Tomás Ó Flatharta

Oleksandr Yurov

Member of the Irish Labour Party ・ Participant of Social Movement (Ukraine) ・ Veteran ・ Resident of Donetsk Recently, two articles were published on Aontacht Media under the name Ilya Ulyanov that claim to represent an “eastern Ukrainian” and “left-wing” perspective:

1. The Western Left Must Come To Terms With Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Problem

https://aontachtmedia.ie/the-western-left-must-come-to-terms-with-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem

2. The Western Left Must Stop Backing Zelensky’s Conscription Machine

https://aontachtmedia.ie/the-western-left-must-stop-backing-zelenskys-conscription-machine

I am from Donetsk. I lived there until 2014. I was a participant in the Donetsk Euromaidan. I stood on the same square where, on 13 March 2014, Dmytro Cherniavskyi was stabbed to death. I saw pro-Russian militants beating unarmed people. After that I joined volunteer units and later served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. From 2014 to 2018 I fought in the Donbas. I had to rebuild my life from scratch on government-controlled territory. In 2022 the Russian army came again — this time with a full-scale invasion. I fought again.

Today I am a participant of Social Movement in Ukraine and a member of the Irish Labour Party. I have criticised Volodymyr Zelensky since the first months of his presidency. I have openly criticised, and continue to criticise, his government for neoliberal reforms, the weakening of labour rights, oligarchic influence, corruption and much else. My comrades in Social Movement do the same. We are not “pro-Zelensky” activists. We do not defend every decision taken in Kyiv.

Precisely for that reason I see the difference between left-wing criticism and what these articles propose with particular clarity.

What Ulyanov is doing is not simply criticism of the Ukrainian government. It is the acceptance of the core scheme of Russian state propaganda: that Ukraine has no right to its own political choice; that it must remain in the orbit of the Kremlin; that any attempt to leave Russian control is a “Western project”; and that Russian armed intervention is merely a “reaction”. In essence this logic reduces Ukrainians to a population that must silently accept a status similar to that of Belarus under Moscow’s external control. This is not analysis. It is the justification of aggression dressed up as “anti-imperialism”.