UKRAINE needs to lift its ban on socialist newspaper Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers Newspaper) immediately, a leading international trade unionist says.

International Federation of Journalists deputy general secretary Jeremy Dear told the Morning Star today that the ban, confirmed by the Kiev District Administrative Court on Sunday, was “another sign of the growing intolerance towards alternative opinions in Ukraine.

“The ban should be immediately lifted and rights to freedom of expression must be respected,” he said.

The newspaper, which was founded in 1897, was targeted by the Ministry of Justice in spring.

Authorities cited articles which quoted Marx, Lenin and other communist writers as the reasoning for this clampdown.

Other justifications include the publication’s praise for the positive achievements of the socialism during the era of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

This commentary was found to have breached strict anti-communist laws brought in following the Maidan coup of 2014.

These laws prohibit communist symbols and positive depictions of the Soviet Union.

It was also attacked for publishing pieces critical of the rehabilitation of nazi collaborators in Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

The OUN organised massacres of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles during the nazi occupation of Ukraine.

Denying the “heroism” of the OUN is also now illegal.

The paper’s staff issued a statement saying that the overwhelming defeat of former president Petro Poroshenko in the last election showed voters rejected the “oligarch-nazi” agenda.

They said that the population also rejected the “social genocide” being carried out as a result of privatising reforms of the health, education and housing sectors.

They also said that the people had been “cheated” by the continuation of all the same policies by the Volodymyr Zelensky administration.

“In the end the change of personalities on the Olympus of power did not change the predatory nature of the regime in Ukraine,” the statement declared.

“That is why our Rabochaya Gazeta which before the neonazi coup of February 2014 and even more so afterwards acted as the real mouthpiece of workers and was therefore unwanted by the new ‘servants of the people.’

“We never avoided sharp corners and regularly published materials criticising the socio-economic policies of the oligarch clans.”

Staff said they would take the fight against the ban to the European Court of Human Rights.

“We call on all domestic and international human rights organisations to support the newspaper’s staff in this struggle and to show professional solidarity,” they said.