UKRAINE’S Communist Party published an open letter to the peoples of Ukraine and Russia today, warning against the rise of fascism and of bids by the ruling elites in each country to turn their populations against one another.

Citing Julius Fucik, the Czechoslovak communist martyr hanged by the nazis in 1943, and his warning – “people, be careful!” – the party’s central committee urged a “co-ordinated struggle against the forces of neofascism, territorial nationalism and anti-communism” and for “a voice of protest against Russophobia and Ukrainophobia.”

It blamed media in both countries for pitting one populace against another and warned of “distortion and blackening of the history of Ukrainian-Russian friendship.”

After 2014’s US and EU-backed Maidan coup, “citizens of Ukraine themselves experienced what neofascism and neonazism are,” it said.

Since the coup, Ukraine has banned the Communist Party from participating in elections (in the last free elections it received over 13 per cent of the vote), outlawed communist symbols and torn down thousands of Soviet-era monuments, including those to Red Army soldiers killed fighting the nazi occupation. It has also rehabilitated nazi collaborators such as Stepan Bandera, whose Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles as part of the Holocaust.

Despite “neofascists burning down Communist Party offices in Kiev and the regions, more than 400 criminal cases filed against our members and neonazis beating up our comrades because we stand for peace in the Donbass and non-aligned status for Ukraine rather than turning it into a flaming bridgehead for Nato on the Russian border,” the party still maintained a membership of 40,000 “ideologically persistent fighters, ready for further battles for social justice, freedom and the brotherhood of workers and nations,” it declared.