U nion leader Natalya Marynyuk is responsible for organising nearly 20,000 steelworkers casting iron every day at Kryvyi Rih’s massive blast furnaces. Located in the Metallurgical District, the 86-year-old Soviet-era facility lacks many modern mechanical processes, making the labour much more intense.

“It is tough work by hard people,” says Marynyuk, the local head of the Trade Union of the Metalworkers and Miners of Ukraine.

A short drive from the industrial complex, now operated by Luxembourg-Indian steel giant ArcelorMittal, is the nondescript high-rise housing complex where Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was raised by his parents, Oleksandr and Rymma, from his birth in 1978.

The 44-year-old’s metamorphosis from TV comic to anti-corruption politician, struggling president and now Churchillian superhero is already the stuff of legend: the daily

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