Ukrainian journalist Svitlana Morenets has a go at 'stop the war' Zarah Sultana in her Spectator article Zarah Sultana’s pompous, luxury beliefs about Ukraine.

[https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/zarah-sultanas-pompous-luxury-beliefs-about-ukraine/]

It's always a bit worrying when anyone starts touting their 'working class' credentials, whether they are from Ukraine or not, and then claims to speak for all of them on the basis of my mum worked in a factory or my dad was a miner.

Ms Morenets speaks eloquently for Ukraine's working class but the question is, which one: The working class of western Ukraine or the working class of eastern Ukraine? But surely not both?

She claims:

The truth is that when working-class Russian soldiers crossed the border to occupy Ukraine, working-class Ukrainians queued at the enlistment offices to defend their homes.

Well many did, undoubtedly. But which army did they enlist in?

Many of Ukraine's working class had already been defending their homes in eastern Ukraine from occupation by the Ukrainian army and bombardment by the Ukrainian state for years.

Plenty of 'working class' Ukrainians were murdered, imprisoned or simply disappeared in the crackdown on the East by the democratic Ukrainian state, well before Russia invaded. 

And plenty of working class Ukrainians from the east also had to line up for hours or days, not to enlist, but just to collect their pensions or get basic supplies (see p.431 in book below).

All of this is documented in great detail in Benoit Paré's book What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022 - Diary of an International Observer, which one assumes Ms Morenets has read and considers to be nothing but baseless 'pro-Russian' propaganda.

So unless everything meticulously documented in this 600+ page book is in fact a carefully constructed tissue of lies fabricated by a mad Frenchman then it's not entirely clear that Ms Morenets can speak authoritatively about the whole of Ukraine's working class lining up to resist 'Russian imperial aggression', whether she's from a typical Ukrainian village or not.

Having banged on about the working class, Ms Morenets then goes on to admit:

The strange thing is that, having lived in Ukraine for most of my life, Sultana’s class-war politics just don’t apply. The cleavage that defined politics in my lifetime was between those who looked to Moscow or those who saw Ukraine as part of democratic Europe.

This neat 'cleavage' ignores the fact that while surely many young Ukrainians looked to European democracy for their future and other Ukrainians looked to Russia for theirs, there was also a bunch of - as it turns out - rather influential 'working class' Ukrainians who were looking for something really quite different - so where do they fit in?