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On October 28, ZSP Warsaw organized two connected actions: one in front of the Russian Embassy and one in front of the Ukrainian. Although the message was somewhat different at both, we carried similar ideas there as well.

One of our main slogan was „Glory to Deserters” which is a detournement of the Polish patriotic slogan „Glory to Heroes”, which glories the military. We brought this slogan to the Russian Embassy where we strongly criticized Putin's war but also spoke of the many acts of desertion, sabotage and other resistance happening in Russian, despite risks of extreme repression. We yelled that Putin should end up like Nicholas II and that Putin was kaput. A couple of Russian dissidents also joined in with their anti-war message. Prior to the action we made it clear that everybody who was against the war was welcome at this demo, which was important to us because a few weeks ago, the self-ordained leader or the so-called women's strike again showed her deplorable attitude by heating up a pogrom-like atmosphere to chase Russians off a different demo. We had to make our opinion about that also known. We also expressed the opinion that Poland should open its borders to deserters who refuse to go to war in Ukraine and not discriminate against them,

After decrying the actions of the Russian government, we moved on to the Ukrainian Embassy. Here we had a few ideas from Ukrainian anarchists about what they wanted expressed. The first thing was the problem with not allowing assigned males to go abroad. We pointed out that this was probably affecting the poor more than anybody else, because plenty of people could not afford to become 30 year old students or pay bribes at the border to get into Poland, but some people are stuck. We also talked about how this was part of the patriarchal world view, that men are supposed to „man up” and fight.

While we were at the Embassy, we also talked about the fact that the government is taking advantage of this war to push through all sorts of reforms to the labor code that actually their neo-liberals have been trying to push for some time and finally found a pretext to do so.

We expressed solidarity with all the people who are suffering in the situation and called on people to organize. We also spoke about the problems of Ukrainian workers in Poland, who are finding themselves in a more and more desperate situation, with both unscrupulous bosses and landlords and called on them to organize themselves to stand up to this situation.

ZSP Warsaw