Statement by the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA)
Sent to the Pervomaisk City District Court (inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua) and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal (inbox@mka.court.gov.ua), with a copy to the World Socialist Web Site (freebogdan@wsws.org)
Bogdan Syrotiuk, April 2023
The Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), fighting among the working class and youth to build the revolutionary leadership in South Asia, in solidarity with the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), condemns in the strongest terms the fascistic verdict handed down on August 10, 2026, by a district court in the Nikolaev region sentencing Bogdan Syrotiuk—a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist, opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, and leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists—to 15 years in prison on the charge of “high treason under martial law.” We demand the immediate annulment of this verdict and Bogdan’s unconditional release.
Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine on April 25, 2024, on the unsubstantiated allegation that he was an agent of the Russian state. More than two years later, not a shred of evidence has ever been produced for that claim. What was in fact placed before the court was a set of six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site and a 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” These writings called for the international unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war launched by the Putin regime and prosecuted as a US-NATO proxy conflict; they exposed the Zelensky government’s rehabilitation of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division; and they documented the dismantling of elections and opposition politics in Ukraine. None of this constitutes treason under any legal standard that retains a shred of meaning. It is political speech, protected in principle by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which Ukraine is a signatory.
The state’s own forensic institutions could not sustain the case. A 65-page report by the veteran Ukrainian criminologist Yuri Irkhin found nothing in Bogdan’s writings amounting to propaganda for Russian aggression. When the court ordered a second, state-directed examination in the hope of a different result, even that body could identify no call for the overthrow of the government, no advocacy of the seizure of power, and no support for the alteration of Ukraine’s borders. The court disregarded its own experts. It disregarded the defense. It disregarded the law. What was handed down on August 10 was not a judicial verdict but a political directive from the Zelensky regime, aimed—as the judgment itself half-admits in citing the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions—not at any act of espionage but at the growth of antiwar sentiment among Ukrainian workers and soldiers. Opinion polling in 2025 found 69 percent of Ukrainians favoring a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal from 2022, while more than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against Ukrainian soldiers for desertion since the invasion began. It is this mounting revolt from below, not any threat from Moscow, that the Zelensky dictatorship is moving to suppress through the imprisonment of Bogdan Syrotiuk.
The character of the regime that has produced this verdict must be stated plainly. Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024. He rules today, more than two years later, by decree, under martial law, with elections suspended indefinitely. Communist parties and symbols have been banned since 2015. In 2022 the government suspended eleven opposition parties, subsequently banning outright the largest opposition bloc in parliament. The World Socialist Web Site itself has been blocked inside Ukraine since June 2024. Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, laws that Human Rights Watch has described as dangerously broad and vague, under which people who performed emergency services, construction and garbage removal in occupied territory have been prosecuted as traitors. The United Nations Human Rights Office reported as recently as September 2025 that it continues to document torture and ill-treatment of detainees in Ukrainian custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee has described conditions in Ukrainian pretrial facilities as potentially inhuman and degrading. A fifteen-year sentence inside this system, for a defendant whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest and who has for over a year been denied urgently needed medical care, is nothing less than a sentence of death by degrees.
We in Sri Lanka and South Asia have no difficulty recognizing this method of rule, because we have lived through its variants ourselves. The Sri Lankan state waged a communal civil war for decades under the banner of “national security,” using laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act to criminalize dissent, hold detainees without trial, and, in the war’s final phase, to carry out mass atrocities against the Tamil population that the state and its apologists continue to deny to this day. The Dissanayake-led JVP-NPP government, which came to power promising a break from this history, has instead deepened the IMF-dictated austerity program inherited from its predecessors, maintained the repressive apparatus of the state largely intact, and continued to suppress the democratic and social rights of workers, plantation labor, students, and the Tamil and Muslim minorities. Across South Asia, from the communal-nationalist project of Hindutva in India to military and civilian authoritarianism elsewhere in the region, the ruling classes respond to deepening economic crisis and mass social opposition not with concessions but with the criminalization of left-wing and antiwar politics. The persecution of Bogdan Syrotiuk is a sharp expression of a universal tendency of capitalism in its terminal, imperialist stage: as war and austerity generate irrepressible opposition from below, the ruling classes everywhere reach for dictatorship.
This is why the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk cannot be treated as a matter internal to Ukraine, to be left to the discretion of a court system that has already demonstrated, in the words of the World Socialist Web Site, its fascist contempt for the most basic democratic rights. It is a test for the international working class as a whole, including the working class and youth of Sri Lanka and South Asia. The imperialist powers that have armed and financed the Zelensky regime throughout this war—the United States above all, alongside the NATO powers and their allies—bear direct political responsibility for a war being escalated toward direct confrontation with Russia and, ultimately, toward a wider conflagration that already touches Iran, Venezuela, Lebanon and the flashpoints of the Indo-Pacific. Workers in Sri Lanka and across South Asia have a direct stake in this fight, both because the same imperialist powers that bankroll repression in Kyiv dictate the terms of austerity and militarization pursued by our own governments, and because the defense of Bogdan Syrotiuk is inseparable from the defense of the right of socialists everywhere—including in Colombo, Jaffna, Mumbai, Dhaka, Karachchi, and every other city of this region—to organize the working class against war, communalism and capitalist exploitation without fear of imprisonment.
Bogdan Syrotiuk’s only crime was to tell the truth: that this is an imperialist war, that Ukrainian and Russian workers share a common class enemy in their respective ruling classes, and that the celebration of Nazi collaborators as national heroes is a crime against historical memory. For this he faces fifteen years prison sentence. A 15-year sentence in Ukraine’s prison system, where overcrowding, denial of medical care, and deaths in custody are documented by the Council of Europe and the United Nations, is a death sentence. Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year. He suffers from diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and the prison administration’s deliberate refusal to provide dental treatment — causing him severe, unrelenting pain — risks chronic infections that, left untreated, can lead to sepsis and death. Every day he remains behind bars is a threat to his life.
We call on the Pervomaisk City District Court and the Mykolaiv Court of Appeal to annul this verdict without delay and to order Bogdan Syrotiuk’s immediate and unconditional release. We call on workers, students, trade unionists, lawyers, intellectuals, artists and all defenders of democratic rights in Sri Lanka and throughout South Asia to take up this case as their own: to pass resolutions in their unions, workplaces, universities and organizations demanding Bogdan’s freedom, and to join the international campaign being built by the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Overturn the verdict. Free Bogdan Syrotiuk now!
Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), in solidarity with the international socialist perspective of the International Committee of the Fourth International
theSocialist.lk republishes the following statement by the WSWS Editorial Board published on WSWS.org on 10 August 2026. We call upon our readers to join the fight to ensure the immediate and unconditional release of Syrotiuk.
Bogdan Syrotiuk
On August 10, Bogdan Syrotiuk, a 27-year-old Ukrainian socialist and opponent of the US-NATO war against Russia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The verdict, handed down by a district court in the Nikolaev region, also orders the confiscation of his property and electronic devices and the destruction of the socialist books, leaflets and programmatic documents taken from him.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International denounce this verdict and call on workers, young people and all defenders of democratic rights around the world to demand Bogdan’s immediate release.
The verdict will be immediately appealed. Under Ukrainian law, the appeal must be filed within 30 days. We call on all supporters of democratic rights to back these legal actions and call for the annulment of the sentence.
Bogdan, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists (YGBL), was convicted of “high treason … under martial law.” But the record of the case contains no act of treason—no espionage, no sabotage, no collaboration with any military force. The sole evidence presented against him consisted of his writings, published on the World Socialist Web Site, and his communications with the editors who published them.
The state’s experts examined 14 of Bogdan’s writings and included seven in the indictment. The court was then forced to drop one of the seven—an article on the military commissariats’ violent seizure of draft dodgers—after its own forensic commission could find nothing criminal in it. Bogdan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for six articles.
What was the subversive content? According to the court, the articles contained “non-recognition of Ukraine’s legitimately elected political leadership and democratic processes,” “comparisons with fascists and Nazis,” “negative assessments of Ukraine’s Armed Forces” and “reinterpretation of national heroes and historical figures.”
In fact, everything written by Bogdan is politically and historically accurate. The “legitimately elected political leadership” is a president whose term of office expired in May 2024. Zelensky remains in power more than two years past his legal mandate, ruling by decree under a state of permanent martial law. Elections have been canceled and basic democratic rights suspended. Bogdan has been convicted of failing to recognize “democratic processes” in a country where no democratic processes exist. His is a verdict handed down by a regime of illegality.
As for the “national heroes” whom Bogdan is accused of “reinterpreting,” they are Stepan Bandera and the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division—Nazi collaborators who supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and were implicated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. The court’s complaint about “comparisons with fascists and Nazis” refers to Bogdan’s exposure of the official rehabilitation and celebration of these forces.
Among the “proofs” of treason cited by the court are Bogdan’s article “The crimes of the Banderovites against the Ukrainian people: Notes by a Ukrainian Trotskyist” and his 2023 May Day speech, “For the Unity of the Working Class of Russia and Ukraine!” In any country where democratic rights retain the slightest meaning, such writings are protected speech. In Ukraine under Zelensky, they carry a 15-year sentence.
When Bogdan was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on April 25, 2024, the state claimed he was functioning as an agent of the Russian government. In the more than two years since, nothing was produced to substantiate that libelous allegation. In fact, the articles that are cited in the conviction make explicit Bogdan’s opposition to the Russian invasion and the Putin regime.
The verdict refers several times to the “socially dangerous consequences” of Bogdan’s positions. This exposes the fact that the prosecution of Bogdan is not about the manufactured pretext of support for Russia. Rather, it is aimed at the growing opposition to war and the Zelensky regime among Ukrainian workers and youth.
The evidence presented in Bogdan’s defense was never answered. A 65-page report by Yuri Irkhin, one of Ukraine’s leading criminologists, found in Bogdan’s writings no “statements, phrases, sentences, or word combinations that have signs of propaganda aimed at supporting the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” Rather than respond to it, the court ordered a new examination from a state forensic institute—which, even so, found in the articles no calls for the overthrow of the state, the seizure of power, subversive acts or the alteration of Ukraine’s borders.
The defense established that nothing in the record made out the elements of treason, and that Bogdan’s writings were political speech protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court swept all of this aside.
The verdict was not the outcome of a legal proceeding but the execution of a political directive from the Zelensky dictatorship. It states that Bogdan acted “on instructions from a representative of the World Socialist Web Site, under the pseudonym ‘David’”—identified in the judgment itself as David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS. The Ukrainian state is asserting the power to declare international socialist and antiwar publications criminal enterprises, and collaboration with them treason.
The decision to destroy the YGBL’s program, its brochures, leaflets and folders of printed articles exposes the real content of the verdict. The methods are those of fascist regimes: imprison the opposition, confiscate its materials, burn its writings. The court even ordered Bogdan to pay more than 178,000 hryvnia to cover the cost of the forensic “examinations” used to convict him.
The sentencing of Bogdan takes place in a country in which left-wing politics has been outlawed. Communist parties and symbols have been banned in Ukraine since the “decommunization” laws of 2015. In 2022, the Zelensky government suspended 11 opposition parties, including the largest opposition party in parliament, which was subsequently banned outright.
Some 20,000 criminal cases have been opened under Ukraine’s treason and collaboration statutes, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office, which reported in September 2025 that it “continues to document cases of torture and ill-treatment” of detainees held by the Ukrainian state. Human Rights Watch describes the collaboration laws as “overly broad and vague”; among those prosecuted are people who carried out “emergency services, construction, humanitarian relief and garbage removal” in occupied territory.
The World Socialist Web Site has been banned in Ukraine since June 6, 2024, six weeks after Bogdan’s arrest.
All of this has been buried and concealed from the public by the government and media outlets that claim the war is being waged in defense of Ukrainian democracy.
The frame-up of Bogdan is the act of a desperate regime. Opposition to the war is mounting within Ukraine itself. More than 300,000 criminal cases have been opened against soldiers for desertion or absence without leave since 2022, the majority of them in the past year. In 2025, 69 percent of Ukrainians told Gallup that the country should seek a negotiated end to the war, a complete reversal of opinion since 2022. Terrified of the growth of antiwar sentiment among workers and soldiers, the Zelensky government is intensifying repression at home while working to create the framework for the direct entry of the NATO powers into the war.
A sentence of 15 years in a Ukrainian prison is the equivalent of a death sentence. The conditions in Ukraine’s penitentiary system are well documented. At the United Nations Committee Against Torture’s review of Ukraine in April 2025, experts cited overcrowding, inadequate access to food and water, the absence of independent medical examinations and a rising toll of deaths in custody. The Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee, reporting on its October 2023 visit to Ukraine, described decaying facilities in which remand prisoners are confined to their cells for up to 23 hours a day and found conditions in one pretrial detention center so degraded that it judged them potentially “inhuman and degrading.”
Bogdan, whose health was already poor at the time of his arrest, has been denied urgently needed medical treatment for over a year, despite repeated promises from the prison administration. Every day behind bars is a threat to his life.
His fate cannot be left to the courts of a state that has just demonstrated its fascist contempt for democratic rights. Bogdan’s freedom will be won by the mobilization of the international working class, youth and all progressive organizations and individuals dedicated to the defense of democratic rights. We appeal to workers, trade unions, student and youth organizations, civil liberties groups, and socialist and anti-war movements in every country: Take up Bogdan’s case. Pass resolutions in your workplaces, unions, schools and universities demanding his release. Issue public statements of protest.
Send statements demanding the overturning of the verdict and Bogdan’s immediate release to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua, with copies to the World Socialist Web Site at freebogdan@wsws.org.
The fight to free Bogdan Syrotiuk is a fight against imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism. Fill out the form below to get involved.
Human remains marked no. 429, uncovered on 19 July 2026 at the Chemmani mass grave. Image courtesy of Kumanan Kana.
A skeleton (429th) excavated yesterday (19) — Day 37 of Phase 3 of the excavation at the Chemmani mass grave — was found buried in a sitting position: legs folded, arms resting on the lap, body oriented toward the northeast. This is the second such discovery. An identical posture was found in the 227th skeleton during Phase 2 in 2025. None of these findings became news for any of the established media stations in the South.
Someone buried this person with deliberate, specific orientation. That detail is a wound that refuses to close.
Chemmani-Sittupatti is now Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including 18 children, six of them infants. Excavations began only because construction workers accidentally struck bones while digging a crematorium foundation in February 2025. The dead literally surfaced from beneath the earth.
The graves trace back to 1995–96, when the Sri Lankan army retook Jaffna. An army corporal convicted for the rape and murder of Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy confessed in court in 1998: hundreds of Tamil civilians — “suspects,” abductees, the disappeared — were executed and secretly buried here on the orders of senior military officers. Warrants were eventually issued for seven military personnel. All were released on bail. By 2004, the entire case was quietly interred.
For nearly three decades, successive governments — UNP, PA, SLFP, UNP again, SLPP, and now the JVP/NPP which celebrated the 2009 military “victory” — have guaranteed one thing above all else: impunity for the killers.
Today the JVP Justice Minister visits the site (19 June), faces hundreds of protesters demanding truth and accountability, and walks past them to promise justice “within two years.” But the obscenity does not end there. After standing at Sri Lanka’s largest mass grave — over 400 skeletal remains, including the bones of infants — the minister, answering questions from people at a meeting held at the Jaffna Divisional Secretariat Office publicly cast doubt on whether Chemmani is even a mass grave at all, suggesting it may simply be a normal graveyard. He stated, “first of all, it is a cemetery, cause of death of bones should be inspected, and complaints are required before we can proceed with DNA identification”. This is not confusion. This is not ignorance. With 400 dead beneath the soil of a Hindu cremation ground, with six infants among them, with bodies buried in clusters at a depth of barely 1.6 feet, with a convicted army corporal’s sworn court testimony naming senior officers who ordered the killings — to call this a “normal graveyard” is the language of a cover-up. It is the language of impunity spoken in plain sight.
And it could not be more fitting that it comes from a minister of the JVP — the very party that spent the entire 26-year war waging a communalist campaign for military victory, that actively strengthened the hand of Rajapaksa whose forces committed the documented atrocities now being disinterred from this earth, and that celebrated the 2009 “triumph” despite the killing of 40,000 Tamil civilians. This is the same government that halted Phase 2 excavations for eight months by refusing to release funds, that maintains over 100,000 troops occupying the North and East, and that rejected the UN Human Rights Council’s call for an international war crimes investigation just last year. The minister’s doubt is not incidental — it is the government’s policy, expressed without shame.
And Chemmani is not alone. Mannar. Thiruketheeswaram. Kokkuthoduvai. Kalavanchikudy. The North and East are a landscape of unmarked graves.
No justice will come from this capitalist state — not under the JVP, not under the UNP, not under the SLFP, not under any formation of the Sinhala bourgeoisie whose entire political order was built on anti-Tamil communalism. Nor will justice come from Tamil nationalist parties that appeal to the same “international community” — Washington, London, Brussels — that armed, trained, funded and politically backed the Sri Lankan military throughout the war, then looked away as 40,000 died in the Vanni in 2009. These same imperialist powers are today backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
And let there be no illusion: justice is equally owed for the crimes of the LTTE and its breakaway factions — the forced recruitment of child soldiers, the assassination of Tamil political opponents, the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the north, the bombings of Sinhala civilians. Those crimes too will never be honestly reckoned with under a capitalist order in which the Tamil bourgeoisie has its own interest in suppressing any genuinely independent working-class accounting of the war.
The sitting skeleton, legs folded, arms at rest, facing northeast — buried in haste by soldiers following orders, covered up for thirty years by generals protected by presidents — is a testament to what capitalism produces when it governs a multi-ethnic society divided against itself.
The buried will will not stay buried. But justice will not emerge from within this system.
It will come only when Tamil and Sinhala and Muslim workers unite — not behind any bourgeois party, not behind the imperialist “international community” — but in a common struggle to overthrow the capitalist order that made Chemmani possible, and to build a Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam.
