The racial and class question

Virtually forgotten due to the discourse of Ukrainian unity and the general lack of interest in analyzing the nuances of events, the racial and class question is going virtually unnoticed in this war. If the Donbass conflict had a proletarian aspect that the press mocked in the first weeks of the DPR due to those Soviet-looking press conferences of workers and academics, in the current context, there have not even been any such comments. Presented as a war of national liberation, no aspect other than nationalism has deserved much mention in the Western press or in academia. Volodymyr Ishchenko and Ilya Matveev, who have sought to study the class aspect in the outbreak of the conflict, are the rare exception. To Ischenko’s surprise, RFE/RL published an article last September that dealt, albeit in generalities and without great depth, with the increase in inequality that war implies, an aspect that is, on the other hand, perfectly evident. “As the war drags on, the gaps in Ukrainian society are widening,” the American media headlines.

“An estimated 7.3 million Ukrainians are moderately or severely food insecure, including 1.2 million children and 2 million elderly people, according to a United Nations analysis. There is a high concentration of food-insecure people in the capital, but most of those affected are close to the front, where about a quarter of the population faces severe or extreme food shortages, according to the organization,” explains the article, which prefers to focus on the geographical aspect and not dwell on the inequality and impoverishment that had already begun before the Russian invasion in 2022. There is also no mention of the situation on the other side of the front, where the war has disproportionately affected the elderly population, with greater mobility difficulties and fewer options to leave areas close to the front. This situation has only begun to worry Ukraine when it has been its elderly who have been harmed, while it has maintained restrictions on crossing the front, long queues in which several people died and non-payment of pensions in Donbass for years in the face of the manifest lack of interest in the lives of this population that is still technically Ukrainian.

The numbers of food insecurity and extreme poverty, “in contrast with the bustling city center of Kyiv, with its restaurants crowded, their sleek cars and street fashion. The Ukrainian economy has shown signs of recovery from the deep recession that followed the full-scale invasion of February 2022. After falling 30% in 2022, the real GDP grew at a 5.7% in 2023 and is expected to reach 3.5% this year. After shooting up by over 26% in 2023, inflation declined to increase to between 4% and 5% per annum. The inflation of food prices fell from more than 37% by the end of 2022 to about 5% today.” However, that growth based on the international subsidies is not reflected in a significant part of the population, particularly in the working class, “especially affected by the loss of employment due to the destruction of the industrial infrastructure”. What the article fails to mention is that this destruction precedes the intervention of the Russian military and that the working class had already fallen in situations of impoverishment. “Although there is no official data available, the members of this class are also more likely to be called up,” admits the article regarding the data provided by Olena Simonchuk, a sociologist at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

With no interest in any industry other than the military, neither the Ukrainian government nor academic research is considering rebuilding the industrial fabric lost in the last decade of war and in the three preceding ones since the capitalist restoration left the sector in a position of less interest than the development of agriculture. The loss of industrial employment in one of the most developed Soviet republics marked the beginning of the increase in inequality and the impoverishment of the working class, which in places like Donetsk and Lugansk rose up against the possibility of joining the European Union, aware that such incorporation tends to go hand in hand with conversion that is, the closure and outsourcing of industry. None of this is relevant to Simonchuk, who, on the contrary, sees “positive tendencies” of unity in issues that had historically been controversial, such as joining NATO and the EU. Even in analyses that claim to focus on social gaps, the discourse of national unity ends up being a priority.

Despite the repetitive rhetoric of the Ukrainian authorities and media, which has succeeded in making the idea prevail in the Western media as well, unity has always been relative. Aside from the reality of the secession of several regions long before the Russian invasion in 2022 and the thousands of Ukrainian citizens who have fought and are fighting against the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the front lines, social divides are evident both in racial and class terms.

It is no coincidence that minorities who were already discriminated against before the war are suffering disproportionately from the effects of the conflict. “The war in Ukraine has torn apart the Roma community,” writes The Economist in one of the few articles that mention this demonized population. “At least half of its pre-war population has fled abroad. That is a vastly higher proportion of refugees than among Ukrainians at large.” Eleonora Kulchar, director of a hostel for Roma refugees in Uzhhorod, in the west of the country, says that many have left “in search of a new and better life, because here they were discriminated against and poor,” adds the British newspaper without specifying the type and form of discrimination that the community suffered before the war.

The years leading up to the Russian invasion saw a rise in racist incidents targeting different minorities, such as people from the Caucasus or Central Asia, with a particular focus on the Roma population. Threatening raids on the capital’s markets were publicised both by the authorities and by far-right organisations such as C14, Sich, which participated in them alongside state security forces. In 2018, there were four violent incidents in which paramilitary groups, specifically C14 and Azov, appeared to be in a race to see which of the two would attack vulnerable Roma settlements the most vigorously. After several villages were burned and one person was killed, the bad press from these openly racist attacks that sought to expel a population that, from their supremacist viewpoint, they did not consider their own, the bad press from the far-right attacks forced the trend to stop. Now that a significant part of them have left the country, “few expect them to return one day. Many of them do not have a passport or ID, so they may never be able to do so, as they cannot prove that they are Ukrainian citizens.”

“Many Roma have fought and died to defend Ukraine. According to a recent report from the Foundation of Roma to Europe, a pressure group, supported by the EU and the Open Society Foundation of George Soros, a quarter of the surveyed families had relatives in the army,” explains The Economist. When providing cannon fodder for the war, the racial differences are not the obstacle itself accounted for other aspects. “The war has disrupted the lives of millions of people, but the Roma population in the vast majority of them poor and with little or no training, has been the most affected. Many lack proper documents to deal with the authorities, and access to social assistance. According to the report, one-third of the respondents stated that their family economy was in crisis.”

The difficulties in accessing the meager assistance that the government provides to families are compounded by social rejection, which has not disappeared despite the war. “The Kulchar shelter houses 64 people, many of whom sleep crammed into a room that used to be a restaurant. He opened it five days after the Russian attack, when Roma refugees arriving in Uzhhorod were expelled from the shelters open to the rest of the population. Since then, he says, some 3,000 have passed through its doors. Most have left the country.” Whether intentional or not, the country’s authorities, who did not bother to prevent the attacks and have never defended these settlements or their population, and the extreme right that has directly attacked these places, have achieved what they wanted: a more Ukrainian Ukraine, in the ethnic sense of the word.