Today, on May 9, 2025 – exactly 80 years after the end of the Second World War, which cost the lives of 60 million people, including 27 million Soviet citizens – we, the citizens of Europe, raise our voices! We are ashamed of our governments and the EU, which have not learned the lessons of the 20th century. The EU, once conceived as a peace project, has been perverted and has thus betrayed the essence of Europe! We, the citizens of Europe, are therefore taking our destiny and our history into our own hands today, on May 9. We declare the EU a failure. We start with citizen diplomacy and refuse the planned war against Russia! We recognize the co-responsibility of the “West”, the European governments and the EU in this conflict.

We, the citizens of Europe, together with the European Peace Project, oppose the shameless hypocrisy and lies that are being spread today – on Europe Day – at official ceremonies and on public broadcasters.

We are reaching out to the citizens of Ukraine and Russia. You are part of the European family and we are convinced that together we can organize peaceful coexistence on our continent.

We have the images of the military cemeteries before our eyes – from Volgograd to Riga to Lorraine. We see the fresh graves left behind by this senseless war in Ukraine and Russia. While most EU governments and those responsible for the war are rushing and suppressing what war means for the population, we have learned the lesson of the last century: Europe means “Never again war!”

We remember the European reconstruction achievements of the last century and the promises made in 1989 after the peaceful revolution. We call for a European-Russian Youth Exchange, modelled alike the French-German Youth Office of 1963, which ended the “hereditary enmity” between Germany and France. We demand an end to sanctions and the reconstruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline. We refuse to waste our tax money on armaments and militarization at the expense of social standards and infrastructure. Within the framework of an OSCE peace conference, we call for the creation of a European security architecture with and not against Russia, as laid down in the 1990 Charter of Paris. We call for a neutral Europe, emancipated from the USA, which takes on a mediating role in a multipolar world. Our Europe is post-colonial and post-imperial.

We, the citizens of Europe, hereby declare this war to be over! We will not take part in the war games. We will not turn our men and sons into soldiers, our daughters into nurses in military hospitals and our countries into battlefields.

We offer to immediately send a delegation of European citizens to Kiev and Moscow to start a dialog. We will no longer stand by and watch our future and that of our children being sacrificed on the altar of power politics.

Long live Europe, long live peace, long live freedom