Why Stop the War and No2NATO lie about the 2014 deaths at Odesa

Part 4 of “With Washington and Moscow”

A Your Party WhatsApp group, late last week. The screenshot drops into the thread without comment: orange, distressed type, three faces ranged along the bottom edge. IN MEMORY OF THOSE KILLED IN THE ODESSA MASSACRE. May 2nd, 2pm, Ukrainian Embassy, 60 Holland Park, London W11 3SJ. One of the members types: isn’t he one of ours?

He being Chris Williamson, third face on the right. Former Labour MP, current deputy leader of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, and, since last autumn, a Your Party member.

The poster says what it says. ‘Commemorate those martyred in the Odessa Massacre 2014 by Ukrainian neo-Nazis.’ Stale words of denunciation that have replaced argument. The poster does not argue the case. The poster asserts the case as already settled, and it asserts it on behalf of No2NATO, the Workers Party, and the wider conservative-left orbit that has spent twelve years preserving a version of events that the documentary record does not support.

The middle face is the giveaway. Jesse Winney, listed openly as UK coordinator of the World Youth Festival (Russia). The 2024 festival was held in Sochi by direct decree of Vladimir Putin, organised by the Russian state youth agency Rosmolodezh, and timed to anchor mobilisation around the March 2024 presidential election that returned Putin for a fifth term. Putin gave the opening speech. The Workers Party sent a delegation; Galloway has since moved to Russia in what Wikipedia, with admirable blandness, calls ‘self-imposed exile’. Listing your Sochi affiliation on a campaign poster outside the Ukrainian embassy is not a CV oversight. It is a political statement about who the commemoration is for and on whose terms.

This piece is about the lie at the centre of the commemoration. A second piece next week will trace where the lie was first published in Britain, and who did the publishing. This one is about why it is still being repeated.

What the poster claims, and what happened

The 2 May Civic Investigation Group, an independent body of Odesa journalists and forensic analysts, has spent more than a decade reconstructing the day from video, witness testimony, and forensic reports. The European Court of Human Rights ratified the broad outline of their findings in March 2025, and ordered Ukraine to pay €114,700 in compensation to survivors and victims’ families.

The sequence is a matter of judicial record.

A pro-Unity march of around 1,500 people, including football fans from the Chornomorets-Metalist fixture, gathered at Soborna Square in central Odesa on the afternoon of 2 May 2014. They were attacked by an organised group of around 300 to 400 Anti-Maidan activists drawn primarily from the Odesskaya Druzhina, identifiable by red armbands. Stones, Molotov cocktails, firearms. A militant named Vitaliy Budko, known as Botsman, was filmed firing a Kalashnikov-style automatic weapon from behind a police cordon. The deputy head of the local police, Dmitry Fuchedzhi, later fled to the Russian-held territories. Six people died in the city-centre fighting: two pro-Unity activists and four Anti-Maidan activists.

Only then did the unity crowd, pursued from the square and now numbering in the thousands, push toward the Anti-Maidan tent camp at Kulikove Pole. The Anti-Maidan activists, outnumbered and aware that the police facilitation they had counted on was breaking down, retreated into the House of Trade Unions, which they had previously fortified for defence. Molotovs went both directions. Barricades of combustible materials inside the lobby caught fire. The central staircase acted as a chimney. Forty-two people died in the building, most by carbon monoxide poisoning. The 2 May Group concluded that it was impossible to determine the precise source of the fatal fire.

The collusion runs the opposite direction from the commemoration’s claim. Police facilitated the Anti-Maidan attack on the unity march. They allowed Botsman to fire from behind their lines. The dead in the Trade Unions building died because the political project they belonged to had bet on state collusion that broke when the consequences arrived. That isn’t a defence of the deaths. Forty-two people in a fire is a horror regardless of who fortified the building. It is a defence of cause and effect.

The 2017 prosecution of nineteen defendants, all acquitted for insufficient evidence, is treated by the Workers Party as proof of a fascist regime sheltering its killers. The actual record: prosecution attempted, evidence contested, defendants acquitted under the rule of law, the suspects who would have mattered most in court now in Moscow. The Strasbourg ruling against the Ukrainian state is not the ruling the Workers Party wants. They want Odesa as Khatyn. They have, at most, Odesa as Hillsborough plus armed gangs.

That is the documentary record. The poster is not a different reading of it. The poster is its inversion.

Why Stop the War and No2NATO repeat the inversion

Strip the inversion out of the architecture and the rest collapses. Without the founding atrocity, Maidan is not a fascist coup; it is a popular uprising the campist position has spent twelve years refusing to engage with on Ukrainian terms. Without the Khatyn analogy, the comparison of Russian aggression to NATO aggression becomes too embarrassing to make in public. Without forty-two trade unionists burned alive by fascists, the British conservative left has to confront what Ukrainian socialists, the actual ones, the ones in Sotsialnyi Rukh and the KVPU and on the front line, are saying about the war they are fighting.

That confrontation is what Holland Park exists to avoid. The annual commemoration is not really commemoration. It is the licensing ritual for everything else: the silence on Russian deportations of Ukrainian children, the refusal to engage with the independent Ukrainian unions, the recycling of Mearsheimer in red paint. Twelve years of Holland Park has been organised so the conversation with Yuliya Yurchenko of the KVPU never has to happen.

Stop the War knows this. Chris Nineham, its joint chair, wrote the British template in a March 2015 review of Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine, still hosted on the Stop the War website. The review told readers the Odesa deaths numbered ‘a minimum of 48, many hundreds according to locals’. The official figure was forty-eight. It has stayed forty-eight through the 2 May Group’s decade of reconstruction, the 2017 trial, and the 2025 European Court ruling. The ‘many hundreds’ figure has no source other than the unnamed locals Sakwa cited and Nineham repeated. It is the casualty figure of the campist imagination, propagated through Stop the War’s website to the British trade union left, and never withdrawn.

The same review described the building as if it had simply caught fire, with no agent named, even though the 2 May Group’s evidence of Molotov cocktails thrown from inside the building as well as outside was already in the public domain by 2015. The Workers Party flyer is the bare conclusion of an argument Stop the War made eleven years ago and has chosen, repeatedly, not to update.

Taras Bilous, a Ukrainian socialist, editor of Commons, member of Sotsialnyi Rukh, and a serving soldier in the Territorial Defence Forces since the first day of the full-scale invasion, named the operation in his open letter to the Western left in February 2022. He wrote about those who ‘exaggerated the influence of the far-Right in Ukraine’ and avoided criticising the authoritarianism of Putin’s regime. He named it three days into the invasion. The operation has continued without interruption.

Williamson, the bar, and Your Party

Williamson joined Your Party last autumn. At the November founding conference in Liverpool, the interim leadership briefly expelled him on the mistaken grounds that he was a member of the SWP. He was reinstated within hours. In January, when CEC nominations opened, he was barred from standing on the firmer footing that he leads a party registered with the Electoral Commission to contest elections under its own name. He ran on a slate organised by Republic YP, a platform inside Your Party that defended his candidacy on procedural-democratic grounds. The new CEC took office on 28 February. It has not, in the two months since, approved any other party as compatible with Your Party membership. The dual-membership question that the founding conference voted on, by 69.2 per cent to 30.8 per cent, remains, in the language of the election rules, conditional. Williamson is barred from standing for office. He is not barred from membership.

Four months later he is headlining a commemoration co-organised by the Workers Party and No2NATO, beside an organiser of the Russian state’s youth festival, asserting on a poster that what happened in Odesa was a massacre carried out by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. The bar acknowledged the problem. It declined to act on it.

Republic YP’s defence of Williamson’s right to stand is the argument any genuinely democratic socialist organisation owes its members. They wrote: ‘The issue here is democracy, not whether comrades agree or disagree.’ They were right about the procedural point. They were also explicit that the CEC, once elected, would determine which other parties are eligible for dual membership. The CEC has had that remit since 28 February. It has not used it. Holland Park is the question the CEC’s silence cannot keep ignoring.

Two o’clock on Saturday

Three speakers. A poster that asserts what it does not argue, beside an organiser whose other affiliation is to the Russian state’s youth-diplomacy operation. Behind the closed embassy gates, the country whose existence the commemoration is organised to deny. Twelve million displaced. Tens of thousands of children deported. Independent trade unions still organising under martial law against the wartime erosion of labour rights, while the war continues into its fifth year.

The lie at Holland Park is not a difference of opinion about a contested event. The 2 May Group has reconstructed the day. Strasbourg has ruled. The documentary record contradicts the poster. The conservative left repeats the poster anyway, because the architecture it has built around the lie cannot survive the truth.

Whatever Your Party decides about it, the Ukrainian embassy will be closed, and the country it represents will not be in the room.

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About this series

“With Washington and Moscow” examines how a section of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documents the settlement terms, traces the political trajectory of organisations that enabled this outcome, amplifies Ukrainian socialist voices, and argues for an internationalism that sides with the oppressed against all imperialisms.

All parts of the series will be posted at “With Washington and Moscow”

Next week: how the lie was first published in Britain, who published it, and how the international tendency that did the publishing has now, at its 2025 congress, repudiated itself.