In Ukraine, “the Left” remains a difficult political object. It is burdened by its association with the Soviet past, by the delegitimation of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Socialist Party of Ukraine throughout the 2010s until their eventual ban in 2022, and by its historical entanglement with pro-Russian political networks linked to the Party of Regions. These legacies are compounded by the long-standing failure, since the 1990s, to consolidate durable progressive or political ecology movements within the partisan field. In a context shaped by war and acute geopolitical polarisation, left-wing party identities have thus become politically marginal—if not outright toxic.
Drawing on ongoing fieldwork combining semi-structured interviews and open-source cartography of civil society networks conducted since 2022, this paper argues that while “the Left” struggles to exist as a partisan category, many of its ideological markers have re-emerged outside the formal political spectrum. Humanitarian action, volunteer networks, cultural initiatives, and grassroots solidarity practices articulate claims around social protection, care, environmental justice, and the recognition of gender rights and sexual minorities. Echoing observations made about self-defence movements and civic mobilisation after 2014, the Ukrainian wartime case points to a displacement of leftist politics from parties to civil society, highlighting how war reshapes both the spaces and the modalities through which progressive ideas can be publicly expressed. At the same time, the paper shows how some of the most active figures within these networks express deep ambivalence toward the prospect of entering the electoral arena after the war, raising questions about the conditions under which these forms of mobilisation might—or might not—translate into partisan organisation.
