Stephen Smellie reports on the UNISON delegation to Ukraine in autumn.
In late September and early October a delegation of four UNISON members in Scotland took part in a solidarity delegation to Ukraine. In advance we raised thousands of pounds to support trade union and humanitarian projects. As a member of the delegation, I was both shocked and impressed by what I saw and learnt.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has been waging a defensive war to protect its independence and territory. While the invasion was condemned at the time by most unions, including UNISON, I believe that this was the first union delegation from Scotland to visit.
We spent most of our time in the city of Kharkiv, thirty kilometres from the Russian border, where we met trade unionists from unions affiliated to the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU) and Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU). We visited children in underground and Metro classes, and spoke to social care workers, teachers, health workers, local politicians, workers who were now in the military, and student and youth leaders. We met sports centre staff who organised food banks and rehabilitation for soldiers and civilians who had been disabled and traumatised by the war, journalists who risked their lives reporting from the frontline, and LGBTQI+ activists.
We visited council buildings, a sports college, and a large peripheral housing scheme, which had suffered severe damage or outright destruction from missile attacks. These were sites of many deaths. The signs of damage to buildings were everywhere. And yet the people of Kharkiv seemed to continue nearly as normal. They went to work. They visited the shops. The were nonchalant about air raid sirens. This was their daily life, and they were getting on with it.
However, behind this normality, the people we spoke to all had a story to tell about their experiences of war, of shelling, of losing loved ones. It is hard to understand the trauma that these people are coping with and the impact that this is having on them, or how it will affect them in days to come.
Each night and some days, air raid warnings were sounded, and we spent many hours in the hotel basement that served as a shelter. Few Ukrainians rushed to the shelters. This was an everyday experience for them, and they had to get on with their lives and their sleep. We may have adopted that attitude if it hadn’t been for the loud explosion we heard when a college building nearby was hit and badly damaged.
A couple of weeks after we returned a kindergarten a short distance from our hotel was destroyed. Fortunately, all the children were safe in the basement when the missile struck.
The organisations we met and listened to had all changed how they operated. The sports centre was no longer simply focussed on training future Olympic champions, but was organising food banks for the homeless and rehabilitation for the wounded, and providing a safe space for children to play and make friends. The LGBTQI+ group was continuing with its HIV prevention work but also organising to deliver medicine to people who could not leave their homes due to injury or shelling, and providing counselling to gay men on leave from the frontline. The teachers were using all the techniques they had learned during Covid to provide online education for primary, secondary and university education. Local politicians and officials were adapting services to ensure that education continues, in underground classes where possible, and that homeless people from the destroyed homes in the city and the wider region were found somewhere to stay, often in the vacated student dormitories that foreign students had previously occupied.
The trade unions were adapting to enable them to support their members in the workplace and in their community by providing counselling, first aid training and food parcels, as well as ensuring that those workers who joined the military would have a job when they return to civilian life. They know many of them won’t, and that many of those who do will return disabled, physically and mentally, and will need support to be able to return.
Unions have established Union Lifeline, a co-ordinated approach to providing aid to members who are injured, lacking food and medicine, homeless, or suffering trauma. By adapting to address the needs of their members now, the unions are building a trade union consciousness and loyalty amongst members that will enable them, they hope, to be stronger and able to play a powerful part in building the fair society they want after the war.
However, the priority of all these people and organisations is that the war must be ended. They do not have faith in Trump to put pressure on Russia, and they don’t think Putin is prepared to end the war through negotiation. Therefore, they believe that the war will have to be won on the battlefield. When we asked what kind of support they needed, the answer was always the same: help to win the war. And for that, they were clear, our government should supply Ukraine with the material they need to stop Russian attacks and to protect their people and independence.
Yet they also need immediate humanitarian assistance. We heard of needs for powerpacks to enable a social care centre for elderly, disabled and homeless people to maintain their heating when the Russians disrupt power supplies. We heard of the need for more supplies for food for the homeless, and equipment to help with rehabilitation. Journalists told us how they needed more ‘drone detectors’ to protect them from the targeted attacks on the press enabled by drones pinpointing their whereabouts for direct shelling. We heard of lots of areas where funds raised in the UK can help people survive.
We also saw that the trade union movement is doing great things in supporting members, but that they are aware of challenges that lie ahead to address poverty wages, poor conditions and insecurity of work. They are looking to learn how to negotiate and win for workers. They need solidarity now and in the future.
Trade unions and the left are understandably uncomfortable with raising military expenditure, but the workers of Ukraine, in their unions, workplaces and communities, are entitled to expect the solidarity that we speak of when people are under attack. That means stepping up political and economic pressure on Putin and offering practical support to the Ukrainian people and their trade unions.
The full report of the delegation can be read at www.unison-scotland.org/ukraine-delegation-report/