[Sharing] « Busification » and social struggles in Ukraine

Marta Havryshko replies to Meaghan Mobbs on X

Meaghan Mobbs, the daughter of retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, Donald Trump’s former special envoy for Ukraine, calls me a “Marxist” because I criticize Ukraine’s busification that disproportionately shifts the human burden of this war onto poor and working-class Ukrainian men.

They are expected to pay for the geopolitical ambitions and military calculations of political elites with the only currency they possess: their bodies and their lives.

So let’s talk about Class.

Let’s ask whether class really has nothing to do with this war — or whether dismissing class is considerably easier when you happen to occupy the right one.

⟶ Meaghan is the daughter of a powerful American general who advised a U.S. president.

I am the daughter of a driver and construction worker who spent his life doing hard physical labor so that I could get a university education in Ukraine. Today, he survives in Ukraine on a pension of roughly $80 a month.

⟶ Meaghan runs several foundations and organizations, with publicly reported compensation reaching into millions of dollars a year.

I was a professor at Clark University, earning roughly $73,000 a year. I do not own a car — something that, in much of the US, is less a luxury than a survival tool. My son takes the school bus. Once a year, his school gives him a Food Stamp gift card through a program for children from low-income families.

⟶ Meaghan is an American citizen and a member of the American establishment. I am a Ukrainian citizen in the United States — a refugee, an Eastern European immigrant, and a mother.

While she speaks about sacrifice, I live with death threats from Ukrainian neo-Nazis with ties to American neo-Nazis — threats serious enough that the FBI and state police advised me not to open suspicious mail.

Perhaps this is “Marxism”. Or perhaps it is simply arithmetic.

But nowhere is the arithmetic of class more brutal than in war.

Every relative of mine who has been killed in this war came from the working class. They had no money, connections, foreign passports, prestigious surnames, or means to buy distance from the front.

So they went.
Now they are in the ground.

Their kids are growing up without fathers. Their wives are living without husbands. Their families will carry the consequences long after the people who speak most enthusiastically about sacrifice have moved on to another conference, another panel, another strategic objective.

And we are told this is “heroic.”

Of course it is heroic. The courage of the men who fight and die is not what I question. What I question is the obscenity of a political order that turns the heroism of people with the fewest choices into a renewable strategic resource.

It is remarkably easy to demand more heroes when someone else supplies the corpses.

That is the class question at the heart of this war.

Who gets to formulate the grand strategy, and who gets dragged into a van? Who speaks about “victory” and a “just peace” from Washington offices, conference stages, and well-funded institutions — and who leaves a widow and children behind in a Ukrainian village? Who gets a salary, a title, and a platform for explaining why the war must continue, and who gets a military funeral?

Those are not Marxist questions.

They are moral questions.

And calling the person who asks them a “Marxist” is a convenient way of avoiding the answers.

There is something particularly grotesque about affluent members of the foreign-policy class romanticizing the sacrifice of working-class Ukrainians. They speak reverently of courage, resilience, heroism, and the necessity of continued sacrifice. Yet the “sacrifice” remains curiously abstract because it is almost always somebody else’s.

Someone else’s father.
Someone else’s husband.
Someone else’s son.
Someone else’s grave.

The people whose lives become units in geopolitical calculations have names, families, mortgages, frightened children, aging parents, unfinished kitchens, ordinary jobs, and plans for next summer.

Their lives are not cheap because they are poor. Their deaths do not become morally inexpensive simply because someone in Washington, London, or Brussels can fit them into a theory of deterrence.

And this is precisely why class matters.

It matters because wars may be described in the universal language of nations, democracy, security, sovereignty, and justice, while their costs are distributed with extraordinary inequality.

Some people debate war.
Other people become its raw material.

So yes, Meaghan, let’s talk about class.

Because before asking Ukraine for another generation of “heroes,” perhaps the people making that demand should be required to look directly at who is actually being asked to die — and to explain why the lives of men they will never meet should remain the cheapest available currency for purchasing their preferred version of a “just peace” [end]

The original article

Marta Havryshko is a US-based author and researcher focused on Ukrainian nationalism, the far Right and the Russia-Ukraine war. She is holding a PhD in history from the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Ukraine.

Meaghan Mobbs is a clinical psychologist and non-governmental organization leader. She is the daughter of retired general Keith Kellogg, former Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, who as young officer, was also defeated in Vietnam.

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