We just crossed the border between Poland and Ukraine. Our humanitarian mission will shortly begin.

We are 110 activists from all over Italy, on our way to the eastern regions where the front line runs.

The initiative, renamed the Jubilee of Hope, starts from EMNA (European Movement for Non-violent Action), to which 35 organisations have joined, including Azion Cattolica, the Italian Catholic Guides and Scouts Association, the Italian Mayors National Association, the Gariwo Foundation and Marco Bentivogli’s Base Italia.

The mission is sponsored by the Holy See’s nunciature in Kyiv, with the great support of the Apostolic Nuncio in Ukraine, Monsignor Visvaldas Kulbokas.

Keeping the focus high

We think that a Jubilee for Ukraine is necessary to make our proximity, as a transversal civil society, felt to the martyred Ukrainians: a valiant people who have been resisting the invasion for more than three and a half years.

Our initiative stems from the need to be present with our bodies, in an attempt to give substance to rhetoric and proclamations, giving concrete support, touching and seeing with our own eyes the despair of war, but also the beauty of hope, which does not stop in the face of injustice.

That is why we will go to Kyiv and then to Kharkiv between 1 and 5 October, where we will meet many layers of Ukrainian civil society, contributing to the construction of a small piece in the direction of a just peace.
Because starting from the bottom, from the civil society that, despite its different sensitivities, recognises in any case and in any case the strength of the struggle for freedom, is the best way not to turn off the attention of Italians towards the Ukrainian drama.

The memorial to the fallen in the Kyiv Maidan

Requests to the European Union

Together we will call again for Europe to convene a second European Citizens’ Conference on World Peace and Security (the first one was convened for the then President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, in 2021) and to set up its Civil Peace Corps – already foreseen in the European Union’s CSDP, Common Security and Defence Policy, Civil Pact– to overcome inertia and limited responses in the face of the law of the strongest.

The European dream is made of peoples resisting and then coming together, cooperatively, advancing peace and community security: today is the decisive moment to defend and safeguard that ideal of democracy and the rule of law.

We are here, as a civilised society present where war is reoccurring, with admiration for those who find a reason to go on, despite everything, in the aspiration towards a freedom to be defended.

To those who struggle, to those who resist, to those who keep walking.