Growing doubt in Ukraine
Hélène Richard, Le Monde diplomatique, 31/10/23
We’ve lost too many people to make concessions’ The human cost of the war in Ukraine has been immense, but some Ukrainians are paying a higher price than others. Soldiers fighting for fair pay, and veterans are struggling to get medical care.
The city of Kryvyi Rih is less drab than its industrial heritage might suggest. It’s old-fashioned but well-maintained, has a fine neoclassical theatre, and retains a certain Soviet charm. In late August, people were enjoying ice creams by the planetarium in Yuri Gagarin Park, there were bouncy castles for children, and old women were selling plastic cups of home-grown raspberries. The sound of an air-raid siren barely disturbed the peace. The Russians are only 100km away, across the Dnieper river, but after more than 18 months of fighting nobody looks up at the sky any more.
Yet only the day before, a missile had damaged two dozen houses in a neighbourhood close to the city centre; on 31 July six civilians had been killed in a missile attack; and on 13 June a strike on a nine-storey block of flats had killed 11 people, prompting a visit by President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose hometown this is.
Despite the apparent normality of daily life, the war has hit Kryvyi Rih hard. Its economy centres on the export of iron ore and steel (French engineer and banker Paulin Talabot financed the first blast furnaces here in 1880), and the Russian blockade of Black Sea ports has forced local companies to resort to (more costly) overland routes to Europe, abandoning their traditional markets in the Middle East and North Africa. Power cuts, frequent since the Russians started targeting energy infrastructure, are also disrupting the economy.
According to the directors of steelmaker ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih (AMKR, the town’s biggest employer, which pre-war provided 26,000 jobs), ‘production is running at only 20-25% of capacity’ (1). As of late summer this year, just 12,000 employees still had full-time jobs; most had been put on short-time or laid off. By 18 August, 14% of the workforce had been called up and 106 had been killed in the fighting.
Employees of big companies like AMKR are more likely to be called up than the rest of the population. Because people don’t always live at their registered address, ‘army recruitment centres find it easier to contact them via their employers,’ said Oleksandr Motuz, an employment lawyer who works with the local branch of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU), the country’s second-largest union grouping. ‘They send call-up papers to their workplace. If a worker fails to report, the recruitment centre can put pressure on him via his employer. It happened to a guy at Arcelor. Every morning, when he got to work, they’d ask if he’d been to the recruitment centre yet. Eventually, he quit.’ AMKR at first wouldn’t answer questions on how it worked with the military, and later denied it was helping directly with recruitment, notably delivering call-up papers to employees. Motuz said, ‘Cases where busloads of miners were stopped right outside mines belonging to DTEK Pavlogradugol have been reported to the KVPU leadership. Even the company’s directors have complained.’
Even so, employers such as AMKR can ‘reserve’ managerial staff or workers whose skills are in short supply (capped at 50% of their workforce), and prevent them being called up, but the scope for this is diminishing as army recruitment needs grow.‘I queued but they didn’t take me’
Viktor (2) was called up in mid-August. As a foreman at AMKR, he was until then ‘reserved’. He told me that only employees over 35 now qualify for exemption. ‘I’m 33, dammit, the same age as Christ! Maybe if I can just make it to 34 I can hope to die an old man.’ His union gave him a bed roll, sleeping bag and backpack to take to the front; they were on the back seat of his car, still in their original packaging.
The day after the invasion, Viktor went to a recruitment centre voluntarily. ‘I queued for two days. They didn’t take me, but said they’d call.’ Eighteen months later, his enthusiasm has waned. ‘Five of my friends went to fight in 2014-15. They were all killed.’ Now it’s his turn. Because of an old hand injury sustained in a brawl he could have been exempted, but the army doctor wanted $4,000 dollars for a disability certificate. ‘People talk a lot about bribery. It’s kept me out of prison in the past, but I decided that if I was called up, I’d go.’
The queues outside the recruitment centres are gone. Everyone in Ukraine now knows what army life is like. Disabled ex-soldiers are a common sight and families are in regular contact with loved ones at the front. They get a continuous stream of photos and videos on their phones, apparently almost uncensored. Dacha, who teaches English in Kryvyi Rih, told me that after a week without news of her son (aged 31) she couldn’t sleep. She showed me a clip he had filmed in a ruined block of flats. In the video, he says it’s a fine place to be celebrating his birthday. In mid-August, US officials told the New York Times (on condition of anonymity) that 70,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and up to 120,000 wounded (3).
Protests are growing, both on social media and, more surprisingly, in the courts, and Motuz has more and more soldiers as clients. Much of the litigation concerns pay: last July the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that cancels the requirement for employers to continue paying the salaries of employees who have been called up. Soldiers don’t like risking their lives in the trenches for less than they were getting in civilian jobs, especially skilled workers who were making good money. The army pay of 20,000 hryvnias (around $550) per month isn’t always enough to pay off a loan or cover alimony.
Resentment among the troops
‘Volunteers feel conned,’ Motuz said. ‘Out of more than a hundred pay claim cases, we took on three pro bono, hoping to establish a precedent, invoking the principle of non-retroactivity of laws. But in early August the Supreme Court dismissed a similar case.’ Resentment is growing among troops, who are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice themselves for their country while life for those back home seems to be returning to normal.
Dacha said, ‘At the start of the war Ukraine was united, but today it’s divided between those who have a loved one at the front and those who don’t. When I see young people posting holiday snaps on social media, I get really angry. My son joined up on 24 February 2022. Our boys are exhausted. The government promised us a law that would demobilise them after 18 months, but we’re still waiting.’
While most people are focused on the war and their own economic survival, the government is quietly dismantling labour rights. Last July it introduced a law that suspends collective bargaining and allows employers to change working conditions at will. Employees who refuse to comply can now be fired without the normal two months’ notice, and trade unions can no longer veto dismissals.
Meanwhile, law 5371, ratified by Zelensky in August 2022, creates a special legal framework for small and medium enterprises (which employ 70% of Ukraine’s workforce). In firms with up to 250 employees, working conditions (salary, vacations, working hours etc) are no longer covered by the national labour code but must be negotiated by individual employees with their bosses. All restrictions on dismissals have been lifted, except the requirement to provide severance pay equivalent to 50% of one to five months’ statutory minimum wage, depending on duration of employment.
Another law has introduced zero-hour contracts. Motuz said, ‘It makes concessions to employers without specifying how they are linked to the impact of the war on the economy. The same rules apply in Zaporizhzhia oblast, where the fighting is fiercest, and in Transcarpathia, which is completely unaffected. That’s a clear sign of our government’s intentions.’‘Decommunising’ welfare
Pressure from trade unions and their international supporters (4) and protests from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) have forced the government to limit the application of these laws to the duration of the war. ‘But,’ Motuz said, ‘the end of the war means the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. And that won’t happen tomorrow. These laws are going to be around for a long time.’
The war has also provided new justifications for reforms already in the pipeline, such as liquidating Ukraine’s social insurance fund and transferring its functions and assets to the state pension fund. Halyna Tretiakova, the government MP who first proposed this reform, claims it is ‘necessary if the economy is not to be bled dry by the war’. This decision is clearly the culmination of a deliberately induced crisis in social insurance funding since 2016: the proportion of social insurance contributions allocated to the fund has fallen from 14% to 9%. (Total contributions have, moreover, fallen by half in the last few years.) Tretiakova was already calling for the ‘decommunisation’ of the social insurance system, to open up the market to private insurers, back in January 2020 (5).
Meanwhile, the public prosecutor’s office is attacking Ukraine’s leading trade union group, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU). Although this body claimed to have nine million members before the war, it was in no way a political opposition force, discouraging strikes in companies where it was represented, pursuing a non-confrontational social dialogue and collaborating with major corporations on social projects. However, even this mild approach is too much for the government, and the public prosecutor seems about to win a longstanding legal battle in the midst of a war.
The dispute dates back to the 1990s when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet trade union confederation declared itself independent and set up two for-profit limited companies; these registered property rights to the sanatoriums, hotels and leisure complexes that it had until then managed. From 1997 successive governments, through the public prosecutor’s office, tried to disband these companies and win legal recognition of state ownership of these assets. They largely failed and the FPU won a case in the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that the state had not demonstrated the benefit to the public of renationalising the assets (which it had in any case planned to re-privatise immediately) (6).
The Ukrainian government is now pursuing its campaign in the criminal courts. FPU deputy chairman Volodymyr Saenko has been in provisional detention for the last ten months on charges of ‘embezzlement on an especially large scale or by an organised group’. Around 40 of the FPU’s 50 establishments have been sequestered, including the iconic Trade Unions Building on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), which was burned down during the 2014 revolution. Having lost its properties in Crimea after the peninsula was annexed by Russia, the FPU has effectively been cut off from the assets that generated 50-60% of its funds before the pandemic. Meanwhile, members (and membership fees) have decreased as a result of unemployment and the economic crisis, and bankruptcy threatens.
‘Slaves of the state’
The FPU is all the more astonished by the government’s actions since it has opened up its establishments to Ukrainians displaced by the fighting – more than 20,000 people, including 3,000 children, in the first nine months of the war according to an internal document. Despite its depleted finances, the FPU still houses some of these people. It also fears the court proceedings will put an end to rehabilitation programmes it has set up for the war-wounded.
Dmytro Dovhanenko, head of the FPU’s asset management department, says, ‘This policy is ridiculous in wartime. It will permanently reduce our ability to oppose further neoliberal reforms the government may try to introduce’ – just when Ukrainians’ healthcare and social security needs are growing rapidly.
In Khmelnytskyi, a medium-sized town around 300km west of Kyiv, I found myself sharing a BlaBlaCar ride. With Ukraine’s civilian airports out of action, its sea ports blockaded and its railways crowded with goods, the most widely used forms of transport are now carpooling and buses.
Valentin, 24, was wounded at the front either in a drone attack or by one of the antipersonnel mines the Russians scatter using rockets – he’s not sure which. The explosion killed one man in his unit and wounded seven. Valentin had extensive surgery to save his legs but he still needs crutches. He had to pay part of his medical costs himself. Like many former soldiers he has hired a lawyer to help him apply for state aid. He is still trying to get recognised as a category three invalid, which would entitle him to a better pension, and also hopes to get the $2,500 bonus the state promised for ‘service in an active combat area’. He’s currently in a rehabilitation centre in Kyiv.
Evgeny Mikhailiuk, from Kryvyi Rih, has similar problems but can’t afford a lawyer. Instead, he has posted a video on Facebook complaining about how he’s been treated and demanding to be demobilised. He suffers from epilepsy – following a concussion incurred in 2014 when fighting the separatist rebels in the Donbass – which returned when he was at the front this time. Following inappropriate treatment from an army doctor, he spent a week in a coma. He then overstayed a period of home leave and had to rush back to the field hospital to avoid five years in prison for desertion. ‘I thought I was fighting the spectre of the Soviet Union, but now I realise I’m still living there,’ he told me. ‘There are lots of us, stuck here with no rights. We’ve become slaves of the state.’
Zelensky cracks down
For domestic and international consumption, Zelensky makes a show of fighting corruption and privilege. These were already a problem before the war, but the conflict has made people less tolerant. And foreign lenders, whose countries are funding half this year’s budget (7), want to see results. On 11 August Zelensky announced on Telegram that he was sacking the heads of all regional army recruitment centres on suspicion of ‘helping citizens to obtain disability certificates or be temporarily recognised as unfit … so as to delay or avoid military service’. On 5 September defence minister Oleksii Reznikov resigned. Separately, three days earlier, oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi had been placed in provisional detention on charges of fraud and money-laundering; during the 2019 presidential campaign, Ukrainian and foreign media had referred to him as Zelensky’s sponsor.
Relations between the state and people of Ukraine are a mix of cooperation and mistrust. The army depends heavily on donations by individuals to equip its troops – from first-aid kits to body armour, helmets and drones. Trade unions, volunteer associations and even ad hoc WhatsApp groups collect money and equipment, sometimes on a very large scale. The Victory Drones association has trained 28,000 people to fly drones (compared to 10,000 trained by the army) and volunteers deliver them to the front (8).
Yuriy Lutsyuk, a construction business owner from Khmelnytskyi, has paid for several thousand euros’ worth of equipment, including assault rifle sights, night vision binoculars and kits to convert civilian jeeps into military transport vehicles. ‘We must take back every last bit of territory, including Crimea. That should be the easiest to achieve: all we have to do is cut the land bridge and prevent supplies getting through,’ he said. Yet he admitted forbidding his son to join up and trying to dissuade business friends from doing so. ‘I asked them, “If you die, who will keep the country running or rebuild the economy?” It’s the most patriotic people who are dying. At this rate, there won’t be anyone left to change the system.’
The authorities don’t trust Lutsyuk. When I first met him, in 2014 outside a recruitment centre in Khmelnytskyi, he was accompanied by a couple of dozen young men in paramilitary uniform (9). With former president Viktor Yanukovych recently ousted, and the army sending men to fight the pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass, he was putting on a show of strength by touring the city’s institutions – to ‘see the revolution through’. When the Russians invaded last February, he tried to get back in on the action, and recruited some 300 volunteers. But after four and a half hours of questioning with a lie detector, the SBU (Ukraine’s security service) rejected his application to register his group as a territorial defence battalion.
Armed civilian groups like Lutsyuk’s, intended to support the regular army, were being formed in cities across Ukraine in preparation for urban warfare. ‘They accused me of wanting to seize power in Khmelnytskyi,’ he told me. ‘Nothing’s changed since 2014. If anything it’s worse: we now have an online dictatorship!’
In Zelensky’s vision, the future Ukraine will be free of Russian invaders and protectionist legislation, and will be run online. Like 19 million Ukrainians, Lutsyuk has the new Diia (‘action’, also the Ukrainian acronym for ‘The State and Me’) app on his phone. Launched in 2020 by the new Ministry of Digital Transformation, it’s the pride of the Ukrainian government, allowing all identity and administrative documents to be managed centrally: passports, driving licences, tax assessments, fines etc. In just a few clicks, users can register a business, apply for aid to rebuild their home if it’s been damaged by enemy fire, report sightings of Russian troops or apply for internally displaced person status.
Diia allows access to 120 public services, which the government claims will make it possible to cut civil service jobs by 10%. It was developed in partnership with the US Agency for International and Development (USAID), which provided $8.5m of finance; Google and Visa also gave grants. Washington touts it as a model to be exported and Zelensky sees it as a prototype for the startup nation he wants Ukraine to become (10). The Estonian state, widely regarded as a leader in digitisation, wants to develop its own Diia-style app. ‘You can even see court rulings online,’ Lutsyuk grumbled, scrolling through several cases against him – all politically motivated, he claimed.Not ready for concessions
Civilian support for the army has been declining because of the economic crisis and duration of the conflict, and pessimism regarding the chances of winning the war has been growing. ‘My friends at the front say we don’t have enough men or munitions,’ said Nazar Baranov, who runs a hotel in Khmelnytskyi. In the lobby were three multi-packs of energy drinks waiting to be collected by a convoy that takes donations to the front twice a month. ‘Demographically, Russia has the advantage. Everyone’s talking about the American F16s, but they won’t change the course of the war.’ So should Ukraine be negotiating with Russia? He shook his head. ‘We’ve lost too many people to make concessions. All we can do now is hope Putin dies.’
A recent survey found that 30% of Ukrainians want the war to end ‘as soon as possible’ and ‘at any price’ (11). Yet when asked what concessions their country might make, most rejected all the suggested options: of the 30%, only 23% supported ending hostilities while part of Ukraine’s territory remained occupied; just 13% would envisage any territorial concessions; and 28% and 27% respectively would abandon ambitions to join NATO or the EU. Overall, just 8% were prepared to make some kind of territorial or political concession.
Despite the war, Ukrainians still have considerable freedom of speech. Police ID checks are rare. People are happy to talk to foreign journalists, even to criticise the government, the incompetence of army commanders and corruption. Yet Ukraine is no longer an ordinary democracy. Every television channel broadcasts the same never-ending, mind-numbing news programmes, which are mainly about Ukrainian advances in the field, new equipment received by the army, and Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure.
The penal code has a new article, no 436-2, covering the ‘justification, recognition as lawful [or] denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine’ and the ‘glorification of persons [carrying it] out’. Alongside collaboration, expressing the wrong political views is now an offence. According to the prosecutor general’s website, 2,471 instances have been filed since the war started.
Volodymyr Chemerys knows all about this. Though he is a former Soviet dissident and campaigner for Ukrainian independence, in the past few years he has preached ‘appeasement’ (12) and condemned the culture of impunity surrounding neo-Nazi groups who beat up and murder people. When the invasion started, he called for the Ukrainian army to surrender and the government to begin peace talks with Russia immediately. Last July the SBU carried out a forcible search of his home, during which he suffered several broken ribs. The court case against him under article 436-2 is still in progress.
‘We’re living under a totalitarian regime,’ he told me. ‘You can criticise Zelensky, of course, but opposing the strategic direction the country is taking is now unthinkable.’ He estimates the number of political prisoners in Ukraine at ‘a few dozen’.
(1) Statistics in this paragraph are from written responses provided by the company’s directors, 10 August 2022.
(2) Sources who asked for anonymity are indicated by an (altered) forename only.
(3) ‘Troop deaths and injuries in Ukraine war near 500,000, US officials say’, The New York Times, 18 August 2023.
(4) ‘ITUC & ETUC letter to the European Commission and European Council regarding Law 5371 on workers’ rights in Ukraine’, 24 August 2022, available on the European Trade Union Confederation website, www.etuc.org/.
(5) Serhiy Guz, ‘Ukraine’s latest economic reforms threaten workers’ social benefits’, openDemocracy, 12 October 2022, www.opendemocracy.net/.
(6) ‘Case of Batkivska Turbota Foundation v Ukraine (application no 5876/15)’, 9 October 2018, hudoc.echr.coe.int/.
(7) See Ben Aris, ‘Ukraine releases 2024 budget plan, more spending on military, but raising enough funding will be tough’, Bne Intellinews, Berlin, 28 September 2023/.
(8) According to Sarah-Masha Fainberg of Tel Aviv University’s Elrom Center, interview with France Info, 14 September 2023.
(9) See Hélène Richard, ‘Ukraine’s uncertain future’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2014.
(10) ‘US will help to export Ukrainian Diia app to other countries’, AIN, Kyiv, 19 January 2023, ain.capital/.
(11) ‘Analytical report based on the results of War, Peace, Victory and Future Survey’, Opora, Kyiv, 27 July 2023.
(12) Notably by calling for the Ukrainian government to apply the Minsk accords. See Igor Delanoë, ‘Ukraine and Russia, still frozen’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2020.