I arrived in Kyiv on the afternoon of November 2 to the sound of air raid sirens. The air raid warnings had been going on all day. They come by phone once you get the Air Alert app, which is one of the first things my hosts had me do. Now my phone screen is covered with air alerts.
By the end of the night of November 2-3, Ukraine had been targeted with 96 drones and 1 air-to-surface missile. Ukrainian air defense units intercepted the missile and 66 of the drones, but between the drones that got through air defenses and debris falling from intercepted drones and missiles, six districts of Kyiv were hit, mostly residential buildings. One explosion woke me up. A large explosion hit a building at one of the campuses of Taras Shevchenko National University.
Denys Pilash, the Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) activist who is providing a bed for me while I stay in Kyiv, teaches history and politics at that university. The university closed the campus this week because of the damage from the air strike, so Denys is meeting with his students for class online. The other two men sharing a flat with Denys are in the military. One is a cook and the other works in informations technology. Between the constant air raid warnings and the presence of military people everywhere you turn, you get the immediate sense of a country at war. Another indication of the war footing of Ukraine was the face that I was the only adult male on the bus ride from Warsaw, Poland to Kyiv, Ukraine. Under Ukraine’s wartime martial law, no men between ages 18 and 60 are allowed to leave the country.
My Ukrainian hosts with Sotsialnyi Rukh took me straight from the bus station to an ongoing meeting of the European Left Alliance for the People and the Planet (ELAPP) at the offices of the Rosa Luxemburg Siftung, which is the foundation for transnational policy advocacy and education affiliated with the Left Party (Die Linke) of Germany.
ELAPP is a new alliance formed in September by green left feminist parties in the European Union that are represented in the European Parliament. Representatives of the member parties were in Kyiv to discuss a number of issues, including how to include Sotsialnyi Rukh, the ecosocialist organization that is their political counterpart in Ukraine, even though it is from a non-EU country without representation in the European Parliament.
The first person who greeted me from the ELAPP was Jonas Sjöstedt, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) representing the Left Party of Sweden. We had met 14 years ago at a meeting at the War Resisters League in New York City hosted by the Socialist Party in support of my Green Party candidacy for New York Governor. Jonas was working with the Socialist Party USA at the time. You wonder sometimes if anything will come out of such meetings. But here was Jonas, now an MEP and credited by Sotsialnyi Rukh with bering the leading force among the left parties in the European Parliament convincing them to take strong positions in support of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion.
The other ELAPP representatives at the meeting also hold leadership positions in their respective parties. Catarina Martins of the Left Bloc of Portugal is an MEP and former party leader. Li Andersson representing the Left Alliance of Finland is an MEP, former Minister of Education for Finland, and received 5% in the 2024 Finnish presidential election. Fredererikke Hellemann, a youth climate activist and former MEP candidate, is a staffer for the Red-Green Alliance of Denmark. Jan Paul van Aken is a former Member of Bundestag and newly elected co-chair of the Left Party in Germany, which is regrouping after Sahra Wagenknecht led a socially conservative, economically populist breakaway split to form a new party.
The ELAPP discussion of Ukraine solidarity was refreshing after dealing with sections of the American Greens and the broader left in the U.S. who are confused about supporting Ukraine’s national liberation struggle against Russia’s imperialist war to recolonize Ukraine. The leftists at this meeting in Kyiv had no such confusion about which side they were on. They did talk about the problem of pro-Putin left-conservatives like Sahra Wagenknecht. But mostly they talked about how to support Ukraine. They discussed how they are pushing in their national parliaments for more and faster arms to Ukraine while resisting the entrenchment of a militarist culture and power bloc. They particularly focused on strengthening diplomatic pressure on Russia to withdraw. That discussion focused on strengthening sanctions coal, oil, and gas exports to defund Russia’s military machine and hasten the transition from fossil to renewable energy in their countries and worldwide.
Pavlo Bryzhatyy is pointing at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung office banner and wearing the vest with logo of Priama Dija (Direct Action), the network of independent leftist student trade unions in Ukraine in which Pavlo is active. Founded in 2008, it has played a significant role in progressive movements in Ukraine. Its basic goal is to build student organization from below to advocate for free public education, better student stipends, better student facilities on campus, and against the commercialization and privatization of education.
