A big new interview with the underground media of Kharkov for Camille
Chinardet, a student in International Relations of Strasbourg. Published
specially on the anniversary of the end of the First World War,
disrupted by workers and soldiers ---- The development and continuation
of our media depends solely on its audience. Please support our work on
this fundraising page for further coverage of topics that are forbidden
or invisible to the pro-capitalist press. Many thanks everyone!
About the situation:
- How would you describe the situation in Kharkiv right now? On the
social, economic scale, as well as your mindset right now? - What
happened for you on the 24th of February 2022?
- The city has been 20 km from the front line for a year and a half now
(since May 2024). You can find more details about the economic situation
in our separate big material for City Day.
The rest is little different from other southeastern cities. It's like
the 1942-1943 occupation: every day, civilians are safaried on the
streets, packed into minibuses called gas vans and driven to their
death. This is not to mention the regular prisons and pre-trial
detention centers full of political prisoners of all ages, who receive
many years of imprisonment for terrible crimes such as working in the
municipal services of the Russian-occupied Kupyansk or talking about the
common historical past of Russians and Ukrainians. The local language,
holidays, monuments, and toponyms are banned by the administration like
some kind of colonizers. The prospects for getting through the heating
season with heat and electricity are very dim. Naturally, this doesn't
apply to the elites - they will definitely have it.
A wonderful illustration of the Ukrainian authorities' attitude toward
our local population from the Odessa-based leftist historian Vyacheslav
Azarov:
"Language Ombudsman Ivanovska called on Kharkov police to conduct a
preventive conversation with the owners of some bar where visitors sing
karaoke in Russian. The official herself admitted that the law does not
prohibit this, but in the face of Russian aggression, such songs provoke
public outrage, which the ombudsman shares. In essence, the official
called on the police to violate the law because the emotions of a
segment of society intolerant of fellow citizens speaking other
languages are more important to her. The familiar social hierarchy is
once again at play, where there is the rank-and-file citizenry, above
them the state, and on top of them a patriotic elite that is above all
law. I have to disappoint those fighting imperialism, but this scheme
accurately reproduces the order of the late Russian Empire, when public
behavior was dictated by the Black Hundreds. This "salt of the land,"
"truly Russian people" also had the patriotic privilege of using
arbitrary reprisals to improve the behavior of their fellow citizens for
the benefit of the autocracy, and the police actively used them for this
purpose when they were not legally allowed to do so."
Meanwhile, according to government data, in 2024, a total of 51% of
young people in Ukraine spoke Russian in everyday life. This year, 40%
of schoolchildren in Ukrainian schools speak Russian during recess, and
30% do so at home and with friends. The proportion of those who consider
Ukrainian their native language has officially declined from 71% to 64%
over the past year.
-How did life change these years because of the invasion?
- Most became poorer (those who managed to survive), others became
fabulously rich, and for some, the Russian invasion simply gave them
free rein to realize their most morbid sadistic fantasies. This train is
on fire, and the doors are locked by the conductors. That's why more
than half of our content is dedicated to how to leave the
blue-and-yellow mixture of a drug den and a madhouse without asking
anyone's permission. The Makhnovists did the same: when they could not
hold Gulyaipole, instead of defending it to the last fighter, they just
moved to where it was easier to implement their principles.
Recently, another big problem officially has arisen: many Ukrainian
draft dodgers, traumatized by the violence of the regime trying to send
them to death, are beginning to justify the Kremlin's aggressive
policies, blaming Ukraine as the sole culprit for the war continuation,
and rejecting any internationalist agenda. They should understand that
Russian military contractors are no less interested in waging war to the
last Ukrainian poor man (or even poor woman). All post-Soviet dictators
are essentially one company, be it Zevalier, Putler, or Lukachet.
Complete strangers to each other kill each other in tens of thousands in
a fixed match of those who know and contact each other very well.
- What was the situation before that? How was it?
- Everything the same, only some softer.
- What was the state of the left in politics before the invasion?
- Before the fascistic coup of 2014, both Stalinists and libertarian
leftists gathered hundreds of demonstrators in our city for May Day.
Then, the city authorities stopped approving such protests, and the cops
became allied with street neo-Nazis (although even before the Maidan,
they also did not want to investigate the far-right attacks on their
opponents). Due to the leftists' unwillingness or inability to ensure
their own safety, the leftists effectively lost all public influence in
the city.
- Could you tell me to what extent people are able to do and participate
in politics with the restrictions the war usually imposes?
- It depends on what you mean by politics.
- Were there protests against the decisions about the NABU and the SAPO
of the government during the summer this year in Kharkiv?
- Yes, about a thousand rallied. But conflicts between one branch of
state parasites and another are of no interest to us, especially since
these rallies only occurred thanks to complete tolerance from above due
to the EU patronage of these agencies.
From May 15 to 18, over a hundred collectives and initiatives from
various countries gathered at the Balkan Anarchist Book Fair 2025 in
Thessaloniki. There was also space for the Assembly's humble
presentation The Fenced Island of Pain. Comrades particularly
appreciated our line, "It is better to be a termite, little by little
weakening the edifice of militarism, than a flea on the tail of one of
the squabbling dogs." Of course, the gloomy picture we drew there is
already largely outdated: now we have much more positive news
About Assembliya:
- When did you start Assembliya? Why?
- Well, we already decribed it in some details more than 3 years ago.
And there's no Assembliya, we're the Assembly.
- If you think there is a goal to your initiative, what would you say it is?
- Our immediate goal at the moment is to save the lives of as many
people as possible from being sacrificed to the hoarse gnome's eternal
ruling and the boundless enrichment of his friends. The lives of people
who the state Moloch wants to take away for more and more NATO funding.
Every time Ukrainian representatives or cheerleaders tell you about
Ukrainian civilian casualties from Russian bombings, while ignoring the
fact that their closed borders prevent these people from fleeing to
safety, know this: they simply want to conceal their responsibility for
these deaths.
- Did the full-scale invasion change something to your initiative? In
what way?
- We change along with life around us. Reading the above interview from
2022, could anyone have imagined then that we would consider Ukraine no
less cruel than Russia and much more cynical? Of course, when in the
interview linked above we said that Russia genocides everything
Ukrainian, we simply did not yet know what real genocide looked like (in
Gaza). However, another point remains entirely relevant: the only place
in Ukraine safe from Russian attacks is the government quarter and the
palaces in Kiev's VIP suburbs, where the main beneficiaries of this war
live.
Likewise, Ukrainian drones are not killing Kremlin residents, who enjoy
full security guarantees, but civilians in the Belgorod and Kursk
borderlands, many of whom are themselves Ukrainians with relatives in
Kharkov. This means that our main idea from 2022 remains the same: the
real enemies are not on opposite sides of the trenches, but on opposite
sides of the fence around administrative buildings.
- You said in your email that you weren't defining yourselves as
anarchists anymore. Could you explain why?
- Because of what the anarchist movement is doing. The very fact that
it's so seriously focused on proving such elementary theses as "an
anarchist can't kill and die on orders from the state" or "not all
Ukrainians want to serve in the army" makes one think sadly of its
prospects. Even sadder is that this has been going on for 4 years in a
row. For us, Buenaventura Durruti has already said it all: fascism isn't
to be discussed, it's to be destroyed. Some even go so far as to express
solidarity with all those forcibly mobilised, including the Russian
hired stormtroopers, as if the death conveyor belt did not rely on their
obedience.
Everything that has been said about anarchist discourse does not mean
that we are disappointed with anarchist practices - no, the problem is
that this discourse is completely inconsistent with the current
challenges of social struggle. What could be more anarchic than
defending freedom of movement from the cannibalistic state, in order to
be a human being instead of to be expandable material for those who
think they have the right to decide who dies when?
- You are mainly focusing on local news. Why this choice?
- Our budget is very limited even for local work. Expanding to the
countrywide level would require a whole new level of funding.
Furthermore, we don't know who, if we were to do so, would be able to
join us from other regions.
- According to your website, you said you are functioning through
collective intelligence. How does that work?
- We can be located in any country and know what is happening in our
region thanks to our readers who send us information through the contact
form.
- Would you say it is harder to be a media and reporting in this context
of multiplying fake news everywhere?
- This is true, especially when it comes to busification scenes or when
green goblins keep kidnapped people in the basement. That's why we don't
publish all the content sent to us. We have to carefully select and
check it. As you can see, a lot of time often passes between our
publications: to avoid posting unverified things and at the same time
not to replicate what has already appeared in many other media.
A year ago, on October 31, anarchist guerrilla Kyriakos Xymitiris was
killed by an explosion at an apartment in Athens. On this matter, his
image appeared on the wall of the Israeli separation barrier in
Palestine, along with the names of his arrested comrades and the words
that all walls will fall. A week before this anniversary, on October 24,
an unknown young guy from Kharkov blew himself up along with a border
patrol while trying to reach the Belarusian border. Since he left no
suicide note and nothing is known whether anyone helped him, one can
only guess about his motives
About the war:
- As my master thesis is about mostly anarchists' groups and people in
Ukraine, you are the only group I saw talking about deserters. Could you
think of a reason why? Why did you choose this topic?
- Probably because the rest of the groups you came across are in state
service and the state has not authorised them to talk about it. This is
not surprising - nationalists, the army and border guards are everywhere
links in the same chain to serve the ruling class, not only in Ukraine.
It's the same situation here as when they started writing in Ukrainian
instead of Russian as if at the snap of a finger, probably not even
realising how homerically ridiculous their stories about "the war for
defending their identity and independence" sound.
The more their beloved army falls apart and the more territory it
surrenders, the more powerless anger and hysteria we will see from those
you are asking about in this question. Our good Belarusian friends
recently presented even an entire butthurt honor board with regular
updating. Yes, it happens, someone dared to pay them back in the same
coin, can you imagine? There's nothing to worry about: if this
continues, their flame will be enough to heat at least half of Kharkov
if the heating season is disrupted. Moreover, true fans of Ukraine don't
waste time on visiting foreign events at all; they enjoy life behind the
Iron Curtain.
Those of them who are actually in Ukraine are not having the best of
times either. It seems they are afraid that at this rate in Ukraine
there will soon be no one left to fight except themselves, and even
despite this, their masters, by their own admission, didn't even allow
them to form an absolutely servile "anti-authoritarian platoon." And
they still don't allow it Afterwards, these folks whined and complained
about the "damned military bureaucracy" for whom they had voluntarily
agreed to fight. Because their state masters wouldn't even allow them to
organise a platoon, they had to join the openly far-right units, and
then twist and lie. Well, let's not be too hard on the NPCs.
By the way, back a year and a half ago we confirmed information about
more than 100,000 cases of military escapes. Ukrainian state propaganda,
as usual, called it fake news. However, now this figure is even
officially three times higher. According to your interlocutors,
desertion plays into Russia's hands, but how can it take advantage of it
if, according to them, Russia is already on the verge of decay from day
to day?
Although none of us are deserters ourselves, this topic is close to us
not only for political but also for aesthetic reasons. We respect brave
people - and defying criminal law requires more courage than picking up
an assault shovel from Mr. Kuleba and, on someone's orders, dying in a
muddy ditch like cattle at the slaughterhouse. Even if such a fugitive
simply went home, not to say about trudging dozens of kilometers through
the mountains with a backpack, breaking through barbed wire and risking
freezing to death.
- I know there has been a lot of debates about participating the war or
denouncing it and its effects on people. Do you think it is a relevant
debate to have? Is it even a contradictory position? Where would you stand?
- For our group, this question has never arisen. Long before 2022,
Ukraine has deprived some of us of free education, banned others from
working in native Russian language, someone was just robbed of has other
personal scores to settle with it. When it also put the male population
aged 18-60 on a chain (since the evening of 24.02.2022), what doubt
could there have been that the external threats this state faces must be
fully used even if, at that moment, life in the Russian-occupied
territories was much worse than under the Ukrainian government? (Now the
situation there has partly improved, partly not.) And who can liberate
the working class from the state coercion and terror if not these people
themselves, by refusing to be controlled and taking their lives into
their own hands like their ancestors, who fled feudal oppression and
thus founded our city?
Notably, we didn't immediately turn to working with deserters. At the
beginning of the war, it was generally a marginal issue, so the
headlines on anarchist websites that associated the Assembly with this
topic were rather clickbait from the editors. The time for this thing
truly came much later.
October 2025 already set a new record for unauthorised leaving a
military unit and desertion: 21,602 such cases officially, compared to
17,000-18,000 per month during the summer and with around 30,000
mobilised personnel per month. And no one knows yet how many others left
their bank cards for their commanders so they could receive money for
them and not report them missing. That means, in the time it takes you
to send a donation to the Assembly, several more people could have shed
their uniforms bearing the fork-shaped slave brand. As the last leader
of the Soviet Union would say, the process has begun!
- I have read some of the interviews you gave to European newspapers,
before or during the war. Would you say that pacifism is a position that
can be held right now?
- No, we would prefer transforming the war of dictatorships into a war
against them. Of course, pacifists can be our allies, just as
cooperation with some moderate trade unionists isn't always at odds with
the struggle to abolish wage labor.
Along with this, our hopes for even the slightest revolutionary
prospects in Russia faded after the defeat of the Wagner mutiny in June
2023. Then Ukraine's counteroffensive failed, and it began busification
massively. Back then, two years ago, we called this the agony of the
dictatorship. Now we see how it is gradually turning into death
convulsions. Perhaps, after its collapse, now driven rather by the
Ukrainian working class than the slowly advancing Russian troops, the
social struggle will spill to Russia over across the front line, as it
did from Russia to Germany in 1918? Time will tell; for now, we need to
focus on more immediate tasks.
- In the other way around, would you say there is an interest in
continuing the war? For whom?
- The range of stakeholders in the war is very broad; it's far from a
simple conspiracy of a few oligarchs, but a direct material interest for
a fairly broad segment of the population. From garbage media receiving
grants for inciting hatred to military volunteers raising donations and
those who earn money from photographs of the shelling aftermath. Just
imagine that even Ukraine's leading drone manufacturer was a casting
agency for dictator's TV projects before the war. There is no reason to
consider this contingent "victims of aggression," and that's why their
leader has so repeatedly thwarted peace negotiations: Paris in 2019,
Istanbul in 2022, London in 2025.
- You are publishing mostly critical articles about the war and
defending this position in your interviews. Were you threatened for
those opinions? By whom?
- There are many who weep and gnash their teeth at the very fact of our
takestand. You've probably met some of them, even in France. If we
didn't receive threats from them, it would mean we do everything wrong.
More importantly, other people have also received threats for sending
content to us. However, this makes no sense: we haven't yet revealed any
of our informants.
And it's not entirely true that we publish mostly critical articles
about the war. Since last autumn, we've mostly focused on publishing
information useful for escaping abroad, based on stories and
consultations on our 24/7 email hotline.
- In my country (France), people on the left are saying that nationalism
in Ukraine is very strong, thus very dangerous for the left in Ukraine,
especially in the middle of this war, which made it grow immensely, that
is why we should support this war very carefully. Do you feel that way
in Kharkiv?
- Just read everything we answered above and think for yourself. We can
only add that only the most peripheral part of our team stays in
Ukraine, otherwise we would have long ago shared the fate of Bogdan
Syrotyuk, Angela Gurina, Alexander Matyushenko, the "leaflet case"
prisoners, and many, many other Ukrainians who simply dared to have
their own opinion.
- As a collective, do you see an end to this conflict? And if yes, which
end?
- Ukraine's expected depletion of financial resources "until the end of
the first quarter of 2026" can really mean the final act of the war
drama due to the lack of money for the army. In this bloody stalemate,
the least illusory solution appears to be the most negative scenario for
Ukraine: some heavy military fail, which in turn opens the way to some
compromise, just as the severe military defeats in Donbass of 2014 and
2015 paved the way for the previous peace agreements in Minsk. This is
probably why Trump said "let's see in 6 months," and his Kremlin
colleague reacted so calmly to the US sanctions strike. We predicted
this almost a year ago.
The concentration camp's military collapse could greatly facilitate to
free the millions of hostaged people and let them find a more desirable
place to live, although it's important to remember that if you still
have to cross the border outside the checkpoint, in Ukraine it's still
an administrative fine, while in Russia it's punishable by up to 5 years
behind bars. This is why we're talking about a war between two barracks
of a single fraternal prison.
- What would you say Ukraine will look like, socially, economically and
politically in the future? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about it?
Will there be room for leftists' politics, nationally and locally?
- Who can guarantee that Ukraine will even exist next year? We adhere to
the principle of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." Therefore,
we don't advise anyone to connect their future not only with Ukraine,
but even with neighboring countries. We especially call for children to
be taken away from Ukrainian schools, since they teach nothing but the
totalitarian, misanthropic ideology of today's Ukrainianism.
Ukraine is fighting the heroes of anarchism even a century after their
death: two years ago, in Verkhovtsevo of the Dnipropetrovsk region, a
monument to the legendary sailor Anatoly Zhelezniakov, one of the most
famous deserters in the former USSR for his role in the social
revolution in Petrograd, Kharkov and Odessa, mortally wounded at this
station in a battle with the then Z-forces, was dismantled. Last month,
the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (the government body deciding
what Ukrainians should think and discuss) included Mikhail Bakunin on a
list of figures to be excluded from public space for "anti-Semitic
views." Meanwhile, among those canonised by this state as heroes of the
20th century, few are not implicated in the mass massacring of Jews, and
the head of the institute himself is a former officer of the overtly
neo-Nazi 3rd Assault Brigade
More personal questions (once again you don't have to answer, it's for
me a way to better understand where does your initiative come from):
- Who are the people participating in Assembliya?
- A little group of proud draft dodgers and girls supporting them. Let
us go back a little bit to your previous questions. Among those who
liked the aforementioned ABC Belarus text on Facebook, there are only
foreigners, a couple of Ukrainian emigrants, and a couple of media
fighters from Ukraine's information troops. There are no ordinary
Ukrainian serfs, who face being packed in a "bus of invincibility" and,
if unable to pay off, possibly die even before arrival at the front line
from beatings or absence of medical care. This answers another your
question: why are we interested in how to escape from the army and, more
generally, from the people's prison, while for them, this topic is
irrelevant.
- If some of you were engaged in previous initiatives, activities, or
participated for instance in Maidan in 2013-2014 or took part in the
Anti-Terrorist Operation (so-called by the Ukrainian government at the
time) that happened after, could you tell me about it?
- Of the current Assembly participants, one was a university student in
2013-2014 and followed these events as a detached observer, without
siding with any party. Thoughts to create an anarchist armed underground
never came to fruition, as all the anarchists who didn't join the
neo-Nazis simply chose to withdraw from any activism at all. The rest
were schoolchildren at the time and had little interest in politics.
Even if we had all been politically conscious in 2014, we would never
have participated in NATO-sponsored political games, knowing the fate of
Iraq, Libya, etc. The war was started by those who, back in the winter
of that year, were shouting "Put the Muscovites to the knives!" and
seizing weapons, taking advantage of the then regime's hesitation to
suppress them due to pressure from the West. Russian aggression, which
began with the Anschluss of Crimea in March 2014, the subsequent
establishment of puppet ultra-conservative "people's republics" in
Donbass, and assumed full scale in February 2022, was the next stage -
external intervention in an already ongoing civil conflict. The Kremlin
exploited the rise to power of fascist street gangs (that shared the
monopoly on violence with the state in Ukraine) for its own ends.
- As individuals, could some of you (even if it is just a quote, or a
word, I don't care) tell me how you are feeling about the war?
Our team has varying opinions about Yegor Letov, however in this case,
an excerpt from his song would be appropriate:
.
...And we have nothing left, we're dying
And all we can is to be ice
We are the ice under the major's feet
If I'm with them, I stop dying
They've open hands and colorful words
They breathe grass, and they don't care about anything
And the major is coming to destroy them
None of them will accept us, none will understand
But the major will slip, the major will fall
For we are the ice under the major's feet
As long as we exist, there will be an evil black ice
And the major will slip, the major will fall
For we are the ice under the major's feet!
- What will you do once the war is over?
- It depends on how and when it ends. We can assume that both Ukrainian
society and the new diaspora abroad will have a strong demand for
persecution of those who are currently waging war against their own
people. Let's see what comes of it...
Anything else you would like to add about the war, Assembliya, life in
Kharkiv, deserters, Ukraine in general (very broad sorry), or about the
left in Ukraine?
- Down, down, down with Ukraine! Glory, glory, glory to evaders! No
borders, no nations, fuck mobilisations!
Thank you so much for your answers! I wish you luck in everything.
- Thank you for doing this and for addressing us. Good luck with your study!
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/11/14/from-self-demobilization-to-the-abolition-of-ukraine-late-autumn-2025-interview-with-the-assembly/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Chinardet, a student in International Relations of Strasbourg. Published
specially on the anniversary of the end of the First World War,
disrupted by workers and soldiers ---- The development and continuation
of our media depends solely on its audience. Please support our work on
this fundraising page for further coverage of topics that are forbidden
or invisible to the pro-capitalist press. Many thanks everyone!
About the situation:
- How would you describe the situation in Kharkiv right now? On the
social, economic scale, as well as your mindset right now? - What
happened for you on the 24th of February 2022?
- The city has been 20 km from the front line for a year and a half now
(since May 2024). You can find more details about the economic situation
in our separate big material for City Day.
The rest is little different from other southeastern cities. It's like
the 1942-1943 occupation: every day, civilians are safaried on the
streets, packed into minibuses called gas vans and driven to their
death. This is not to mention the regular prisons and pre-trial
detention centers full of political prisoners of all ages, who receive
many years of imprisonment for terrible crimes such as working in the
municipal services of the Russian-occupied Kupyansk or talking about the
common historical past of Russians and Ukrainians. The local language,
holidays, monuments, and toponyms are banned by the administration like
some kind of colonizers. The prospects for getting through the heating
season with heat and electricity are very dim. Naturally, this doesn't
apply to the elites - they will definitely have it.
A wonderful illustration of the Ukrainian authorities' attitude toward
our local population from the Odessa-based leftist historian Vyacheslav
Azarov:
"Language Ombudsman Ivanovska called on Kharkov police to conduct a
preventive conversation with the owners of some bar where visitors sing
karaoke in Russian. The official herself admitted that the law does not
prohibit this, but in the face of Russian aggression, such songs provoke
public outrage, which the ombudsman shares. In essence, the official
called on the police to violate the law because the emotions of a
segment of society intolerant of fellow citizens speaking other
languages are more important to her. The familiar social hierarchy is
once again at play, where there is the rank-and-file citizenry, above
them the state, and on top of them a patriotic elite that is above all
law. I have to disappoint those fighting imperialism, but this scheme
accurately reproduces the order of the late Russian Empire, when public
behavior was dictated by the Black Hundreds. This "salt of the land,"
"truly Russian people" also had the patriotic privilege of using
arbitrary reprisals to improve the behavior of their fellow citizens for
the benefit of the autocracy, and the police actively used them for this
purpose when they were not legally allowed to do so."
Meanwhile, according to government data, in 2024, a total of 51% of
young people in Ukraine spoke Russian in everyday life. This year, 40%
of schoolchildren in Ukrainian schools speak Russian during recess, and
30% do so at home and with friends. The proportion of those who consider
Ukrainian their native language has officially declined from 71% to 64%
over the past year.
-How did life change these years because of the invasion?
- Most became poorer (those who managed to survive), others became
fabulously rich, and for some, the Russian invasion simply gave them
free rein to realize their most morbid sadistic fantasies. This train is
on fire, and the doors are locked by the conductors. That's why more
than half of our content is dedicated to how to leave the
blue-and-yellow mixture of a drug den and a madhouse without asking
anyone's permission. The Makhnovists did the same: when they could not
hold Gulyaipole, instead of defending it to the last fighter, they just
moved to where it was easier to implement their principles.
Recently, another big problem officially has arisen: many Ukrainian
draft dodgers, traumatized by the violence of the regime trying to send
them to death, are beginning to justify the Kremlin's aggressive
policies, blaming Ukraine as the sole culprit for the war continuation,
and rejecting any internationalist agenda. They should understand that
Russian military contractors are no less interested in waging war to the
last Ukrainian poor man (or even poor woman). All post-Soviet dictators
are essentially one company, be it Zevalier, Putler, or Lukachet.
Complete strangers to each other kill each other in tens of thousands in
a fixed match of those who know and contact each other very well.
- What was the situation before that? How was it?
- Everything the same, only some softer.
- What was the state of the left in politics before the invasion?
- Before the fascistic coup of 2014, both Stalinists and libertarian
leftists gathered hundreds of demonstrators in our city for May Day.
Then, the city authorities stopped approving such protests, and the cops
became allied with street neo-Nazis (although even before the Maidan,
they also did not want to investigate the far-right attacks on their
opponents). Due to the leftists' unwillingness or inability to ensure
their own safety, the leftists effectively lost all public influence in
the city.
- Could you tell me to what extent people are able to do and participate
in politics with the restrictions the war usually imposes?
- It depends on what you mean by politics.
- Were there protests against the decisions about the NABU and the SAPO
of the government during the summer this year in Kharkiv?
- Yes, about a thousand rallied. But conflicts between one branch of
state parasites and another are of no interest to us, especially since
these rallies only occurred thanks to complete tolerance from above due
to the EU patronage of these agencies.
From May 15 to 18, over a hundred collectives and initiatives from
various countries gathered at the Balkan Anarchist Book Fair 2025 in
Thessaloniki. There was also space for the Assembly's humble
presentation The Fenced Island of Pain. Comrades particularly
appreciated our line, "It is better to be a termite, little by little
weakening the edifice of militarism, than a flea on the tail of one of
the squabbling dogs." Of course, the gloomy picture we drew there is
already largely outdated: now we have much more positive news
About Assembliya:
- When did you start Assembliya? Why?
- Well, we already decribed it in some details more than 3 years ago.
And there's no Assembliya, we're the Assembly.
- If you think there is a goal to your initiative, what would you say it is?
- Our immediate goal at the moment is to save the lives of as many
people as possible from being sacrificed to the hoarse gnome's eternal
ruling and the boundless enrichment of his friends. The lives of people
who the state Moloch wants to take away for more and more NATO funding.
Every time Ukrainian representatives or cheerleaders tell you about
Ukrainian civilian casualties from Russian bombings, while ignoring the
fact that their closed borders prevent these people from fleeing to
safety, know this: they simply want to conceal their responsibility for
these deaths.
- Did the full-scale invasion change something to your initiative? In
what way?
- We change along with life around us. Reading the above interview from
2022, could anyone have imagined then that we would consider Ukraine no
less cruel than Russia and much more cynical? Of course, when in the
interview linked above we said that Russia genocides everything
Ukrainian, we simply did not yet know what real genocide looked like (in
Gaza). However, another point remains entirely relevant: the only place
in Ukraine safe from Russian attacks is the government quarter and the
palaces in Kiev's VIP suburbs, where the main beneficiaries of this war
live.
Likewise, Ukrainian drones are not killing Kremlin residents, who enjoy
full security guarantees, but civilians in the Belgorod and Kursk
borderlands, many of whom are themselves Ukrainians with relatives in
Kharkov. This means that our main idea from 2022 remains the same: the
real enemies are not on opposite sides of the trenches, but on opposite
sides of the fence around administrative buildings.
- You said in your email that you weren't defining yourselves as
anarchists anymore. Could you explain why?
- Because of what the anarchist movement is doing. The very fact that
it's so seriously focused on proving such elementary theses as "an
anarchist can't kill and die on orders from the state" or "not all
Ukrainians want to serve in the army" makes one think sadly of its
prospects. Even sadder is that this has been going on for 4 years in a
row. For us, Buenaventura Durruti has already said it all: fascism isn't
to be discussed, it's to be destroyed. Some even go so far as to express
solidarity with all those forcibly mobilised, including the Russian
hired stormtroopers, as if the death conveyor belt did not rely on their
obedience.
Everything that has been said about anarchist discourse does not mean
that we are disappointed with anarchist practices - no, the problem is
that this discourse is completely inconsistent with the current
challenges of social struggle. What could be more anarchic than
defending freedom of movement from the cannibalistic state, in order to
be a human being instead of to be expandable material for those who
think they have the right to decide who dies when?
- You are mainly focusing on local news. Why this choice?
- Our budget is very limited even for local work. Expanding to the
countrywide level would require a whole new level of funding.
Furthermore, we don't know who, if we were to do so, would be able to
join us from other regions.
- According to your website, you said you are functioning through
collective intelligence. How does that work?
- We can be located in any country and know what is happening in our
region thanks to our readers who send us information through the contact
form.
- Would you say it is harder to be a media and reporting in this context
of multiplying fake news everywhere?
- This is true, especially when it comes to busification scenes or when
green goblins keep kidnapped people in the basement. That's why we don't
publish all the content sent to us. We have to carefully select and
check it. As you can see, a lot of time often passes between our
publications: to avoid posting unverified things and at the same time
not to replicate what has already appeared in many other media.
A year ago, on October 31, anarchist guerrilla Kyriakos Xymitiris was
killed by an explosion at an apartment in Athens. On this matter, his
image appeared on the wall of the Israeli separation barrier in
Palestine, along with the names of his arrested comrades and the words
that all walls will fall. A week before this anniversary, on October 24,
an unknown young guy from Kharkov blew himself up along with a border
patrol while trying to reach the Belarusian border. Since he left no
suicide note and nothing is known whether anyone helped him, one can
only guess about his motives
About the war:
- As my master thesis is about mostly anarchists' groups and people in
Ukraine, you are the only group I saw talking about deserters. Could you
think of a reason why? Why did you choose this topic?
- Probably because the rest of the groups you came across are in state
service and the state has not authorised them to talk about it. This is
not surprising - nationalists, the army and border guards are everywhere
links in the same chain to serve the ruling class, not only in Ukraine.
It's the same situation here as when they started writing in Ukrainian
instead of Russian as if at the snap of a finger, probably not even
realising how homerically ridiculous their stories about "the war for
defending their identity and independence" sound.
The more their beloved army falls apart and the more territory it
surrenders, the more powerless anger and hysteria we will see from those
you are asking about in this question. Our good Belarusian friends
recently presented even an entire butthurt honor board with regular
updating. Yes, it happens, someone dared to pay them back in the same
coin, can you imagine? There's nothing to worry about: if this
continues, their flame will be enough to heat at least half of Kharkov
if the heating season is disrupted. Moreover, true fans of Ukraine don't
waste time on visiting foreign events at all; they enjoy life behind the
Iron Curtain.
Those of them who are actually in Ukraine are not having the best of
times either. It seems they are afraid that at this rate in Ukraine
there will soon be no one left to fight except themselves, and even
despite this, their masters, by their own admission, didn't even allow
them to form an absolutely servile "anti-authoritarian platoon." And
they still don't allow it Afterwards, these folks whined and complained
about the "damned military bureaucracy" for whom they had voluntarily
agreed to fight. Because their state masters wouldn't even allow them to
organise a platoon, they had to join the openly far-right units, and
then twist and lie. Well, let's not be too hard on the NPCs.
By the way, back a year and a half ago we confirmed information about
more than 100,000 cases of military escapes. Ukrainian state propaganda,
as usual, called it fake news. However, now this figure is even
officially three times higher. According to your interlocutors,
desertion plays into Russia's hands, but how can it take advantage of it
if, according to them, Russia is already on the verge of decay from day
to day?
Although none of us are deserters ourselves, this topic is close to us
not only for political but also for aesthetic reasons. We respect brave
people - and defying criminal law requires more courage than picking up
an assault shovel from Mr. Kuleba and, on someone's orders, dying in a
muddy ditch like cattle at the slaughterhouse. Even if such a fugitive
simply went home, not to say about trudging dozens of kilometers through
the mountains with a backpack, breaking through barbed wire and risking
freezing to death.
- I know there has been a lot of debates about participating the war or
denouncing it and its effects on people. Do you think it is a relevant
debate to have? Is it even a contradictory position? Where would you stand?
- For our group, this question has never arisen. Long before 2022,
Ukraine has deprived some of us of free education, banned others from
working in native Russian language, someone was just robbed of has other
personal scores to settle with it. When it also put the male population
aged 18-60 on a chain (since the evening of 24.02.2022), what doubt
could there have been that the external threats this state faces must be
fully used even if, at that moment, life in the Russian-occupied
territories was much worse than under the Ukrainian government? (Now the
situation there has partly improved, partly not.) And who can liberate
the working class from the state coercion and terror if not these people
themselves, by refusing to be controlled and taking their lives into
their own hands like their ancestors, who fled feudal oppression and
thus founded our city?
Notably, we didn't immediately turn to working with deserters. At the
beginning of the war, it was generally a marginal issue, so the
headlines on anarchist websites that associated the Assembly with this
topic were rather clickbait from the editors. The time for this thing
truly came much later.
October 2025 already set a new record for unauthorised leaving a
military unit and desertion: 21,602 such cases officially, compared to
17,000-18,000 per month during the summer and with around 30,000
mobilised personnel per month. And no one knows yet how many others left
their bank cards for their commanders so they could receive money for
them and not report them missing. That means, in the time it takes you
to send a donation to the Assembly, several more people could have shed
their uniforms bearing the fork-shaped slave brand. As the last leader
of the Soviet Union would say, the process has begun!
- I have read some of the interviews you gave to European newspapers,
before or during the war. Would you say that pacifism is a position that
can be held right now?
- No, we would prefer transforming the war of dictatorships into a war
against them. Of course, pacifists can be our allies, just as
cooperation with some moderate trade unionists isn't always at odds with
the struggle to abolish wage labor.
Along with this, our hopes for even the slightest revolutionary
prospects in Russia faded after the defeat of the Wagner mutiny in June
2023. Then Ukraine's counteroffensive failed, and it began busification
massively. Back then, two years ago, we called this the agony of the
dictatorship. Now we see how it is gradually turning into death
convulsions. Perhaps, after its collapse, now driven rather by the
Ukrainian working class than the slowly advancing Russian troops, the
social struggle will spill to Russia over across the front line, as it
did from Russia to Germany in 1918? Time will tell; for now, we need to
focus on more immediate tasks.
- In the other way around, would you say there is an interest in
continuing the war? For whom?
- The range of stakeholders in the war is very broad; it's far from a
simple conspiracy of a few oligarchs, but a direct material interest for
a fairly broad segment of the population. From garbage media receiving
grants for inciting hatred to military volunteers raising donations and
those who earn money from photographs of the shelling aftermath. Just
imagine that even Ukraine's leading drone manufacturer was a casting
agency for dictator's TV projects before the war. There is no reason to
consider this contingent "victims of aggression," and that's why their
leader has so repeatedly thwarted peace negotiations: Paris in 2019,
Istanbul in 2022, London in 2025.
- You are publishing mostly critical articles about the war and
defending this position in your interviews. Were you threatened for
those opinions? By whom?
- There are many who weep and gnash their teeth at the very fact of our
takestand. You've probably met some of them, even in France. If we
didn't receive threats from them, it would mean we do everything wrong.
More importantly, other people have also received threats for sending
content to us. However, this makes no sense: we haven't yet revealed any
of our informants.
And it's not entirely true that we publish mostly critical articles
about the war. Since last autumn, we've mostly focused on publishing
information useful for escaping abroad, based on stories and
consultations on our 24/7 email hotline.
- In my country (France), people on the left are saying that nationalism
in Ukraine is very strong, thus very dangerous for the left in Ukraine,
especially in the middle of this war, which made it grow immensely, that
is why we should support this war very carefully. Do you feel that way
in Kharkiv?
- Just read everything we answered above and think for yourself. We can
only add that only the most peripheral part of our team stays in
Ukraine, otherwise we would have long ago shared the fate of Bogdan
Syrotyuk, Angela Gurina, Alexander Matyushenko, the "leaflet case"
prisoners, and many, many other Ukrainians who simply dared to have
their own opinion.
- As a collective, do you see an end to this conflict? And if yes, which
end?
- Ukraine's expected depletion of financial resources "until the end of
the first quarter of 2026" can really mean the final act of the war
drama due to the lack of money for the army. In this bloody stalemate,
the least illusory solution appears to be the most negative scenario for
Ukraine: some heavy military fail, which in turn opens the way to some
compromise, just as the severe military defeats in Donbass of 2014 and
2015 paved the way for the previous peace agreements in Minsk. This is
probably why Trump said "let's see in 6 months," and his Kremlin
colleague reacted so calmly to the US sanctions strike. We predicted
this almost a year ago.
The concentration camp's military collapse could greatly facilitate to
free the millions of hostaged people and let them find a more desirable
place to live, although it's important to remember that if you still
have to cross the border outside the checkpoint, in Ukraine it's still
an administrative fine, while in Russia it's punishable by up to 5 years
behind bars. This is why we're talking about a war between two barracks
of a single fraternal prison.
- What would you say Ukraine will look like, socially, economically and
politically in the future? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about it?
Will there be room for leftists' politics, nationally and locally?
- Who can guarantee that Ukraine will even exist next year? We adhere to
the principle of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." Therefore,
we don't advise anyone to connect their future not only with Ukraine,
but even with neighboring countries. We especially call for children to
be taken away from Ukrainian schools, since they teach nothing but the
totalitarian, misanthropic ideology of today's Ukrainianism.
Ukraine is fighting the heroes of anarchism even a century after their
death: two years ago, in Verkhovtsevo of the Dnipropetrovsk region, a
monument to the legendary sailor Anatoly Zhelezniakov, one of the most
famous deserters in the former USSR for his role in the social
revolution in Petrograd, Kharkov and Odessa, mortally wounded at this
station in a battle with the then Z-forces, was dismantled. Last month,
the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (the government body deciding
what Ukrainians should think and discuss) included Mikhail Bakunin on a
list of figures to be excluded from public space for "anti-Semitic
views." Meanwhile, among those canonised by this state as heroes of the
20th century, few are not implicated in the mass massacring of Jews, and
the head of the institute himself is a former officer of the overtly
neo-Nazi 3rd Assault Brigade
More personal questions (once again you don't have to answer, it's for
me a way to better understand where does your initiative come from):
- Who are the people participating in Assembliya?
- A little group of proud draft dodgers and girls supporting them. Let
us go back a little bit to your previous questions. Among those who
liked the aforementioned ABC Belarus text on Facebook, there are only
foreigners, a couple of Ukrainian emigrants, and a couple of media
fighters from Ukraine's information troops. There are no ordinary
Ukrainian serfs, who face being packed in a "bus of invincibility" and,
if unable to pay off, possibly die even before arrival at the front line
from beatings or absence of medical care. This answers another your
question: why are we interested in how to escape from the army and, more
generally, from the people's prison, while for them, this topic is
irrelevant.
- If some of you were engaged in previous initiatives, activities, or
participated for instance in Maidan in 2013-2014 or took part in the
Anti-Terrorist Operation (so-called by the Ukrainian government at the
time) that happened after, could you tell me about it?
- Of the current Assembly participants, one was a university student in
2013-2014 and followed these events as a detached observer, without
siding with any party. Thoughts to create an anarchist armed underground
never came to fruition, as all the anarchists who didn't join the
neo-Nazis simply chose to withdraw from any activism at all. The rest
were schoolchildren at the time and had little interest in politics.
Even if we had all been politically conscious in 2014, we would never
have participated in NATO-sponsored political games, knowing the fate of
Iraq, Libya, etc. The war was started by those who, back in the winter
of that year, were shouting "Put the Muscovites to the knives!" and
seizing weapons, taking advantage of the then regime's hesitation to
suppress them due to pressure from the West. Russian aggression, which
began with the Anschluss of Crimea in March 2014, the subsequent
establishment of puppet ultra-conservative "people's republics" in
Donbass, and assumed full scale in February 2022, was the next stage -
external intervention in an already ongoing civil conflict. The Kremlin
exploited the rise to power of fascist street gangs (that shared the
monopoly on violence with the state in Ukraine) for its own ends.
- As individuals, could some of you (even if it is just a quote, or a
word, I don't care) tell me how you are feeling about the war?
Our team has varying opinions about Yegor Letov, however in this case,
an excerpt from his song would be appropriate:
.
...And we have nothing left, we're dying
And all we can is to be ice
We are the ice under the major's feet
If I'm with them, I stop dying
They've open hands and colorful words
They breathe grass, and they don't care about anything
And the major is coming to destroy them
None of them will accept us, none will understand
But the major will slip, the major will fall
For we are the ice under the major's feet
As long as we exist, there will be an evil black ice
And the major will slip, the major will fall
For we are the ice under the major's feet!
- What will you do once the war is over?
- It depends on how and when it ends. We can assume that both Ukrainian
society and the new diaspora abroad will have a strong demand for
persecution of those who are currently waging war against their own
people. Let's see what comes of it...
Anything else you would like to add about the war, Assembliya, life in
Kharkiv, deserters, Ukraine in general (very broad sorry), or about the
left in Ukraine?
- Down, down, down with Ukraine! Glory, glory, glory to evaders! No
borders, no nations, fuck mobilisations!
Thank you so much for your answers! I wish you luck in everything.
- Thank you for doing this and for addressing us. Good luck with your study!
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/11/14/from-self-demobilization-to-the-abolition-of-ukraine-late-autumn-2025-interview-with-the-assembly/
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