UKRAINIAN communists slammed the Kiev regime’s “desperate search for ways to evade responsibility for its crimes” yesterday after government bids to outlaw their party descended into farce.

Presiding Judge Valery Kuzmenko, who was hearing the Justice Ministry’s suit attempting to outlaw Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) on trumped up treason charges, dramatically resigned on Wednesday evening — saying authorities were putting pressure on the court.

Prosecutors and police had searched his office and taken the computer containing documents relating to the case, Mr Kuzmenko said.

“Such illegal actions,” he said, were “grounds for the rejection of the proceedings to ban the activities of the KPU.”

The future of the ban bid was unclear yesterday as all the other judges on the Kiev District Administrative Court followed his lead and filed applications to be excused from hearing it.

Communists in Ukraine have been under sustained attack since the Western-backed coup against former president Viktor Yanukovych a year ago.

Monuments to the Russian revolution, its leader Lenin and to the Red Army’s victory over nazi Germany have been desecrated and the government launched its attempt to proscribe the party last summer, claiming that it supported the break-up of Ukraine after Crimea voted to rejoin Russia.

But the communists refused to be silenced yesterday, condemning an EU proposal to send armoured cars to “monitor” the ceasefire agreed between the Kiev authorities and anti-fascist separatists in the east.

The war would only be over when Ukraine acknowledged the rights of the people of the Donbass to “decide what language to speak, what church to go to, what script to read in.”

Kiev’s war had caused “the death of thousands, hundreds of thousands maimed, young people’s destinies murdered,” KPU general secretary Petro Symonenko said.

Communist Party of Britain leader Robert Griffiths expressed his solidarity with the Ukrainian party.

“The persecution of the KPU is an outrageous attack on political and civil liberties that gives the lie to Western propaganda that this war is about democracy versus Russian expansionism,” he said.

“This is a party which has had substantial electoral support but whose MPs have been physically attacked inside and outside parliament, demonstrating the nature of the authoritarian regime of President (Petro) Poroshenko as it wages war on its own people.”