Daria Saburova: ‘We must take an interest in the complex realities of Ukrainian society’

First published in French at Politis. Translation by Adam Novak for Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.

In a field study within volunteer organisations, published in June 2024, philosopher Daria Saburova analyses how structures of resistance have developed, three years after the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Daria Saburova conducted fieldwork in Ukraine in Kryvyi Rih, Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, which was predominantly Russian-speaking before the invasion, to understand the dynamics of resistance since February 24, 2022. Her work1, which focuses on the experiences of the population, highlights the role of gender and class in the resistance work carried out by volunteers.

The people you interviewed were mostly opposed to the Maidan uprising in 2014, which led to the removal of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. What prompted them to join the resistance in February 2022?

In 2013-14, in Maidan Square, and then in the war in Donbas, it was mainly the middle classes who mobilised as volunteers and voluntary fighters. They formed the core of this mobilisation on both the organisational and ideological levels. For them, it was a fight for an independent Ukrainian state, as well as for a European and democratic path opposed to Russian authoritarianism. The overthrow of the increasingly authoritarian pro-Russian regime was justified in their eyes.

Many of my interlocutors from Kryvyi Rih saw these events, on the contrary, as an attack on democracy by protesters and opposition parties. The war in Donbas was not their war, even though some of their colleagues in the mines and factories were already being mobilised into the Ukrainian army at that time. But on February 24, 2022, people rose up because their city, that is, their survival, their material existence and that of their community, was immediately threatened by a military invasion. It was less about a commitment to abstract values than a defence of their daily lives.

How has the role of volunteers become central to resistance against Russia since 2014?

The war in Donbas had already created more than a million internally displaced people, supported mainly by volunteers (evacuation, housing, administrative support, legal support, etc.), because the aid provided by the state was largely insufficient. In 2022, the influx of humanitarian aid was greater, but structural problems remained, and volunteering became essential for the distribution of this aid.

In my book, I explain that this situation is not only the result of an unpredictable crisis, but is also largely organised by the state (through neoliberal reforms of public services, which have accelerated since 2014) and international organisations (which prefer to cooperate with private NGOs). Work that could be carried out by public service workers is undertaken for free by volunteers. The recent cessation of USAID illustrates the devastation of the “NGO-isation” of such services: overnight, this decision by Trump deprived hundreds of programmes worldwide, including in Ukraine, of funding.

Since your first research in 2023, have you observed a demobilisation of volunteers, or a kind of weariness?

Unlike “professional” NGOs, the working-class organisations I followed rely largely on support from their community. For example, they ask neighbours to bring them ingredients to prepare meals for soldiers. Today, it is more difficult to collect donations than before. There is a certain fatigue regarding the war. But, above all, the working classes are very materially affected by the war and the government’s neoliberal policies.

For example, in some mines, wages have fallen by 70% since 2022. Management justifies these cuts by citing increased production costs and difficulties in finding market outlets due to the war. They are aided in this by martial law: miners cannot strike and accept working under any conditions to benefit from exemption from military service, as these mines have strategic enterprise status.

How is this volunteer work marked by gender and class domination?

It is clear that the world of volunteering is structured by social logics of domination and exploitation. Most of the funds allocated by international humanitarian organisations go to organisations run by middle and upper classes, while working-class volunteers have very few resources, despite carrying out the most dangerous and physical missions, including bringing materials or food to the front. To access resources, they depend on “professional” NGOs.

In the working classes, volunteering always remains unpaid work, whereas professional NGOs generally allocate part of their funds to salaries. As for gender, there are of course tasks traditionally perceived as masculine, associated with “heroic masculinity,” such as evacuating civilians from bombed areas, but most volunteer work is reproductive work that our society assigns to women: preparing meals for refugees or soldiers, providing psychological support, organising activities for children.

Most of the working-class volunteers I met were women who performed tasks very similar to those they perform in the domestic sphere or to those carried out by women in the public sector. Volunteering extends this sexual division of labour. The more the state adopts neoliberal reforms in the public sector (education, health, social services) that involve job cuts and wage reductions, the more volunteer organisations will have to take on these tasks.

In this context of neoliberal reforms, how has the relationship of these volunteers and trade unions with the state evolved?

In 2022, the support of the Ukrainian population for the state and certain institutions such as the army was enormous. Zelensky was perceived as the charismatic leader of the resistance. This does not mean that all government initiatives were supported, far from it. The position of the unions, for example, consisted of expressing disagreement with the government’s actions, particularly with modifications to the labour code, without engaging in an outright social struggle, both because martial law prohibits strikes and demonstrations, but also because workers’ material insecurity risked making any strike unpopular.

Social tensions are returning, and contestations are emerging, particularly around mobilisation...

Until early 2023, there was this strong unity behind the state, but social tensions are returning, and contestations are emerging, particularly around mobilisation. For at least a year, recruitment services have been implementing very harsh strategies, arresting people on the street and forcibly taking them to recruitment offices, where medical examination becomes a pure formality before sending new recruits to training centres.

The failure of this recruitment strategy, as well as the failure to ensure rotation for soldiers mobilised for three years, is evident when we see that the number of deserters in the Ukrainian army amounts to at least 100,000 people. But this doesn’t mean that people have massively abandoned the cause of resistance: people who avoid military enlistment often support the army from the rear.

In your opinion, what obstacles do we have in France that prevent us from properly understanding what is happening in Ukraine?

Beyond the attention paid to diplomacy and events on the front, we must take an interest in what is happening concretely in society. In an increasingly polarised political field on the Ukrainian question, we must have the courage to stay in touch with reality. Regarding military mobilisation, for example, some try to minimise the violence done to Ukrainian men because they fear that denouncing recruitment practices will undermine support for Ukrainian resistance.

Conversely, others will emphasise these acts of violence to make us believe that Ukrainians no longer want to resist, or that they would accept any conditions for a ceasefire, however fragile it might be. The reality is much more complex. We must be ready to see contradictions for what they are, to consider the fine details of people’s situations instead of superficially clinging to facts that suit us to prove a certain political point.

In France, we have read many articles about Ukrainians who stopped speaking Russian and learned Ukrainian. This is not necessarily a practice that you found among your interlocutors from Kryvyi Rih who opposed the Russian invasion. What resistance exists to this new norm?

Ukraine is a multilingual country. The question that interests me is whether this multilingualism can still exist in the conditions of war and even after the war. To sketch out answers, I turned to these working classes in cities known as Russian-speaking, such as Kryvyi Rih, to understand what they think of these processes, and what their concrete linguistic practices are. Whereas in Kyiv, in the middle and upper classes, people have embraced this idea of unifying the country around the Ukrainian language, in Kryvyi Rih, I observed a form of resistance to the new monolinguistic norm.

It is not a public and organised resistance; it is more about individual sabotage strategies, which involve the distinction between “public text” and “hidden text,” to speak like James C. Scott. For example, people will express themselves in Ukrainian on social networks and speak Russian in private spaces. In interviews, most of my interlocutors defend their right to continue speaking the language they want in private spaces.

References to the history of the Second World War are constant in the Russian narrative to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Among the people you met in Kryvyi Rih, most of whom have family in Russia, what is their relationship to this history?

There is a recurring reference to the Second World War in official Russian rhetoric: the Russian invasion of Ukraine would be a repetition of this struggle against fascists, since Putin constantly describes the Ukrainian government as Nazi. In response to this, intellectual and political elites have adopted the path of “decommunisation” of the country, which aims to rid the public space and national memory discourses of references to the USSR. This is problematic because Ukraine, as a Soviet republic, played an immense role in the Soviet Union’s resistance against the fascist invasion. Among my interlocutors in Kryvyi Rih, however, it is very clearly the memory of Soviet resistance to fascism that is mobilised today to give momentum to the resistance against the Russian invasion.

Finally, why should movements that claim to be emancipatory, such as left-wing parties or feminist movements, be concerned about what is happening in Ukraine?

The military and economic crushing of Ukraine jointly prepared by Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia reveals the capacity of the far right to forge tactical alliances beyond the geopolitical divisions that provided the left with essential points of reference. We must recognise that Ukraine and Palestine now find themselves at the heart of a major reconfiguration of the world order by reactionary regimes, which sweep aside both international law and the political and social advances inherited from anti-fascist resistance, labour, feminist and anti-colonial movements of the second half of the 20th century.

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  Workers of Resistance: Ukrainian Working Classes Facing War, Daria Saburova, Éditions du Croquant, 2024.