SEP Sri Lanka Congress resolution: Free Bogdan Syrotiuk!

17 September 2026facebook iconThe Fourth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka, held on September 11-13, unanimously passed the following resolution in support of the campaign to free Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Ukrainian socialist sentenced to 15 years in prison for opposing war. For more information on the campaign to free Bogdan, visit freebogdan.org.

1. This Fourth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka) declares that fighting for the release of Bogdan Syrotiuk, the Ukrainian socialist sentenced on August 11 to 15 years’ imprisonment for opposing the war, is a central political task of our party. Bogdan was convicted not for any act of espionage or sabotage but for his ideas — six articles published on the World Socialist Web Site. The verdict is a verdict against Trotskyism itself, and against the historical truth for which the Fourth International has been fighting since 1938.

2. The prosecution of Bogdan is inseparable from the Zelensky regime’s hostility to the working class and to the mounting anti-war sentiment within Ukraine. The regime rehabilitates the Nazi collaborator Bandera and the Waffen-SS Galicia Division as “national heroes”; it rules by martial law decree with elections canceled and opposition parties banned; it has filed more than 300,000 criminal cases against soldiers for desertion; and two-thirds of the population, by 2025, sought a negotiated end to the war. The sentencing of Bogdan is the regime’s attempt to terrorize this opposition — to demonstrate that opposition to the war carries such harsh penalties. In condemning Bogdan, the fascist court has laid bare the fraud of the “war for democracy” that justifies the NATO proxy war against Russia.

3. The Congress notes with the utmost seriousness the growing popular support for the campaign to free Bogdan, and the conspiracy of silence by which the capitalist media has responded to it. Workers and youth across the world — postal workers in Britain, Maruti Suzuki workers in India, workers in Australia, Germany, Sri Lanka and the United States, Eastern European immigrant workers, students and artists, historians — have demanded Bogdan’s release. Yet not one major Western news outlet has reported the case, and the WSWS itself has been banned in Ukraine. This is not an oversight. The media silence —aside from a handful who have dared to stand with the campaign — is the political protection of the Zelensky regime, and it is the clearest proof that the bourgeois media of every country, like the ruling classes they serve, stands with the fascist Ukrainian state against the working class. To break this silence is itself a revolutionary act.

4. The Congress therefore resolves that the campaign to free Bogdan is not a secondary or humanitarian task. It is the fight against the war in its most developed form, because it poses the central question — the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian workers against both regimes — in a concrete and winnable struggle. Every worker won to Bogdan's defense is won to the fight against war.

5. The Congress commits the party to the following tasks: to build the campaign in the factories and workplaces through rank-and-file committees and resolutions, independent of the pro-war trade union bureaucracies; to orient the campaign toward youth and students through the IYSSE; to expose the censorship and the silence of the media and the pseudo-left as political, not accidental; and to unite the campaign with the defense of democratic rights.

6. The Congress pledges to redouble all efforts to develop the campaign until Bogdan is free. His freedom will be won not by the courts of a fascist state, but by the mobilization of the international working class — the same force that alone can end the war and overthrow the regimes on both sides of it. Workers of Russia and Ukraine, unite!