A delegation of Alliance for Workers’ Liberty members visited Lviv and Kyiv in late May. This followed on from earlier delegations in 2022 and 2023, and participation in NEU and PCS/EPSU delegations in 2024 and 2025.
We met with trade unionist, socialist and feminist activists in both cities and made contact with more whom we hope to meet in future. As bad luck would have it, a delegation from the German Ukrainische Linke Initiative was leaving Lviv just as we were arriving.
In Lviv, we spoke to the Centre for Urban History of East Central Europe, and INDEX (Institute for Documentation and Exchange); especially on the work of the latter on telling the Ukrainian experience of war to a wider audience, including through art. Dr Sacha Dovzhyk, Director of INDEX, spoke about the programmes and scholarships that they run. We were shown a VR experience made by the Media Initiative for Human Rights, demonstrating the conditions that Ukrainian detainees (including illegally abducted civilians from the occupied territories and prisoners of war) have been subjected to while in Russian captivity. The environment had been meticulously recreated from the drawings of Serhiy Ofitserov, who had been abducted from Kherson, and still has not been released.
In Kyiv, we met with representatives from the KVPU trade union federation, including Olesia Briazgunova, International Secretary.
There are two trade union federations in Ukraine. One is the FPU, which draws its existence from the pre-1991 state “trade unionism” of the Soviet Union, but is still a genuine and independent trade union federation, and the other is the KVPU, which is was founded after independence to aspire to a modern, Western European concept of trade unionism, although both federations do not yet meet the standards of democratic structures that we would want, and much important and vital trade union work is done by trade union staff rather than by rank-and-file members. This won’t be unfamiliar to members of UK unions.
Themes in the meeting with the KVPU focussed on the ongoing struggle for the voice of trade unions, as the organised representatives of workers, to secure a higher profile and influence in both the workplace and the political sphere, where conflict over a proposed new Labour Code (which we have written about previously) continues apace – as well as newer proposals for reactionary changes to the Civil Code that among other things would weaken LGBTQ+ rights, and which has sparked several protests.
It was clear the KVPU (and FPU) face challenges not on the current agenda of Western European trade unions Most obviously, the impact of the war. But other challenges they face are more familiar: a government with a pro-privatisation agenda, and international aid being made conditional on implementation of neo-liberal policies.
This underlines the need for stronger links to be built between Western European trade unions and their Ukrainian counterparts, not just in the form of material support but also in terms of cross-border campaigning to push back against the international capitalist drive for privatisation and cutbacks in the welfare state.
Privatisation
One of the KVPU’s affiliates is the Free Trade Union of Medical Workers of Ukraine. The delegation met with Oleg Panasenko, the union’s President, and will publish a full interview in a future issue ofSolidarity. Oleg raised the enormous negative impact of the government’s pro-privatisation agenda on Ukrainian health services, such as low pay; cuts in jobs and working hours; cuts in the funding of public health institutions; cuts in the provision of public medical care and a growing but deeply inequitable reliance on private medical businesses; cuts in the availability of services in the form of “mergers” of medical institutions; and falling levels of staffing as healthcare workers leave for other jobs in Ukraine or abroad. Oleg made the point that the government was failing to provide or plan to provide the socially necessary amount of provision, and that despite much of Ukraine’s pre-war population having had to flee abroad, if the current level of provision was inadequate for even 30 million people then it would be completely deficient to care for 45 million – and yet the government’s plan would only decrease, not increase, this capacity.
The union places particular emphasis on the World Health Assembly Pandemic Agreement of 2025, which defines state responsibilities in the provision of healthcare, as a form of “leverage” to try to get the Ukrainian government to implement those standards.
That is consistent with the overall KVPU approach of highlighting EU Directives and international labour standards as a means of “leverage” in working to improve workers’ rights in Ukraine. Many Ukrainian unions want Ukraine in the EU.
The delegation had meetings with members of Sotsialny Rukh (SR, Social Movement) in Lviv and Kyiv. SR is a small socialist organisation trying to argue for socialist politics in adverse conditions. Its membership, including in its branches in Lviv, Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih, as well as clusters of individual members in other Ukrainian cities like Odessa, has been dispersed as a result of many members being drafted into the army, or moving abroad, which has especially impacted on its student work. SR has made efforts to coordinate the work of its members abroad (such as in Die Linke).
SR has also attempted to raise political demands among soldiers at the front. But dissatisfaction with conditions in the army results in individual desertions, not in being won over to the idea of collective organisation.
Even so, SR continues to campaign in workplaces and trade unions (one SR member the delegation met was Oksana Slobodyana of the grassroots medical workers organisation “Medical Movement – Be Like We Are”), and around local issues, such as proposed Metro fare increases in Kyiv, and the lack of adequate air-raid facilities in some kindergartens.
SR also publishes useful materials pushing back against the misrepresentation of the nature of Russia’s war against Ukraine that has been relentlessly promoted by the likes of the Stop the War Coalition (STW) – although, after more than four years since the full-scale invasion and twelve years of war since the Maidan Revolution and the subsequent Russian-backed separatist insurgency, one wonders whether those people will ever learn.
The delegation also met with Katarina and Oleksandr of the Social Democratic Platform (SD Platform), another political organisation, who place a heavy emphasis on providing members with an interactive political education and training, and avoiding top-down methods of organisation. In that sense, it seems to have much in common with Standing Together in Israel.
The SDP distinguishes itself politically from pro-market liberalism and various right-wing political currents in Ukraine. Above all, it distinguishes itself from the tradition that “political parties” have taken in Ukraine: non-ideological, devoid of inner-party democracy (or actual members), and merely the tools of oligarchs to promote their own interests.
SD Platform members acknowledged that socialism was a toxic term in Ukraine – due to the country’s experiences of “Communist” rule, and so too was social democracy – due to misplaced associations with (Russia-supporting, Putin’s personal friend) Medvedchuk’s now defunct Ukrainian Choice party. But, they argued, there has been a historical social-democratic tradition in Ukraine which they believe they can now revive and further develop.
Civil Code
Campaigning against a proposed new Civil Code was the main theme of the meeting with Olha Yashchenko from Feminist Workshop. Some of the worst elements of the proposed Code; such as legalisation of marriage for fourteen-year olds if they are pregnant, and a ban on divorce during pregnancy and the first year after giving birth, have been dropped under the pressure of popular campaigning.
Even so, the new draft Code – initiated and being driven by Ruslan Stefanchuk, a member of the ruling Servant of the People party (Zelenskyy’s party) and chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) – is still in serious need of further amendment. It seeks to enshrine in law, for example, the concept of ‘good morals’. No-one can explain what that actually means, making it open to abuse at the expense of women’s safety, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. “Accountability for violence, not vague good morals”, is what Feminist Workshop advocates as an alternative. Other issues discussed with Olha included abortion rights in Ukraine (good on paper, but not in practice) and the impact of the war on the work of Feminist Workshop, which despite the obvious challenges has given the organisation a new lease of life and attracted a new layer of activists.
A week in Ukraine – or any other country – does not allow anyone to speak with any authority about its politics and political conflicts. But what was certainly obvious was just how far removed from reality is the depiction of Ukraine promoted by the STW and its counterparts in other countries.
Trade unions are not banned. We met with their members. Socialist organisations have not been banned. We met with their members as well. Street protests have not been banned, as evidenced by protests organised by Feminist Workshop. And democracy has not been stifled – civil organisations, for example, are particularly active in Ukraine.
Nor was there any sign of what the German politician Sahra Wagenknecht (politics similar to those of STW – only worse) recently called “the explicit Nazi-cult of the Ukrainian government” to justify her demand of “not a penny more for Ukraine”.
The contents of the exhibition “The Ukrainian-Jewish Century” at the Babyn Yar site – and the staging itself of the exhibition – indicate that the situation of Jews in Ukraine is not what Putin and some in Western Europe, who call Ukraine Nazi or near-Nazi, suggest. While there is a discussion to be had over some of the early-20th century figures that the Ukrainian government commemorates due to their association with the Ukrainian independence movement (Melnyk being a recent example), this is hardly different from the British state’s commemoration of figures like Churchill whom we, or the Ukrainian left, would not endorse either.
A delegation by a small British socialist organisation is not a substitute for delegations by British trade unions for the purpose of laying the groundwork for practical working-class solidarity, and we will continue to participate and push for these to occur in addition to future delegations we are planning ourselves – we need to make more solidarity with our Ukrainian friends and comrades, build better links between the UK and Ukrainian labour movements, and increase understanding that support will need to continue well after the war to ensure a just and pro-worker reconstruction, rather than any imposed deals, carve-ups, neoliberal privatisations or watering-down of rights.
It is all very well for trade union General Secretaries to put their names to a statement of solidarity with Ukraine. But some of them have yet to actually do anything in terms of active solidarity. Unite the Union, for example, adopted policy at its 2025 conference to organise national and regional delegations to Ukraine, organise speaking tours by Ukrainian trade unionists, and promote the twinning of Unite branches with Ukrainian union branches. Nearly a year later, the policy remains a dead letter. That needs to change. And change is needed in other unions as well. We will do everything we can to make that happen.
From Workers’ Liberty. Read the original here.
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- The Red-Brown “Zombie Plague” – Part 3, by Daphne Lawless – May 2018
- Lenin Versus Democracy: A Reply to Critics of ‘Goodbye to Lenin and Leninism’, by Dan La Botz – 23 May 2026
- Five Years of Coup: Burmese Anarchists within and without the Revolution (Htet Khine Soe interviewed by Ban Ge, CrimethInc.) – 10 February 2026
- Beauty and Cosmopolitan Whiteness, by L. Ayu Saraswati – 3 May 2021
- What is Yurt Jurt? – 29 October 2024