You're reading: Ukrainian government trying to disqualify Communist Party from running in parliamentary election

The Ukrainian Communist Party believes the Ukrainian government is seeking to deprive the party of the opportunity to run in parliamentary elections, the party said in a statement on Wednesday, July 23.

The proceedings against the Communist Party at a Kyiv administrative
court “have been started at Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Chairman Oleksandr
Turchynov’s direct instructions,” the statement says.

“Psychological and physical pressure, reprisals in relation to the
party’s leaders and ordinary members, the ransacking of the offices of
its central and regional committees, acts of vandalism in relation to
monuments and commemorative plaques to outstanding figures of the past
and Great Patriotic War liberating soldiers, the unfolding of mad
anti-Communist psychosis, groundless accusations of the party of
unconstitutional actions, and the dissolution of the Communist Party’s
faction in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada – all these are preparations for
banning the party in the absence of any legal grounds for this,” the
statement says.

“All this shows that the rightist-nationalist regime has decided to
push until the end and, by banning the Communist Party, remove it from
running in parliamentary elections and preventing any leftist opposition
from being part of a new Verkhovna Rada composition,” it said.