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“Kharkiv is wounded,” says Igor Prikhodko, “but it is alive and refusing to surrender.” Prikhodko is the director of Kharkiv’s Specialised Sports College, an elite training centre less than 30 kilometres from Ukraine’s border with Russia, whose graduates include Olympians and world champions. On 26 March 2024, the college was hit by short-range Iskander ballistic missiles – the third time it had come under attack. The assault has since been documented as a war crime by the city’s branch of Ukraine’s National Police Investigation Department. Now, in November 2025, Prikhodko and I are standing on the college’s roof, having picked our way through broken glass and rubble, past rooms too unsafe to enter. Above us is Kharkiv’s grey autumn sky. At our feet is a large crater, where the most recent attack led the roof to collapse inwards. Through the gaping hole, we can see the destroyed ruins of what were once students’ dormitories. We hear three dull, distant thumps: the explosions of incoming artillery fire. Each boom is a reminder that the frontline is only a few kilometres from here. Looking down, a single wooden door is visible. It once marked the entrance to bedroom 03, but now, with no wall left to frame it, the door looks alien. It will never again be opened by students eager for bed after a hard day’s training. Behind it, just visible in the darkness, we can see the twisted remnants of a ladder, metal poles, crushed wallpaper and a tangle of wires. Brick and cement pour into broken piles where walls should be. There’s a fourth thump. Far enough away to be safe. Close enough to make us flinch. The first attack on the college came in March 2022, just weeks into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when it was hit by three guided aerial bombs. All the students were safely evacuated, but the school’s athletic trainer – a grey-haired man named Alexander – was on duty on the ground floor of the three-storey building. A missile penetrated all the way down to the first floor, missing him by just one storey. Alexander again narrowly escaped the second devastating missile attack, “so we say, he has three birthdays”, Prikhodko jokes. Despite the extensive shelling damage, 450 pupils aged 11-21 still come to the college to train. On their way to the gym, they pass both a photo display celebrating the college’s most successful alumni – athletes who won medals in London, Beijing, Tokyo and Rio – and a bombed-out crater. “We can’t rebuild the destroyed college buildings now; we have to maintain what we have, but it is hard,” Prikhodko says. When I visit in early November, the temperature outside is already hitting lows of six degrees; by January, it will be around -5℃. The college’s electricity comes from a single generator, donated by a German NGO. If they are to have enough power to teach throughout Ukraine’s dark, freezing winter, they will need a second. “The Russian terrorists are waging war on children,” Prikhodko says. His piercing eyes, which sparkle when he smiles, quickly fill with tears as he recounts the harm inflicted on his students, colleagues, and city over the past three years and nine months. “They are waging war on Ukraine’s national identity, and that is why they attack our educational centres.” “Many of our trainers and former students are now at the front,” he adds. “Many of them have already perished.” The east US and Ukrainian intelligence assessments indicate Russia initially thought it would take two days for its troops to occupy Kharkiv, a historic centre of Ukrainian culture, literature, and education. Instead, long and bloody battles waged for more than three months as Russian forces neared the city limits. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled. Those who stayed suffered intense shelling, spending night after night sleeping in the metro to escape the bombs. Around 600 civilians were killed. While Ukrainian troops have twice succeeded in pushing Russian soldiers back from the city, the shelling of Kharkiv has not stopped. In some Ukrainian cities, such as Lviv or Kyiv, the war is visible mostly from the anti-tank infrastructure and sandbags around statues, and you can walk down multiple streets before encountering shelling damage. In Kharkiv, it’s impossible to escape the physical impact of military violence. War wounds are everywhere you look. The centuries-old wooden beams pointing skywards from the collapsed roof of a pink-fronted Victorian mansion, pastel paint blackened and scorched. The Soviet-era office block with gaping holes where windows should be. The bombed-out residential block whose ground-floor cafe still welcomes passers-by in for coffee, while upstairs the destroyed and abandoned minutiae of a stranger’s life are visible: the smashed cabinet, the splintered shelves, the broken bedroom doors. The war has even made walking in the city hard work; pavements are littered with potholes dug out by shrapnel, slabs poking up at odd angles that trip you up. It’s as if even the earth under your feet has been made unsteady from multiple missile impacts. One of the deadliest attacks took place on 1 March 2022, destroying the government building that dominates the city centre’s Freedom Square and killing 29 people. A teacher from the sports college had been on the sixth floor of the building when the missiles hit. Her husband was working as a rescuer that night, and, terrified of losing his wife, insisted his colleagues keep searching for her. She was found, thankfully, alive, in the basement. The city’s Aquarena Centre – home to an Olympic-sized swimming pool, gym and sports facilities – was hit by a rocket in the same month. It was the first attack of many: since then, air bombs have hit the surrounding areas, damaging the building, most recently in July this year. The centre’s director, Maksym Bondarev, oversaw the reconstruction, which he described as “very difficult but it is very important and extremely necessary for our city during the war to have a facility where you can do sports, where you can relax, have a distraction from these difficult realities that we are currently living in.” Bondarev is also a member of the Kharkiv Regional Organization of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU), which has a small office in the Aquarena centre’s basement. The confederation’s regional branch is headed up by Prikhodko, and his students are able to train at the centre thanks to support from the confederation and Bondarev’s team. He is proud of how the workers’ movement has mobilised to support the war effort. “Many of our trade union members went to the front from the first days of the war to defend their families, their cities, and their Ukraine,” Prikhodko says. “Many of them have already fallen on the battlefield. Our organisation is helping the families of soldiers by providing them with humanitarian aid.” As well as direct aid, the union branch provides psychological support and resilience training to its members – part of a joint project with the KVPU, the International Labour Organisation, and Belgian partners. “This project provides free legal and psychological assistance to all trade union members, displaced persons, soldiers, and their families,” Prikhodko explains. “As reality has shown, under conditions of constant shelling and alarm sirens, psychological support has proven vital. At the seminars, we teach first aid for panic attacks and how to maintain stress resilience under martial law. At first glance, it may seem like peaceful life is underway. But we must remember that the war is already in its fourth year. We have simply learned to live and work under war conditions.” Meeting the Kharkiv confederation of trade unions at the Aquarena are members of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, a UK organisation of trade unions which fundraises to deliver aid to their comrades in the Ukrainian labour movement. The delegation has driven three trucks for 2,000 miles to bring aid to rescue workers and soldiers on the frontline. Packed with clothing, helmets, sleeping bags and medical supplies, the trucks themselves are also a vital part of the delivery, as the team hand over the keys to rescue workers and soldiers. One of those collecting a truck is Anatoliy Chorney, who heads up a paramilitary unit dedicated to rescuing miners. Always a dangerous job, mining has become even more deadly, as Russian shelling attacks Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, of which the mines are a key part. “We save lives of the miners,” Chorney puts it simply, chatting over coffee in the swimming cafe. “After shelling, we get people out of the mines, we clean them up, we save lives.” Our conversation is cut short. In Dnipropetrovska, 5,595 miners are trapped underground as a result of Russian shelling on a nearby sub-station. Chorney says goodbye, takes the keys to his newly delivered truck, and heads to the rescue. It takes eight hours, but all the miners make it out alive. The capital A day later and almost 500 kilometres away from the bombed-out college roof in suburban Kharkiv, I join trade unionists, LGBTIQ+ activists, members of Ukraine’s Parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) and European MPs in the modern interior of a chain hotel in Kyiv city centre. They have gathered for the first-ever Ukraine Progressive Summit, organised by the SD (Social Democrat) Platform, an organisation created in 2012 to “unite progressive people”. Five hours before the event started, Kyiv was under Russian attack. An air alert went off across the city at 3.50am, followed almost immediately by the crack-crack-crack of the air defences. Most of the UAV drones were caught by anti-aircraft guns. Most. There was one loud explosion at around 4.30am. A UAV drone hit the Percheskiy district, close to Kyiv’s botanical gardens, and 6.7 kilometres from our hotel. Drone debris caused a fire and injuries, although thankfully no fatalities. Nationally, Russian strikes hit key energy infrastructure, intensifying the power blackouts that have become a fact of life across the country. But apart from a few sleepy faces and a long queue for the coffee machine, the audience here is energised to discuss and strategise on Ukraine’s future. On the opening panel on labour rights, the KVPU’s international organiser, Olesia Briazgunova, explains the war work of the trade union movement. “Our priority is keeping our members safe,” she says. “Our members work under fire, under shelling. They are railway workers and miners, they can’t always go to the shelters. We provide humanitarian aid, as well as mental health counselling to try and alleviate stress.” The mental health impact of war is something well-known but little discussed. “Our members are worried about their children being shelled in kindergarten and schools,” Briazgunova continues. “They are worried for loved ones on the frontlines.” Safety is not the only issue on the agenda. The panel is keen to emphasise the need to reform Ukraine’s labour laws to better protect workers’ rights. There is concern across the trade union movement that the war is being used as a cover to push Ukraine to a more neoliberal economy, where the markets and businesses are prioritised over workers and communities. For KVPU members fighting on the frontline, it is vital they return home to a country committed to human rights and democracy – not oligarchy. That desire for a new political system is expressed powerfully by Inna Mishura, a co-founder of the left-wing Narodovladdia party (which translates into English as People’s Power Party), labour rights activist, historian and teacher. The party, which was founded in 2020, is funded by membership donations – a first in Ukraine. While Mishura stood at a local election in Kyiv in 2020, there have been no national elections since 2019 due to the full-scale invasion. Party leader Yuri Levchenko, who was formerly a Rada member for the ultranationalist Svobada party, is keen to field candidates once an election is called, and is driven to, as he explains to me in his office, “build a real grassroots party for working people that will exist 100 years from now”. Having struggled to get Svoboda to adopt progressive economic policies, Levchenko set up his own party with a platform that includes fair taxation, workers’ rights, nationalisation of strategic infrastructure, and social housing, as well as a demand for democratic reform – demands that have become more urgent when Ukraine looks to reconstruction post-war. His shift from a far-right party to new-left may seem surprising but perhaps less so in a political climate where the established parties have long been tainted by corruption, or where the public perception of the traditional left is that it still has links to the communist past. This dissatisfaction partly explains Zelenskyy’s electoral success in 2019, when the electorate rejected the mainstream in favour of a former actor, whose best known political role was the president he had formerly played on TV. “It is also a common characteristic in Ukrainian nationalism, which as a nationalism of an historically oppressed people has often seen evolutions from conservative forms to radical and progressive politics,” said the co-founder of Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Chris Ford, who has authored of Ukapisme: A Lost Left and other books on Ukraine left wing political history. “The main issues we are campaigning on is a lack of social, economic justice and direct democracy,” Mishura tells openDemocracy. “Ukraine suffers from low trust in politicians, and there is a crisis of confidence and trust in politics. We need direct democracy so we can put power in people’s hands. That means, for example, giving communities the right to recall its elected officials, or having a referendum law that is actually effective. People are fighting for our country and after the war they want a new country, a progressive country.” One of those fighting is her husband, Ihor Tokovenko, another party co-founder who, like Levchenko, left Svobada to help establish a left-wing force in Ukraine. We meet in Narodovladdia’s Kyiv office, located in one of the most shell-damaged areas of the city. Unlike politicians’ offices in the UK, the rooms are packed with military and humanitarian aid that its members and volunteers collect to send to soldiers on the front and civilians living close to the frontlines. Much of the aid they collect goes to the 43rd artillery brigade, which played a decisive role in defending Kyiv during the first months of the full-scale invasion. Alongside the aid is a collection of wartime souvenirs sent as thank you gifts to Narodovladdia from the soldiers: empty tank shells and grenade casings, as well as a piece of shrapnel that pierced the office’s door and wall during an air raid. Tokovenko has been fighting in this war for nearly four years now. Like his wife, he believes that when the war ends, they have to build a new country – “one where we have social justice, and by that I mean economic justice, a welfare state. We want to be free of any form of imperialism. Right now, that means Russian imperialism, but we also mean American imperialism, too. I hope that when the war ends, we will have a truly workers-led government, one for the many and not the few.” When Levchenko's family arrives, we wrap up the interview and head out in the darkness. Kyiv vibrates to the thrum of generators, the city's new soundtrack. Inside a bar where we drink local beers in darkness, the only lights are battery-powered torches and a candle. Its holder? An empty grenade casing used in the battle for Bakhmut, a city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, which Russia has occupied since 2023. Today, Russia is intensifying its assault on Ukraine’s eastern regions. People I spoke to expressed fears that previously liberated territories are at risk of being recaptured and reoccupied. The killzone has expanded in recent weeks, and the nature of frontline fighting has changed, including in the long and brutal campaign for Pokrovsk, a city seen as crucial in defending Donetsk, where Russia’s use of drones and small storming groups of soldiers has led to it making significant advances. Speaking to The Guardian’s Luke Harding earlier this month, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said Moscow had thrown enormous forces into its Pokrovsk operation. “That’s the whole story,” he said. There is no [Russian] success there. And many casualties.” Zelenskyy urged allies in Europe to do more to support Ukraine to defeat Russia, saying “It’s never enough. It’s enough when the war ends. And enough when Putin understands that he has to stop.” He also warned The Guardian that the Russian president could launch further attacks on Europe, saying: “We must forget about the general European scepticism that Putin first wants to occupy Ukraine and then may go somewhere else. He can do both at the same time.” But as the war continues, and Ukraine faces an uncertain winter of blackouts and further losses, international attention has turned away, and diplomatic solutions have stalled. Many people remain unpersuaded or are sceptical of the wider threat to European security, and war fatigue means donations and support for the conflict’s victims have slowed down. It is now also being reported that US and Russian officials have been quietly drafting a peace plan that would require Kyiv to surrender territory and severely limit the size of its military. “We need the international community to pay attention to us and help us,” Prikhodko, the director of the Kharkiv sport college, insists. “So that we can continue the education and training of our student-athletes and, together with our trade unions, repel the Russian occupiers and bring Ukraine's victory closer.” Support our work As more and more news sites put up paywalls, we're keeping our journalism free for everyone to read. Instead of closing off what we do from people that can't afford to subscribe, we work with the support of a growing community of readers throughout the world. Together we've produced award-winning campaigning journalism that drives real change. If you value what we do, please back our work and help keep it free for everyone to read. Set up a regular donation today.

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