By Steve Gillis
February 14, 2025
The following is an interview in Russian by Workers World newspaper reporter Steve Gillis of Mikhail Kononovich, a political prisoner in Ukraine, locked up and tortured since March 2022 for opposing war with Russia. He and his brother Alexander — arrested for their many years of “Komsomol [Communist Youth League] for Peace” actions, which they organized in all cities of Ukraine, starting in 2014 — are currently living under house arrest. See workers.org/2024/12/82775 for more background. The interview has been edited. Translation: Steve Gillis.
Alexander and Mikhail Kononovich. Photo: Peoples Dispatch
Workers World: U.S. President Donald Trump, during his election campaign, promised to “end the war in Ukraine on day number one” of his presidency. This has obviously not happened. Nevertheless, reports in the U.S. media claim that Trump is in negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the U.S. proxy war.
How have the workers of Ukraine experienced the first weeks of the Trump administration?
Mikhail Kononovich: Trump’s “peace” is a lie! There will be no peace in Ukraine, not in a day, not in a month, not in a year. The slaughter will continue. Trump is an oligarch, capitalist, Nazi and butcher!
War is the engine of the capitalist economy! The war in Ukraine is a “Drang nach Osten” [Drive to the East]. Trump openly says he will fight for the minerals in Ukraine!
If one recalls history, how did Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” with Kim Jong Un end? Nothing, it was a Trump fake! How did the Iran deal end? Nothing, it was a Trump fake!
What’s going on in the Gaza Strip right now? Is there peace there? No! And despite the signed “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas, Palestinians continue to die there every day. Trump’s “peace” in Palestine is to clear Gaza of Palestinians, just like Hitler’s “General Plan East” to clear the territories of Eastern Europe by exterminating all Slavs, which by the way continues now in Ukraine.
Today’s war in Ukraine is just a continuation of Hitler’s policy on the part of the collective imperialist West’s “onslaught on the East.” Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus have long been considered as western colonies, so they want to drag them into NATO knowing that Russia will not allow it, and there will be war.
The U.S. and European Union (EU), as in the war against Yugoslavia in the 1990s, pursue several goals. The first is to get European refugees, cheap labor, moved into the countries of Western Europe and get markets. The second is to weaken Russia and China by imposing sanctions and destroying Chinese “Belt and Road” projects in Europe.
Having first digested millions of refugees and colonized the economies of Eastern Europe, Germany, Britain and France cast their eyes further to the east. According to the classics of Marxism regarding empire development, an empire should constantly expand or die, so the “Western empire” of the so-called collective West is expanding by means of the same Nazi-era “Drang nach Osten” — onslaught on the East; everything new is well-forgotten old. …
They got markets for their century-old “junk weapons” plus a testing ground for new weapons in the conditions of modern warfare. And if [some] Ukrainians [mind dying] for Western imperialism fighting against Russia and China, they should have just changed the government in Ukraine and put their regime in place as it happened in 2014 after Maidan.
Trump and Putin can hold even a thousand negotiations, but they will not lead to anything, as each has his own goals and overriding interest. A simple example: Trump was the first U.S. president to start supplying offensive weapons to Ukraine in his first term. Also, it was under Trump that the bloody phase of the split of Orthodoxy (Orthodox faith) in Ukraine began and the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
For the workers of Ukraine, nothing has changed with Trump’s arrival, because the capitalist colonial regime in the U.S. has not disappeared, and Ukraine was a colony and remains a colony. The change of presidential surnames for the workers of the U.S. and Ukraine does not change anything; they are just surnames that represent the systems of capitalism.
But for Ukrainian communists, anti-fascists and all those who advocated and advocate for peace in Ukraine, it has only gotten worse. People, in misunderstanding and hope, began to talk more and more about peace, and looking at the statements of oligarch Trump and arriving at illusions of peace, began to speak more boldly about it. Zelensky’s regime targets them and immediately throws them in jail or under arrest.
We confidently and responsibly declare that repression and arrests of communists, anti-fascists and those who advocate peace have increased. Arrests and repressions have become even more than in 2022 at the beginning of the war. Recently in Ukraine, five students (men and women) who were just studying Marxism and sharing their knowledge on social networks were arrested and thrown in jail.
The reason for the arrest of these young men and women was Lenin and Marx’s books! You know? Just books! If you look now at the statistics of arrests by the Zelensky regime in the last two months, it is more than a thousand people who are persecuted for political reasons. They are students, journalists, workers and pensioners; for the regime there are no exceptions.
WW: As the U.S-NATO. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine enters its fourth year, what is the condition of the anti-war forces inside Ukraine? Does the Zelensky regime continue its persecution of anti-war forces and those who object to military mobilization?
MK: The most important indicator of the society, how Ukrainians experience the war, is the forced mobilization into the army. People are caught like animals and sent to the front. The whole internet is full of thousands of videos of forced mobilization by kidnapping on the street. What would be more understandable to our American comrades, mobilization in the Ukrainian army now and the attitude of society to the war is very similar to the situation in the United States during the Vietnam War.
Then when the U.S. Army was based on [the drafting of] defenseless poor people, disproportionately Black and Latine Americans, U.S. society wanted to stop the senseless slaughter in Vietnam, but the U.S. government was eager to continue the war at any cost.
All those who consistently advocated for peace even before the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022 are, as Ukrainian communists and anti-fascists, either in jail, under arrest or in exile. The anti-war forces in Ukraine are repressed but not defeated; we continue to fight no matter what.
The Zelensky regime, realizing that there is a demand for peace in society, is urgently launching several pro-war political projects. The regime observes that some political prisoners and their ideas about peace are becoming popular in Ukrainian society and abroad in the U.S. and Europe. They are trying to play their show for the Ukrainians; Zelensky is a showman and loves a show.
Zelensky and his regime are now trying to create their own controlled “political prisoners.” They have selected people from the president’s own team and supposedly imprisoned them for their anti-war sentiments. For example, Zelensky’s close friend Oleksandr Dubinsky, also a showman and former host of oligarch Igor Kolomoisky’s 1+1 TV channel … allegedly sits in the detention center (SIZO) in Kiev for more than a year.
In fact, he is in a paid VIP cell with expensive accommodations, alone, with a microwave oven, multicooker, refrigerator and other household pleasures. … Every day he gets food from a high-end seafood restaurant (he loves octopus), expensive whiskey (only Scotch is available) and exclusively Cuban cigars.
A few years ago Dubinsky called for killing on the spot or imprisonment for 20 years those who have been in favor of peace since the beginning of the war. This same fake “political prisoner,” recruited by the CIA, … is an acting people’s deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Ukrainian parliament), even receiving a salary. For Dubinsky the prison is just a business trip.
In all this fuss and deceit we should not forget the real heroes of peacemakers who gave their lives in the fight for truth, as was the Chilean-American Gonzalo Lira who, in his reports before his death in a Ukrainian prison, wrote about his Ukrainian comrades, including communist brothers Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich. He died for us all, and we have no right to forget it! Eternal glory to the American hero and anti-fascist Gonzalo Lira!
WW: From the perspective of those like you and your brother who are struggling to end the war from inside Ukraine, what are the most important demands that the anti-war movement in the U.S. should raise with the Trump administration?
MK: We — as Ukrainian communist anti-fascists, as people who have personally been tortured by the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], imprisoned and abused by the regime — call on our American comrades to demand first of all that the Trump administration immediately declare a full amnesty for all political prisoners in Ukraine! Thousands of pro-peace people are being subjected to daily non-human torture and deprivation in the center of Europe! This must stop immediately!
We call on you American comrades, communists, leftists, anti-fascists to march to Ukrainian embassies and consulates throughout the United States and Canada to demand an end to political repression in Ukraine and the immediate release of political prisoners from prisons.
We communist brothers Mikhail and Alexander Kononovich, convinced atheists and materialists, call on the Trump administration to force the Zelensky regime to immediately stop the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the physical extermination of UOC priests. In prison, we communists met the rector of the largest shrine in the Orthodox world, the vicar of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Pavel, a UOC priest who was imprisoned by the regime solely for his faith.
In prison, in humiliation and abuse, he did not betray his faith and helped other prisoners with everything he could, including vital medicines, although he himself suffers from heart disease and diabetes. Vladyka Pavel in prison became a symbol of resistance to the Zelensky regime and with human pride and honor passed this way; he did not betray and did not give up!
Metropolitan Pavel is our Ukrainian Pastor Martin Niemöller, who single-handedly defied Hitler’s regime during World War II. It is the same as if the Italian government arrested the rector of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City for his faith, and everyone kept silent! In Ukraine, thousands of priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are in prison or under arrest.
These demands can be met even before peace and cessation of hostilities in Ukraine. There is no need to negotiate with Russia here, it will be enough for Trump to call Zelensky and make him do it! If Trump really wants peace in Ukraine, let him do it! More than a thousand words!
We, Ukrainian communist anti-fascists, reject all violence, all kinds of discrimination and segregation by the Zelensky regime against all citizens of Ukraine regardless of their political beliefs, religion or nationality! Peace to Ukraine!
Comrades come out and fight for us as we would fight for you!
