Ukraine crisis: peace policy instead of escalation

[This peace declaration published on Feb 24, 2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/upload/pdf/220224-Friedenspolitik-statt-Eskalation.pdf.]

Russia's recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states and the deployment of military force is a breach of the Minsk II Agreement.of military force which has the status of international law by UN Security Council decision.

This further turns up the escalation screw, increases tensions and exacerbates the risk of war.

These decisions are Russia's reaction to Ukraine's failure to implement Minsk II with the acquiescence of the West for the past eight years, and a change in this situation and the

associated intolerable situation of the people in eastern Ukraine appeared unachievable.

We demand from Ukraine as well as from Russia and the West to return to Minsk II and to negotiate a political solution to the crisis on this basis.

Moscow's move was in response to the U.S. and NATO's unwillingness to serious negotiations on Moscow's legitimate security interests, which Moscow proposed in December.

NATO's European allies have echoed U.S. policy,

not only with words, as most recently at the Munich Security Conference, but in the case of Greater Britannia, France, Poland, among others, by supplying weapons or redeploying military personnel.

The renewed intensification of the crisis underscores how urgent de-escalation and diplomacy are. It shows where it leads when the principle of undivided, common security is ignored and instead unilaterally creating a fait accompli. Now Russia, for its part, has resorted to these methods. The whole development is ultimately the result of NATO breaking its commitments, not to expand eastward. The military enforcement of the secession of Kosovo from Serbia was also in violation of international law.

NATO has opened the box of pandora.

It is all the more necessary now not to turn the escalation screw any further. With ever more sanctions and the strengthening of military threats according to the motto "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth".

we will be led us closer to the abyss. Sanctions have been part of a confrontational policy that threatens peace and an economic war against Russia.

Far from having the intended effect, they have achieved the opposite.

For us as a peace movement, it can never be about Putin, Biden and great power interests, but about life, welfare and peace.

It is about the people in Donetsk and Luhansk, about the people in Ukraine, in Russia and in all of Europe.

We demand:

- Immediate cessation of all military activities on all sides;

- Return to and swift implementation of Minsk II;

- Concrete steps towards de-escalation;

- An end to war rhetoric, confrontational politics and sanctions;

- Negotiations with Russia on the basis of a clear commitment to the principle of common security;

- Active advocacy of arms control and disarmament negotiations;

- Beginning of negotiations on a lasting peace order for Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

We call on the peace movement and all people interested in peace in Europe to participate in public actions, information booths, vigils, demonstrations and initiatives for these demands.

to stop the march into the abyss.

The text was written by:

Hugo Braun (Attac), Reiner Braun (International Peace Bureau), Claudia Haydt (Informationsstelle Militarisierung),

Ralf Krämer (Socialist Left in the Left Party), Willi van Ooyen (Peace and Future Workshop), Christof

Ostheimer (Federal Committee Peace Council), Peter Wahl (Attac)

(Details of the persons for information only)