This is all shameful nonsense! We, and I personally, know comrade Maksym
Syrotiuk from our solidarity convoys to Ukraine in 2022 and met him
twice. He is a very young (early 20s) student and has been an activist
of Socialni Rukh. For the reactionary Ukrainian state apparatus
everything socialist or communist ist "Russian" so there is no reason to
believe them. This is like Chiang Kai-check (or Stalinists) accusing the
Chinese Trotskyists as "agents of Japan" in the 1930s and 1940s. It
should be not so difficult for democrats, not to speak about Marxists,
to take a principled stance of solidarity with comrade Maksym Syrotiuk!
Am 27.08.2026 um 14:35 schrieb John Reimann via groups.io:
There is a back and forth discussion between Pirani and me in the
comment section of his article. Pirani may have a valid point about
freedom of speech in Ukraine, but overall he portrays the view that is
all too common on the non-campist left that the "left" Putin
apologists and us are all part of one family and that we're basically
all on the same team. In his article Pirani writes "It beggars belief
that the Russian state would be stupid enough to fund the WSWS, or
that the WSWS would be stupid enough to accept that funding. In any
case, Syrotiuk would have known nothing about such arrangements."
No, it doesn't beggar the imagination at all. Code Pink and PSL
receive large amounts of money from the Chinese Communist
Party-connected Roy Singham and the African Peoples Socialist Party
got money from Aleksandr Ionov. Those are just the above board cases.
An important part of Putin's strategy is to have agents and assets all
around the political spectrum, and given the position of WSWS, it
wouldn't surprise me in the least that the are Putin assets and even
paid agents in WSWS. Yes, it's true that WSWS "opposes" Putin, but
that is out of one side of their mouth. Then out of the other, the
cover up for him. For example, I went to a meeting of theirs several
years ago in which they denied the fact of the war crimes committed by
the Russian forces in Bucha. We see this sort of double speak from
neo-Nazis who say they don't like Hitler and then turn around and say
"but we just want a reexamination of the actual facts surrounding the
Holocaust."
As for Syrotiuk himself: There was clothing with Russian insignia
allegedly found in the basement of the building where he lives. There
was no legal proof that that material belonged to him, but what
"beggars the imagination" is that it did not. Consider a hypothetical
situation in which such clothing with Nazi insignia had been found in
a similar location in a building during WW II. So, yes, I think
Syrotiuk was probably a conscious Russian agent.
The fact that he and WSWS spout "left" sounding phrases means nothing.
Does anybody remember Borotba? They claimed to be communists and all
sorts of things. They had me fooled back in 2014. Then it turned out
they were Russian agents.
Socialists need to stop this nonsense of letting Putin and his
defenders off the hook. I remember when Howie Hawkins debated Margaret
Kimberly. He refused to point out her complicity with fascists at the
AGMR conference. It was the same when Bill Fletcher debated Medea
Benjamin and said he considers her to be a comrade and failed to point
out her support for another dictatorship - the Iran
dictatorship. Without drawing these pictures, it's nearly impossible
for the uninitiated to understand what the difference is really all
about. It was the same - even worse, in fact - at the recent Porto
Alegre "anti fascist" conference that wasn't an anti-fascist
conference at all, as I've pointed out. (See: the International
"Anti-Fascist" conference that wasn't
<https://oaklandsocialist.com/2026/04/25/the-international-anti-fascist-conference-that-wasnt/>.)
John Reimann
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