A necessary precision here: none of the 11 suspended (and not banned) parties are left-wing. The Ukrainian Socialist Party is a conservative party lead by a neofascist, the Progressive Socialist Party is officially part of Putin’s coalition (the only non-Russian party to be part of that coalition), the Union of Leftists was the personal vehicle of its leader and plundered when he was condemned for corruption in 2012, and the other “left parties” suspended (Left opposition, State, Socialists’ Party, Union of left forces) were all empty shells created by supporters of former conservative president Viktor Ianukovitch, in order to attract activists from the Communist Party, which still exists but was not authorized to participate in any election since 2015, and which was a powerful political force in the east of Ukraine that both the Opposition Bloc and the Opposition Platform did not manage to scavenge. So they both created a few “left-wing” parties to ally themselves with, hoping that the former Communist Party electors would vote for them.
