Pictured: IUAFS comrades outside of Ukrainian embassy, London.

by New Worker correspondent

On Saturday 3rd May members of International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity and several other organisations held a vigil outside the Ukrainian embassy in London in solidarity with the families of those who died in the Odessa massacre of 2014.

They carried signs saying “Remember Odessa 02.02.2014” in English, Russian and Ukrainian. After the vigil they laid flowers at the gate of the embassy, and a letter addressed to ambassador Valery Zaluzhnyi was left by New Communist Party of Britain general secretary Andy Brooks.

Eleven years after the tragic events of 2nd May 2014 no-one has been brought to justice for these crimes, and no independent, local or international inquiry has ever been held. And according to the European Council, an investigation by Ukrainian authorities in November 2015 had lacked £institutional and practical independence”.

On 13th March 2025 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Ukrainian authorities had failed to prevent or end the violence on that day nor to “ensure timely rescue measures for those trapped in the fire”, and said that since 2014 the Ukrainian authorities had “failed to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events”.

The court ruled that these failures were in violation of Article 2 (right to life/investigation) and Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

While the ruling was widely covered by the Russian and Ukrainian media it appears to have been totally ignored by leading Western media outlets, including the BBC, Reuters and CNN.

The virulently proUkrainian website EUvsDisinfo dismissed the ruling as “recurrent pro-Kremlin narrative about the Odessa tragedy and about Nazi Ukraine”.

EUvsDisinfo is run by “a team of experts” called the “East Stratcom Task Force”, which operates under the EU High Representative Kaja Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister.