According to Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, by the 2010s the party had "degenerated into a conservative and pro-Russian rather than pro-working class grouping, gradually losing its voters and membership".

During the Russian-Ukrainian conflict which followed, the Security Service of Ukraine said the party was actively helping pro-Russian separatists and Russian proxy forces, which it denied.

[14][15] In December 2015, the Communist Party was banned, for actions "aimed at violating Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, collaboration with Russian proxy forces, and inciting ethnic hatred".

Officially, it was designated as the 29th Congress to denote it as a direct successor to the Soviet KPU and it elected Petro Symonenko as First Secretary.

The first ten members on the party list were Petro Symonenko (MP), Omelian Parubok (MP), Anatoliy Nalyvaiko (tunneler of the Karl Marks Mine (Yenakieve)), Borys Oliynyk (MP), Valeria Zaklunna-Myronenko (actress of the Lesya Ukrainka Theater (Kyiv)), Adam Martynyuk (the 2nd secretary of the Central Committee of CPU), Anatoliy Draholyuntsev (mechanic-electrician at Luhanskteplovoz), Vasyl Sirenko (Koretsky Institute of State and Law (NANU), unaffiliated), Borys Molchanov (tool craftsman at Dniproshyna) and Anatoliy Strohov (pensioner).

[36] The second article states that the public denial of the Holodomor as a genocide is recognized as desecration of the memory of millions of victims, disparaging of Ukrainian people and is unlawful.

[36] On 13 January 2010, the Kyiv Appellate Court reviewed the criminal case on the fact of committing genocide (crime against humanity) and agreed with the conclusions of the investigation that the leadership of the Soviet Union, including Joseph Stalin and others, had purposely created such living conditions designed to physically eliminate a part of the Ukrainian national group.

[44] Oleh Tyahnybok tried to challenge the creation of Communist faction, but on 30 January 2013 the Higher Administrative Court of Ukraine declined his petition.

[48] Symonenko added that should Azarov fail to fulfill the promise of Ukraine's joining this customs union, the Communists would initiate his resignation.

They were sparked by President Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign the political association and free trade agreement with the EU, instead choosing closer ties to Russia.

In January 2014 the party supported the draconian Anti-protest laws that severely restricted freedom of speech and the right to protest.

Russia occupied and then annexed Crimea, while armed pro-Russian separatists seized government buildings and proclaimed the independent states of Donetsk and Luhansk, sparking the Donbas war.

[60] On 6 May, a majority of MPs voted to expel the Communist Party from the parliamentary session hall for making a pro-separatist declaration.

[70][71] On 22 July, a vote supported by 232 MPs gave the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada (the speaker of Ukraine's parliament) the power to dissolve a faction that has lost some of its members compared to the number it had while it was formed during the first parliamentary session after the previous election, pending a signature from President Petro Poroshenko.

[9] On 16 December 2015, at the request of the Ministry of Justice, the District Administrative Court in Kyiv banned the Communist Party for actions aimed at violating Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, collaboration with Russian proxy forces, and inciting ethnic hatred.

[84] According to a Kyiv Polytechnic professor, who published an article in The Guardian, the party came into conflict with the Ukrainian government after the Revolution of Dignity due to prominent displays of support for ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych during the Euromaidan protests[citation needed] and alleged involvement with the separatist movement in Donbas as well as the party's pro-Russian government agenda.

[56] Two days after the Ukrainian parliament changed its regulations regarding the required size of parliamentary groups, the Communist Party faction was dissolved on 24 July 2014.

[86] On 6 July 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the KPU was again banned after a Lviv court ruling which turned over all its assets, including party buildings and funds, to the Ukrainian state.

In a statement, the Eighth Administrative Appeal Court said that it had satisfied the claims of the Ministry of Justice and ordered the party's banning.

[93] In 1998, to celebrate the would-be 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union it published Historical Thesis, a text which painted a rosy picture of the former state.

[93] The Soviet Union is barely criticized and controversial events such as the Great Purge and Holodomor are not mentioned in the party press.

[93] However, certain concessions to the present have been made and at the 2nd KPU Congress it was stated that "it would be utopian to try and revive a socio-economic system of different relations, which existed in different conditions, under different principles and different organizations of production and distribution, different social-class structures of society, a different level of consciousness".

[94] It could be said that the party believed stronger than ever in the possibility of a socialist future since the "careerists", symbolized by Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kravchuk, were gone.

[94] As Vasyl Tereshchuk, a former party theoretician expelled in 2005, noted: "People are surviving on what they accumulated in the years of Soviet power: that is, they are not yet a classic proletariat as they still have much to lose (a flat, a car, a dacha, etc.).

[98] However, when the Communist Party of the Russian Federation proposed in 1995 to transform the organization into a modern-day Comintern, the KPU opposed because of their Soviet patriotic views.

[100] As noted in the party journal Communist, the "'Soviet man ... did not emerge from nothing before him stood the courageous Slavic-Rusich, the labour-loving Ukrainian peasant, the self-sacrificing Cossack".

[103] Symonenko made controversy in 2007 when he accused the Ukrainian nationalist figure Roman Shukhevych of receiving two Iron Crosses from Adolf Hitler.

Thus, according to Ishchenko "the only things the party has in common with the determined Bolshevik revolutionaries of the past who spared neither themselves nor others are devotion to the Soviet symbols and appeals to empty 'Marxist-Leninist' phrases".

[5] After the start of Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity, the party newspaper Komunist published an article comparing the protests to riots in Black ghettoes in the United States during the 1960s; the article, titled "White on the outside, black on the inside", stated that "at least in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco the police sometimes make raids on such places and simply kill a few rabid Negroes.

[...] Even the dark-skinned vendors in Kyiv second hand shops seem a bit more civilized than our 'light-skinned brothers' from the western regions of the country, who have gathered on the Maidan".