This essay investigates the changes in human rights-based foreign policy rhetoric and priority of the Swedish Social Democrats after the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In order to illustrate how the party's public stance on the Kurdish question and relations with Turkey has changed since the Russian invasion, it undertakes a qualitative analysis of the party's public position through a variety of statements on both individual and collective level. It finds that the party has indeed abandoned its previous commitment to improving the human rights situation of persecuted minorities in Turkey almost entirely and immediately after the outbreak of the war; moreover, it has continued this abandonment in opposition, and it has even silenced Kurdish voices within the party. These findings pose serious questions regarding the liberal theory of international relations, which is ill-equipped to explain such a dramatic and abrupt change. Rather, the essay proposes that the realist theory of international relations is best suited to explain the actions of the Swedish social democrats, and possibly other actors in similar situation.