KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent (CMC):
St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, has written to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and United States President, Joe Biden, calling for an end to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“I write in a quest for global peace, justice, security, prosperity for all humanity, grounded in the fundamental tenets of international law, the precepts of the Charter of the United Nations, and multilateral engagement,” Gonsalves said in his December 2 letter, that was also copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres.
“I am making a humble plea for an honourable, negotiated end, immediately, to the war in Ukraine,” Gonsalves said in his letter, which was also copied to heads of state and government of members of the United Nations.
Gonsalves, in his letter, which his office released to the media on Monday, noted that the war has been raging since February 2022 and has “recently entered a most dangerous phase of escalation which portends a hitherto unthinkable nuclear Armageddon.
“To civilised men and women across the globe, this war is senseless as it has been brutal and completely unnecessary. It is as though the most powerful and advanced nations of the world have learnt nothing of lasting value from the history of humankind.”
He said the main combatants, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, fully backed by the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led principally by the United States, “appear to the bulk of humanity’s eight billion people to be gripped by an extreme condition of unreason, in practical disregard not only of life and limb, blood and treasure of their peoples but of the knock-on global effects of additional pain and suffering for the rest of us, including possibly the collapse of human civilisation as we have come to know it.
“Ordinary men and women across the world have become helpless bystanders to a seemingly inevitable march to their destruction, even their extinction. Surely, it is beyond time to stop this war, which, to most of us, has a tribal ferocity which is well-nigh incomprehensible.”
The letter is the second that Gonsalves has written to Putin since the war began.
In his February 2022 letter, Gonsalves told Putin that ‘as a longstanding friend of the Russian Federation, St Vincent and Grenadines is deeply disturbed at your government’s initiative of a special military operation in the territory of Ukraine, an independent republic.”
In the letter, Gonsalves also told the Russian leader that the government of the Caribbean country understood “your articulation of the legitimate security considerations of the Russian Federation and your perspectives on the political situation in the region of Donbas, inclusive of the declaration of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic”.
Gonsalves, however, had said that Putin’s government stance on the matter at hand, “taken at its highest in your favour, cannot reasonably justify the special military operation upon which Russia has embarked.
“Self-evidently, the metaphoric horse and chariot have been driven through the chatter of the United Nations,” Gonsalves added.