The Socialist Equality Party (UK) is holding a Zoom meeting on Wednesday, September 2, at 7pm on the case of Bogdan Syrotiuk and the socialist fight against the Ukraine war.

We invite readers of the World Socialist Web Site to register to attend. Our speakers will include Chris Marsden and Tom Scripps, the national and assistant national secretaries of the SEP (UK), and Johannes Stern, the German language editor of the WSWS and leading member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei.

27-year-old Bogdan was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment on August 10, 2026. He has been in pre-trial detention since his arrest in April 2024, charged with “high treason under martial law” based on six articles he wrote for the WSWS calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against the war.

Bogdan’s imprisonment explodes the lying NATO narrative presenting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a champion of “democracy”. Zelensky heads a martial law regime that has cancelled elections, banned opposition parties and criminalised left-wing and anti-war journalism and protest.

Syrotiuk’s articles exposed the far-right pedigree of this government, including its promotion of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators such as Stepan Bandera and his Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, perpetrators of the Holocaust.

As a leader of the Young Guard of Bolshevik Leninists (YGBL), a Trotskyist youth organisation affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International, Bogdan has courageously opposed both NATO’s proxy war and the reactionary Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has fought to unite workers and young people from Ukraine and Russia--killed and maimed in their thousands every month--on a socialist and internationalist platform.

This perspective is required by the working class of Europe and the world. Capitalist governments are carrying out major rearmament drives at the expense of social spending, discussing conscription and telling their populations to prepare for the disruption of vital infrastructure. A new era of imperialist violence and global war has begun.

Workers in Britain are being dragged towards a direct conflict with Russia by a Labour government which continues to supply Ukraine with the means to strike Russian domestic targets. It stages repeated provocations against a government whose representatives have warned the UK is “playing with fire”.

We encourage you to attend the SEP’s meeting to discuss Bogdan’s sentencing, the escalating NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, the warmongering role of Andy Burnham’s Labour government and the campaign to secure Syrotiuk’s freedom.

Register here to attend this vital discussion!

If you have not already, add your name to the petition at wsws.org/freebogdan and write letters of opposition to the Pervomaisk City District Court at inbox@pm.mk.court.gov.ua and the Nikolaev Court of Appeal at inbox@mka.court.gov.ua, with a copy to freebogdan@wsws.org.