Ukrainian Peace Activists Speak Out

As Codepink’s Chair of the US-based Peace in Ukraine Coalition, I interviewed Yurii Sheliazhenko, Executive Secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, about the war in Ukraine and military mobilization against the Russian invasion. Yurii lives in Kyiv, where he faces routine electricity shortages and daily air raid sirens that send people running to subway stations for shelter.

Inspired by pacifists Leo Tostoy, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Indian and Dutch non-violent resistance, Yurii calls for an end to US and NATO weapons to Ukraine. Arming Ukraine undermined past peace agreements and discouraged negotiations to end the current crisis, he says.

Mass rally in Berlin, Germany, at the Brandenburg Gate with people protesting against the war in the Ukraine with peace symbols and the Ukrainian flag

The Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, with ten members at its core, opposes the war in Ukraine and all wars by advocating for protection of human rights, especially the right to conscientious objection to military service.

Yurii, please tell us about the pacifist or anti-war movement in Ukraine. How many people are involved? Are you working with other European and Russian anti-war organizations? What actions have or can you take to end the war in Ukraine? What has been the reaction?

Ukraine has a thriving civil society politically poisoned by warmongering mainstream. Brazen militarism dominates the media, education and all public sphere. Peace culture is weak and fragmented. Still, we have many organized and spontaneous forms of nonviolent war resistance, mostly hypocritically pretending to be in line with war effort. Without such conventional hypocrisy it would be impossible for the ruling elite to manufacture consent for the painfully ambitious aim of “peace through victory.” For example, the same actors could express commitments to incompatible humanitarian and militarist values.