The Population Sacrificed—Including by Their Leaders

Mar 17, 2025

This article is translated from the March 14 issue #2954 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

When Russian tanks threatened Kyiv in February 2022, president and former TV actor Volodymyr Zelensky was able to play the role of little David facing giant Goliath and embodying Ukrainian national resistance.

But, after the initial period of sacred national union passed, more and more Ukrainians came to understand that the regime ruled in the service of the rich and only of the rich. After all, Kyiv had constantly attacked working people before the war.

Cases showing the regime’s rottenness come to light periodically. These range from the privilege that allows the wealthy to leave the country to avoid conscription, to the bribes other affluent people pay to elected officials and officers to escape the front. People view this rot as routine.

In the region around the second-largest city Kharkiv, news broke revealing colossal embezzlement by contractors in favor with the administration. Even while the region is under intense bombardment, its road repair budget has “strangely” increased eightfold since 2024. This without any calls for bids and for no apparent reason other than to deliver fresh new roads for Russia’s tanks and bombs. Destruction requires reconstruction—government orders for construction companies which reap enormous war profits. The road budget for Donetsk Oblast, at the heart of the fighting since 2014, has shot up twelvefold this year.

As for the super-rich, the oligarchs, they generally live abroad. They are well sheltered, you could say. They have managed to capture a good part of Western “aid” to Ukraine, with the complicity of the highest echelons of the government. The details are unknown. Even when Soviet-era factories and resources these oligarchs seized were destroyed, or came under Russian control, they managed to hold onto their wealth. They aim to keep it if and when the guns fall silent.

Faced with the extent of such scandals, Zelensky was forced to fire all regional “reconstruction” officials last year. We see how effective this was—not!

Zelensky also regularly fires his highest-ranking generals. He has to shift the blame for military failures on them. He has to try to make people believe he is a bulwark against corruption. But in fact corruption is rife in the military hierarchy. This is all the more revolting for citizens whose standard of living has collapsed and who are called on to give their lives “for the fatherland.”

A year or two ago, the courageous wives, mothers, and sisters of soldiers who protested against remaining at the front until their death seemed isolated. Today, the informal movement against “busification” (the busing of men abducted from the street to the army by local military recruitment brigades) is in every city. Almost every day, videos show “recruiters” attacked in the street by outraged passersby trying to free their human prey. The phenomenon has grown so widespread that the authorities denounce it as “terrorism” and threaten harsh sentences for these street-level “terrorists.”

Officially there are 140,000 deserters—probably more—living and trying to find work while hiding out. But they couldn’t do this if they didn’t have the support of huge numbers of ordinary people.