Bogdan Syrotiuk is serving fifteen years in Ukraine for treason, under a verdict of the Pervomaisk City and District Court of 10 August 2026 published in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions as case 484/5921/24. I oppose the conviction and support his appeal. He was convicted for publications and for nothing else, which makes him a political prisoner, and the charge itself was a choice: Ukraine has a statute for justifying Russian aggression, Article 436-2, carrying at most eight years, and its wording is the wording the state’s own experts used about his articles. The prosecutors reached past it for Article 111, which begins at fifteen years and runs to life.
His politics are campist and wrong. He put the origin of the war in Washington, called 2014 a coup, and described the Kyiv regime as a co-author of a third world war. None of that is treason and none of it should cost a man his twenties.
But the International Committee’s account of the case does not match the court record, and the mismatch has been left standing for two years. Its statement on the verdict says the sole evidence against him was his writings. The judgment also records that Syrotiuk solicited and received a monthly payment from a person it calls ОСОБА_29; that his articles were edited with the participation of citizens of the Russian Federation; and that Russian army equipment and an FSB souvenir were seized from a basement in Pervomaisk, as Intent reported from the hearing.
Here is what is unusual. Ukrainian treason judgments name the paymaster when the prosecution has found one. They name the FSB, they name GRU officers, they record how the money moved. This one names the World Socialist Web Site on almost every page, identifies two of its representatives, and then attaches no description whatever to the person paying. Nor does it place the Russian editors.
So the question is elementary. Was the International Committee employing and supporting its own representative in Ukraine, which would be unremarkable, or was somebody else, whom it cannot account for?
That question does not change what we call Bogdan Syrotiuk. He would be in that cell whoever was paying him. What it changes is what we make of an international that has money and hands supporting its Ukrainian operation whose provenance it will not state.
Asked directly, the ICFI replied that the asking serves the interests of NATO. They of all people should know better. In 1985 their own Control Commission opened the books of their British section and found more than a million pounds from Libya, Kuwait, Iraq and others, taken over nine years without the International’s knowledge, and it deformed that section’s politics beyond repair. They wrote the definitive account of what unexamined money does to a movement.
They can close this in one sentence. They have had two years, and they have chosen the ambiguity instead.