THE Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) will mount a last-ditch legal defence against its banning by the far-right coup regime next week.

In a statement, the KPU central committee said yesterday that the Kiev Appeal Administrative Court has scheduled the hearing for next Wednesday — and rejected its lawyers’ requests for additional evidence and witnesses.

The party is appealing against the District Administrative Court of Kiev’s December 2015 rejection of its appeal against the “decommunisation law.”

The party said it had little faith in the legal system’s impartiality and objectivity, adding: “We are confident that this trial is a politically motivated and is aimed at destroying the Communist Party of Ukraine, the only real opposition to the current regime.”

Since seizing power in the violent 2014 Maidan Square coup, the regime has moved to ban the KPU, communist symbols and even literature or public statements about the Soviet era that fail to condemn the alleged “crimes of communism.”

The party pointed out the hypocrisy of billionaire President Petro Poroshenko’s pro-EU government, saying the ideological ban breached its commitment to the bloc’s supposedly liberal principles.

“We are convinced that the prohibition of the Communist Party, as well as the so-called decommunisation laws per se, is a flagrant violation of international law.”

The KPU also pointed to the regime’s “glorification of nazi collaborators,” including Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists leader Stepan Bandera, statues of whom have been erected across the country.

Radical Party MP Yuriy Shukhevych — the son of Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) general Roman Shukhevych — has introduced draft legislation making it an offence to question the “heroism” of the OUN and UPA, who massacred as many as 100,000 ethnic Poles and 4,000 Jews.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region, two government troops were killed and 10 injured overnight when anti-fascist forces shelled their positions.

In Donetsk, two civilians were injured on Wednesday night when government forces shelled the city for the third day running.