/ Česky /
“The leader has forbidden fleeing the freest country.” 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.
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Submitted by Thunderbird on November 11, 2025
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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 mobilized, 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 authorized 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 realizing 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 organize 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 unauthorized 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 mobilized 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 canonized 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 feetIf 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 themNone 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 feetAs 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 mobilizations!
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!
source: https://libcom.org/article/self-demobilization-abolition-ukraine-late-autumn-2025-interview-assembly