On Aug. 24 Ukrainians around the world celebrated the 35th anniversary of the winning of their independence, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, arms in hand, they’re defending the country’s sovereignty and defying Russian President Vladimir Putin, who seeks to crush an independent Ukraine and reimpose Moscow’s domination.
The fight for Ukrainian independence was precipitated by a huge strike movement in 1989-91 by miners in the Donbas coal basin. The disintegration of the Soviet Union came on top of decades of opposition to the repressive Stalinist regime in Moscow, protests over its responsibility for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and widespread anti-government sentiment fueled by the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Waves of protests by working people toppled Stalinist regimes across Eastern Europe. The door was opened for the working class to enter politics in its own right for the first time in decades.
A protest movement in mid-1989 by Russian miners in Kuzbass, Siberia, spread to miners in Ukraine. As it grew strikers forced many mine directors and Soviet Ukraine officials to resign and began demanding Kyiv be free to determine its own future. The miners organized themselves in strike committees, bypassing Moscow’s state-controlled unions. From this, the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine (NPGU) and the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) arose.
In Moscow an abortive coup was launched by a layer of the Stalinist rulers in August 1991, aiming to stem the tide of popular protests. But this only hastened declarations of independence by different Soviet republics. Days later, the Ukrainian parliament voted for the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. This was approved overwhelmingly by a referendum later that year, with majorities in every province — including Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.
Pro-independence protests 2004-2014
In 2004, working people in Ukraine mobilized to block a Moscow-backed attempt to rig the presidential election, occupying Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. They forced the country’s Supreme Court to schedule another.
Fresh rallies began in 2013 as Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, backed by Moscow, dropped a planned trade deal with the European Union. Initial student protests spread to broader layers after demonstrators “were met with truncheons and bullets,” Mykhailo Volynets, president of the KVPU, told a Militant reporting team that toured parts of the country in 2014 to help get out the truth about the uprising.
“The unions and the workers joined,” he said, with millions across the country backing the occupation. Workers fought pitched street battles with regime thugs, forcing Yanukovych to capitulate and flee to Moscow.
“Workers are beginning to see that they are actors in history,” Alexei Oleksyevych, a leader of the Independent Trade Union of Miners, told the Militant reporting team. He helped organize workers’ rallies in Dnipropetrovsk in solidarity with the Maidan. This is in the largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.
“We brought down the Yanukovych regime and are making gains against bosses in our plants and mines because of the power of the Maidan, and Maidans across the country,” he said.
The success of the uprising strengthened working people for the battles to come, including the fight to push back against Moscow’s 2022 invasion.
Ukraine unions call for solidarity
The KVPU issued a call Sept. 3 to unions worldwide for solidarity as the Putin regime escalated its air war.
A Russian airstrike on a railway depot in Kyiv Sept. 1 killed seven people, including six rail workers. The union statement said “48 workers were killed and 158 injured at their workplaces” from “Russian aggression” in August alone.
It called for Moscow to “immediately and unconditionally end its aggression and withdraw its troops from Ukraine.”
The Nuclear Energy and Industry Workers’ Union of Ukraine has appealed for international support in its fight to free 15 of its members, who worked at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. They were among Ukrainians in the region imprisoned on frame-up charges by Moscow’s occupying forces after they seized the region in 2022.
The union “demands the unconditional release of 15 illegally imprisoned workers of the occupied ZNPP and all residents of Enerhodar who are in the dungeons of Russian prisons,” the union’s president Valerii Matov said.
Days after Putin’s 2022 invasion, several thousand Ukrainians in Enerhodar mobilized in the streets leading to the city to try to block Moscow from seizing the country’s largest nuclear plant.