Left-wing activists must be the driving force for social justice and peace.

Dear friends,

„Peace is not everything, but everything is nothing without peace,“ former German Chancellor Willy Brandt once said. With this in mind we must welcome any initiative today that aims at winning peace and not the war.

The war in Ukraine, like any other war, had its forerunning events. The war is the consequence of the expansion of NATO eastward to the borders of Russia, contrary to all previous promises. Just as the United States would not tolerate military bases of another great power at its immediate borders, for example in Mexico or Canada, or even in Cuba, Russia has always warned against Ukraine’s integration into NATO and its opening to US military bases and missile bases that could reach Moscow or Saint Petersburg in five minutes.

The war in Ukraine did not begin with the attacks and the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. The war began as of 2014, as NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg himself acknowledged. Let’s bear in mind what then Secretary of State for Europe at the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, notorious the world over for her „Fuck the EU“ admitted. According to Victoria Nuland, the United States then pumped $5 billion into a coup in Kiev. Following the 2014 nationalist coup in Kiev, the mostly Russian-speaking regions of Donbass seceded, as did Crimea. The Black Sea peninsula was therefore integrated into Russia.

And just as we criticized the Kiev coup at the time, we today reject the attempts at overthrowing the regime under a false banner in Serbia, so that the country be brought onto the unconditional path of NATO and forced, through sanctions, into economic war against Russia. An economic war that would be fatal for Serbia.

The war for reintegration in Donbass lasted eight long years. Fourteen thousand people died in that war. As we know today, the Minsk peace agreement, negotiated at the time by German Chancellor Merkel and French President Hollande, did not aim at bringing peace to the region. Instead, it was supposed to enable the Ukrainian government that emerged from the Kiev coup to buy time to arm itself and militarily regain the territories. NATO, led by the United States, bears a great deal of responsibility in the current war.

Even if this is still denied by our governments the war in Ukraine has meanwhile turned into a NATO proxy war against Russia, brutal attrition warfare at that, in which thousands of young men, Ukrainian and Russian, must die needlessly for a few acres of land, with no prospect of military victory on the battlefield.

NATO members are involved in the war through weapon deliveries and military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. First the United States delivered 43 billion euros worth of weapons to Kiev last year, followed by Great Britain and Germany, who delivered billions worth of weapons, and then Poland. Together with the EU, these four NATO members have also provided more than €60 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine.

In 2022, the 30 NATO countries together spent around eleven hundred billion euros on the military and weaponry, the same as all the other countries in the world combined. The US alone spent $877 billion in 2022 on the military, ten times more than Russia. This over-spending on weapons increases the risk of war worldwide.

And it is extremely dangerous that the German government should now want to station a brigade of Bundeswehr combat troops in Lithuania. The largest German military base abroad is to be located in this country bordering Russia. This does not contribute to the de-escalation of the Ukrainian conflict. This decision constitutes a fundamental renunciation of the agreements concluded so far by the federal government and NATO. With the permanent stationing of up to 4,000 German soldiers and the construction of a permanent German military outpost in the Baltics, the NATO-Russia founding act of May 1997 is being permanently buried by NATO.

In this important document of international law, NATO assures that „substantial additional combat troops“ will not be « permanently » deployed by the Alliance in the former Eastern bloc states. Last April, NATO reaffirmed that it would „fully“ comply with the NATO-Russia Founding Act. Even security experts from think tanks close to the government such as the SWP and high-ranking generals of the Bundeswehr warned against such a move, as reported in the Swiss newspaper NZZ (Neue Züricher Zeitung).

I think we need to lobby to revive the consultation and cooperation mechanisms agreed on in the NATO Founding Act-Russia, rather than fuel the escalation by sending more and more weapons to Ukraine and setting up permanent NATO bases on Russia’s western border. This madness must be ended. That is why we are committed to an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and to a diplomatic solution.

We support the Irish left and the anti-NATO movement on the island in their struggle to defend neutrality. Neutrality is very valuable these days. It is only by safeguarding neutrality that democratic sovereignty is safeguarded.

Many countries of the global South are experiencing the fact that NATO countries will not accept their neutrality these days but want to force them to join the economic war against Russia including sanctions and providing Ukraine with weapons. In a kind of neocolonialism, the countries of the global South are to be dictated what they must and mustn’t do. The latest example is the pro-NATO right-wing Finnish government, which wants to cut development aid to African countries it considers too pro-Russian on account of their votes at the UN.

Advocating neutrality, even in these difficult times, is to advocate the very freedom, justice and democracy.

Our solidarity goes to the left-wing and indigenous movements in Peru, who are announcing demonstrations against the dismissal of left-wing President Pedro Castillo and his imprisonment since last December, who march for justice and for new elections, who take to the streets to protest the unprecedented violence of the police, accounting for over 60 deaths and thousands injured in the first weeks of the year. The Inter-American Organization for Human Rights speaks of real massacres of natives. They protest against Dina Boluarte’s putschist government, which condones the perpetrators, which is trying to gain international legitimacy at the next CELAC summit-EU in Brussels and which is about to ban left-wing parties in Peru because they are campaigning for a constituent assembly. We say that we stand with the indigenous people in their struggle for freedom and democracy.

Finally, dear friends,

just as it is our responsibility to stand for and support left-wing activists around the world, it is also our responsibility to be the force of social justice and peace here and now, to create justice here in the country and peace around the world, one way or another.

Thank you very much.