people than in 2022. At that time, the enthusiasm was caused not only as a reaction to the Russian invasion but also by the fact that Russia’s initial invasion plan failed in a matter of days. There was not only outrage that Russia had attacked our country but also immense hopes for victory in that spring, and even more so after the Ukrainian counter-offensive in September 2022, with expectations of a greater success of the counter-offensive in 2023.

As we now know, last year’s Ukrainian campaign failed to achieve any of its objectives. We witnessed, instead, the relatively successful advance of Russian forces. This has consequences for how people feel about war. In public opinion, in particular, there are clear trends: when the situation on the front line was good for Ukraine and with chances of improvement, support for negotiations was very low. But when the situation deteriorated and hopes that Ukraine could win the war diminished, support for negotiations increased, while support for, and trust in, Zelensky decreased.

Much indicates that the enthusiasm of 2022 was quite fragile. And this is not the first time that we have seen this kind of dynamic. After the “Orange Revolution” of 2004 and the “EuroMaidan Revolution” of 2014, people had high expectations that quickly yielded to disappointment. A similar dynamic occurred after the election of Zelensky in 2019, and again in 2022. One line of interpretation was that these events were the manifestation of the rise of the Ukrainian nation with a quasi-theological dynamic, as the ultimate outcome of a national liberation struggle.

You mentioned desertion. The number of people trying to escape across the border is high. An even more telling statistic is that of the majority of men subject to military service and aged 18 to 60 who have not updated their data with the military recruitment office. This requirement had been introduced in order to make Ukrainian conscription a little more effective and to avoid resorting to the rather brutal method of grabbing people off the street but rather to try to collect data on all potential conscripts and then to start mobilizing them more effectively. If people do not update the data, they are punished with a large fine, and if they don’t pay it, they invite even more complications in their work and life.

So, it is a very serious matter. Yet despite everything, the majority of Ukrainian men have not obeyed this requirement. And as for Ukrainian men abroad, according to estimates, only a few have updated their data, although everyone was required to do so. This means that the real desire to sacrifice oneself for the state is very low.

Military conscription is becoming increasingly brutal. Videos have emerged of arrests of military conscripts in public and of clashes between police and military personnel on one side, and citizens present at the scene.

PA-SY: Is there a parallel to the situation in Russia on the issue of military conscription? And is there a fear on the part of the state that pushing for a larger conscription could lead to social discontent as in Russia, where for years there was a movement of conscripts’ families, especially wives and mothers, who mobilized to support their husbands and sons?

VI: In Russia, the regime was afraid of launching a large-scale conscription effort. It has tried to find different ways to avoid large waves of military conscription. But I feel that Ukraine, especially when supplies from the United States were low, had no choice, and so it lowered the conscription age. This was accompanied by great brutality on the part of the police.

PA-SY: Are there potential social protests that could arise from this situation?

VI: There is much one can say about this. Unlike Russia, conscription has always existed in Ukraine. So, this is not a single wave of conscription, like the one Putin announced in September 2022 in response to the Ukrainian counter-offensive. The Ukrainian army obtains its soldiers mainly through conscription. Volunteers do not constitute the majority of the Ukrainian army, and their number has become negligible since 2022. All the brutal methods of mobilization are the result of a weak desire to volunteer for the army.

PA-SY: Why is it so weak?

VI: The most generous explanation for the Ukrainian state, and also the one that is repeated in some circles, is that this is simply because the United States did not supply enough weapons. This argument implies a very specific idea of ​​how the war could be won. But it is far from certain that, even if all the weapons and supplies had been delivered in 2022, a decisive victory over Russia could have been won. I won’t speculate about this. But I don’t think that there is a consensus among military experts.

The other side of the coin is that the shipment of weapons to Ukraine is conditional on the effectiveness of Ukrainian mobilization. And so, amendment of the law on conscription this year was linked to the shipment of weapons by the United States. This is confirmed by many Ukrainian politicians. The United States expected Ukraine to make conscription more effective.

Today, the most urgent issue is to reduce the conscription age. It has already been reduced from 27 to 25, and now there is strong pressure to lower it even further, to 22, or even to 18.

There’s a strong argument against this. That is the most fertile demographic cohort of the Ukrainian population, and it is also one of the smallest. In fact, if you send these young people to be massacred, the ability of the Ukrainian population to regenerate its numbers after the war will diminish even further. According to the latest UN projections for the Ukrainian population, by the end of the century it will number only 15 million, compared to 52 million in 1992, right after the disintegration of the USSR.

And this is not even the worst-case scenario. It’s based on the rather optimistic assumption that the war will end next year and that millions of refugees, especially fertile women, will return and be able to 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 conquests. And not necessarily only against imperial conquests, by the way. Take revolutionary France. After 1789, France was able to defeat the coalition of the greatest European powers until 1812, when Napoleon was defeated in Russia. For two decades, France defeated all of Europe. Such was the power of revolution. After 1917, revolutionary Russia was able to defeat the coalition of the strongest imperialist powers that all intervened because of the power of its revolution and its ability to build an effective, large, and victorious Red Army. In the Vietnamese War, the Vietnamese defeated France and the United States over a period of decades. Afghanistan defeated the USSR and the United States in a war that lasted from 1979 to 2021. Theoretically, one might think that a small nation could defeat a much larger enemy. But that requires a different social stature and politics than those of Ukraine.

All of these wars were fought by countries that had large peasant populations that could mobilize in large-scale revolutionary or guerrilla wars. In Vietnam, the demographics held up over the decades, despite the genocide that the United States committed, and even though the balance of forces was so lopsided. Such is the power of revolution.

Post-Soviet Ukraine is a very different country. Its demographic structure is very different from Vietnam’s, Afghanistan’s, and even Ukraine’s of a hundred years ago, when it was a largely peasant country with multiple revolutionary armies – the Red Army, Makhno’s anarchist army, armies of the various nationalist warlords – all of whom benefited from the demographics of the peasantry. Today’s Ukraine is a modernized urban society with a declining demographic. It’s not going to be able to wage war for decades.

And there are no revolutionary changes in today’s Ukraine. The three Ukrainian “revolutions” – 1990, 2004, and 2014 – did not create a strong revolutionary state capable of establishing an effective apparatus that could mobilize an army and the economy. The idea behind these “revolutions” was that Ukraine should integrate into the US-led world order as a kind of periphery. This type of integration would benefit only a narrow middle class, some opportunistic oligarchs, and transnational capital.

In Ukraine, the regime is still discussing a rather moderate tax increase – that after two and a half years of war. That says a lot about how much Ukrainians trust the state and about their willingness to defend that state. The question of social class was very important because the conscripts came mainly from the lower classes. These are mainly poor people who could not bribe the recruitment officers to let them go and people who could not find a way to flee the country.

PA-SY: Zaluzhnyi, head of the Ukrainian armed forces, and Kuleba, the foreign minister, were dismissed this year. Could you talk of the political struggles within the Ukrainian bourgeoisie?

VI: Zaluzhny is a potential political opponent of Zelensky. It was dangerous for Zelensky to see a popular general become a politician. This was one of Zelensky’s motives in sending him to the UK as ambassador. As for Kuleba, there was also a problem of trust.

We can analyze this as building a vertical power structure, an informal way of consolidating the elite and of governing the country using both formal institutions, such as the democratic Constitution and the Parliament, but also informal mechanisms. All Ukrainian presidents have tried to build this informal power. Zelensky’s power vertical started to be built before the invasion. But the war offered more opportunities, and his chief of staff, Andrei Yermak, is considered the second most powerful person in the country, with enormous informal power and the ability to build an effective informal structure that consolidates power around the presidential office.

The dynamics of these conflicts, that sometimes break out into public view, remain mostly hidden. They are mainly related to the results at the front and to military developments. In case of bad developments for the Ukrainian army, these conflicts would intensify, and some radical nationalists, even some oligarchs, could raise their heads, and so forth.

A lot depends on the position of the US and the EU and the strategy that Trump will choose. Zelensky has to end this war in a way that could be presented to the Ukrainian public as a victory, for example, by obtaining EU or NATO membership or some generous funding programs for Ukraine, even if it loses territory. With an outcome perceived as a defeat, Zelensky would probably not have much future.

PA-SY: What is the role of the far right in Ukraine?

VI: This topic has been widely discussed in Western media throughout the war. Some liberal media outlets try to portray the Ukrainian far right as less dangerous than the Western far right, because it is fighting on the right side of history against a Russia that is the more important enemy. The Zelensky regime has tried to appeal to these sectors of the far right by holding official ceremonies for the Azov Battalion or celebrating the birthday of Stepan Bandera, the extreme nationalist and Nazi sympathizer. It is difficult to follow from France how this dynamic is evolving as the war progresses.

PA-SY: Is the far right a small but powerful segment due to its presence in the military. Or is it gaining popularity outside of traditional sectors of the far right? Does the far right play a significant role in the Ukrainian political landscape, or is its influence being exaggerated by the media?

VI: When people in the West discuss the Ukrainian far right, I think they are using the wrong point of comparison. For example, in France, the far right, mainly the Rassemblement national, Le Pen’s party, is much less extreme than the movements that we are talking about in Ukraine. Le Pen’s party probably does not use Nazi symbols and has a more sophisticated attitude toward the Vichy collaboration during World War II. They are trying to clean themselves.

But such is not the case in Ukraine. You mentioned Stepan Bandera, who is openly glorified, and even more so the Waffen-SS, especially by members of the Azov Battalion. The degree of extremism of the Ukrainian far right is much greater than that of the West’s far right.

Recently, an international conference, “Nation Europa,” was held in Lviv, the largest city of Western Ukraine, to which groups such as Dritte Weg from Germany, CasaPound from Italy, and similar neo-Nazi groups from many European countries were invited. All major far-right organizations of Ukraine participated, including the Svoboda party and prominent members of Azov/National Corps. These Ukrainian parties, organizations, and military units are generally referred to as the “far-right,” but they have international relations with Western groups that are much more extreme and violent than the mainstream far-right parties. Incidentally, most of the Ukrainian military units that participated in this conference have ties to the Ukrainian military intelligence service, the GUR.

The ideologically sanctioned capacity for political violence of the Ukrainian far right is much greater than that of the dominant far-right parties in the West. They have much more weaponry and many paramilitary movements built around official military units that are capable of political violence. Unlike mainstream Western far-right parties seeking parliamentary status, the power of the Ukrainian far right has always rested on its ability to mobilize in the streets and to threaten violence. They have not been able to get elected, with the exception of the elections of 2012, when the far-right Svoboda party won over 10% of the vote. (But the far right was able to gain much more significant representation and to form the largest factions in many local councils in Western Ukraine.)

Their main source of power comes from their ability to mobilize outside parliament, unlike parties formed by oligarchs (big capital) or by the weak liberals. Ukrainian nationalists can draw on a political tradition that goes back to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was part of a family of fascist movements in interwar Europe. And post-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists have often drawn their inspiration directly from the OUN. This tradition has been upheld in the Ukrainian diaspora, particularly in North America. The Canadian public is only now discovering the number of Ukrainian fascists that its government welcomed after World War II. Other post-Soviet Ukrainian political currents don’t have this advantage of a preserved political tradition.

The members of the Azov battalion have today become very legitimate as war heroes. They enjoy extraordinary media attention and present themselves as an élite unit, a claim that the media uphold. Many Azov speakers have become celebrities. They have also benefited from a certain whitewashing in Western media, which before 2022 referred to them as neo-Nazis. Today, they easily forget this part of history.

And finally, we must think not only about the far right itself but also about the complicity of Ukrainian and Western elites in whitewashing the Ukrainian far right and ethno-nationalism. Not only in Ukraine but also in the West, discussing this topic today can immediately lead to ostracization. For example, Marta Havryshko, a Ukrainian historian who moved to the United States, continues to write critical articles about Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian ethno-nationalist politics, the Ukrainian far right, and she receives thousands of threats, death threats, rape threats.

PA-SY: Is Azov, in your view, the main force of the Ukrainian far right? Wasn’t it greatly weakened in the battles of Mariupol and Bakhmut? Do you think that it will still play an important role in the future, in the recomposition of the far right?

VI: On the contrary, Azov has grown, now forming two brigades – the 3rd Assault Brigade and the Azov Brigade of the National Guard. This is in addition to a special unit, the Kraken, which are subordinate to the GUR (military intelligence). Their political appeal and publicity in the media have grown considerably. Their legitimacy has also grown. So, they are not weakened, but strengthened. And contrary to popular myth, they have not become depoliticized.

PA-SY: Are you afraid that after the war, the extreme right, and in particular those that had fought at the front, will be the only force to have a sufficiently coherent ideological project for post-war Ukraine, given the absence of ideology of the neoliberal project for Ukraine and the weakness of the left?

VI: That depends entirely on the outcome of the war. And the range of possible outcomes is still very large. A nuclear war is a possible outcome, although one hopes that it is not the most likely one. In that case, everything we are discussing today will no longer matter. A lasting ceasefire is also possible, but unlikely.

The radicalization of the Ukrainian far right will depend on the stability of Zelensky’s government and the stability of the Ukrainian economy. In the event of the disintegration of state institutions and a failing economy, the nationalists will have a good chance of consolidating their power because they are a very legitimate, very well-known, and militarized political force.

PA-SY: What is the situation of the labour movement? There have been some minor strikes in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, especially in the health sector. But it is difficult to know what the real situation is. What is the situation and the capacity of the working class to organize and perhaps play a role, at least to counterbalance the rise of the extreme right in the country?

VI: The working class cannot play any role in the current situation. The labour movement in Ukraine was weak long before the war. The last really massive political strike was in 1993 among the miners of Donbass. They demanded autonomy for Donbass and closer relations with Russia, ironically. But even that strike was linked to the interests of the “red directors” of former Soviet enterprises who had a lot of power in the immediate post-Soviet years. They used the strike to obtain some concessions from the government. Eventually, the strike led to early elections and a change of government. But since then, there has been no large-scale strike.

For three decades, we have seen only small-scale strikes, usually limited to individual companies, at best to certain segments of the economy, and very rarely politicized. Moreover, it was precisely the inability to launch a political strike during the EuroMaidan of 2014 that led to the escalation of violence because that protest movement was unable to put sufficient pressure on a government that was unwilling to make concessions. This gave the radical nationalists the opportunity to promote their violent strategy of protest.

And so yes, since the current large-scale invasion, strikes are banned. The strikes that have taken place are probably informal strikes.

What will happen after the war still depends a lot on how it ends. But from what we understand, the empowerment of the labour movement would require some economic growth so that workers are not laid off. This requires a successful reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy.

In some very optimistic – but not necessarily likely – scenarios, Ukrainian soldiers returning to the Ukrainian economy could demand more from the government. That has indeed happened after some wars, particularly after World War I. But that remains speculative today. Much darker scenarios now seem more likely…

PA-SY: As concerns the situation and the positions of the Ukrainian left, at the beginning of the war, many articles and texts presented the point of view of Ukrainian left activists and explained how blind some of the Western left is for not supporting NATO arms deliveries more. In your articles, you try to present a more nuanced point of view on the war.

How have the positions of the Ukrainian left, the organized left, but also intellectuals, changed since the two years after the invasion? Is the left adopting a more critical position toward the Ukrainian government and NATO’s role in the conflict?

VI: The Ukrainian left has always been very diverse.

Ironically, the largest left party in Ukraine, the Communist Party of Ukraine, supported the Russian invasion. The Communist Party of Ukraine was a very important party… until EuroMaidan. It was the most popular party in the country in the 1990s. The Communist Party candidate won 37% of the vote in the 1999 presidential elections. Even on the eve of EuroMaidan, the Communist Party won 13% of the vote. Although its support had declined, it had significant representation in parliament and effectively supported the government of Viktor Yanukovych. After EuroMaidan, it lost its electoral stronghold in Donbass and Crimea, as these territories were cut off from Kiev. The party also suffered repression due to the government’s “decommunization” policies – the party was suspended, and in 2022, it was permanently banned, as were a number of other so-called pro-Russian parties.

Petro Simonenko, the leader of the party since 1993, fled to Belarus in March 2022. From Belarus, he supported the Russian invasion as an anti-fascist operation against the “Kiev regime.” The communist organizations in the areas occupied by Russia have merged with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and participated in the local elections organized by Russia in 2023, even entering some local councils. The same merger occurred with the soviet-type Ukrainian trade unions in the occupied areas. Such is the lion’s share of what was called the left in Ukraine.

At the same time, there were much smaller and younger left groups. They were always critical of the communists and integrated better with the democratic socialists and the liberal left in the West. They also had a very different social base than the communists – closer to the pro-Western NGO-ized “civil society” of the middle class in Ukraine. After the invasion began, they were able to communicate their position much more effectively to the West through a kind of identity politics: “We are the Ukrainian left. The stupid and arrogant Western left does not understand anything about what is happening in the country.”

Of course, this position was very problematic, to say the least, from the very beginning. For comparison, the Communist Party had 100,000 card-carrying members in 2014. The young left milieu had no more than 1,000 activists and sympathizers in the whole country, even in the best years of its development, and their numbers have been declining since then, after Euromaidan. Among that left, most supported Ukraine, many volunteered for the army, but they were not able to create a left-wing military unit comparable to the extreme right units, even on a much smaller scale. Many also participated in humanitarian initiatives.

Today, some of them are tending to revise their positions on the war, especially in response to the brutal conscription. It is really difficult to claim that the war is still some kind of “people’s war” when the majority of Ukrainians do not want to fight. The extent to which they are willing to express this revised position also depends on their fear of repression. It is difficult to speak critically of the war in the Ukrainian public sphere. That kind of criticism exists mostly in private conversations, in “friends only” Facebook accounts and so on, and is articulated only very cautiously in publications.

There is also criticism of the ethno-nationalism coming from this left environment because it has become too difficult to ignore how Ukraine has changed in two years, with the spread of discrimination against Russian speakers and the regime’s ethnic assimilation policies. For example, Russian is no longer taught in Ukrainian schools, even as an option, even in massively Russian-speaking cities like Odessa, where probably 80-90% of even ethnic Ukrainian children speak Russian with their parents. A recently introduced bill could ban speaking any Russian in schools, not only in class with teachers, but also during breaks, in private conversations of students among themselves. The bill has already been approved by the Minister of Education.

The third segment of the Ukrainian left is Marxist-Leninist, and is part of what I call the “neo-Soviet revival” that is happening in many post-Soviet countries. They are usually organized in kruzhki – literally ‘circles’. These are proto-political organizations, something more than just Marxist-Leninist reading groups. They are much more popular in Russia, where they are able to create YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. In Russia, Belarus and Central Asia, kruzhki can involve thousands of young people who have not lived a single day in the USSR, but who are critical of the social and political reality of their country and who find in orthodox Marxist Leninism instruments to deal with this reality. They exist and have even developed in Ukraine as well, despite decommunization and the rise of anti-Russian nationalism and anti-communist attitudes.

Almost from the very beginning, these groups opposed their governments and adopted a revolutionary defeatist position. One can wonder whether a social revolution is even possible, as it was a hundred years ago in Ukraine in the collapsing Russian Empire. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, these groups criticized forced conscription, called for internationalism, and did not try to legitimize the actions of the Ukrainian state. •

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a political activist in Ukraine and editor of the review Spiln’ya. He is a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.