Nonviolence, Ukraine, and the Greens

All of the Green parties of the world except the Green Party of the United States (GPUS) have supported military aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. In an October 2022 resolution introduced by saying “the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine,” the National Committee of the GPUS called for the U.S. to end military aid to Ukraine, end sanctions on Russia, and engage with Russia in peace talks for a “ceasefire and subsequent negotiated peace.” The close vote was 48 in favor, 44 opposed, 8 abstaining, and 70 not voting.^[1]

Under Trump, the U.S. has pursued the policy called for by GPUS. The U.S. has stopped economic and military aid to Ukraine.^[2] It has dismantled the enforcement of Russian sanctions.^[3] And it has called for a ceasefire followed by negotiation of a final peace settlement.^[4]

Ukraine has accepted Trump’s many proposals for a ceasefire to facilitate negotiations, but Russia has consistently rejected them and insisted on no ceasefire until a final peace settlement.^[5] Putin said recently that Russia will keep fighting until it achieves the goals of its “Special Military Operation” whether by negotiation or by military force “until the last Ukrainian dies.”^[6] Those goals are Ukraine ceding territory Russia claims to have annexed but does not control, limiting the size of Ukraine’s military, and forgoing security guarantees from Western countries against further Russian aggression. Ukraine, meanwhile, has said it is willing to halt the fighting along the current frontlines and forgo membership in NATO if it has other credible international security guarantees.^[7]

The debate on the National Committee over GPUS policy on Ukraine has continued unabated. Of those who voted in favor of the resolution, there were two basic perspectives, often overlapping: campism and pacifism. The campists argue that the war is a proxy war provoked by U.S./NATO expansion toward Russia and that Greens should oppose U.S. support for Ukraine because the U.S. imperialism is using Ukrainians to fight Russia. Their geopolitical analysis is blind to the fact that Ukrainians are fighting for their own reasons to defend their people and their very existence as an independent nation. Their geopolitical analysis disregards the agency and choices of Ukrainians and notably the appeals of Ukrainian progressives who are the natural comrades of American Greens. Ukrainian Greens, socialists, anarchists, feminists, environmentalists, and trade unionists are unanimous in appealing for military and economic aid.^[8] A class analysis of who is oppressed in this conflict would hear the appeals of Ukrainians for solidarity.

I will leave the campists aside for our purposes here and focus on the pacifist argument against military aid to Ukraine. The pacifists have argued that military self-defense is never justified and nonviolent civilian resistance is always more effective.

The Greens’ Position on Nonviolence

Green parties around the world have adopted Nonviolence as one of their fundamental principles since it was adopted as one of the Four Pillars of unity by the German Greens at a delegated conference in November 1979 in Offenbach in preparation for their founding congress in January 1980.^[9] The Four Pillars were that the Greens would be ecological, social, grassroots-democratic, and nonviolent.

At this conference in Offenbach, Germany, November 3-4, 1979, the German Greens adopted as their principles of unity and inscribed on their banner the Four Pillars of Green Politics – Ecological, Grassroots-Democratic, Social, Nonviolent.^[10]

The German Greens I spoke with in the early 1980s were not dogmatic pacifists who claimed nonviolence was suitable for every circumstance. German Greens I had discussions with about this question included Jutta Ditfurth, a German Green party spokesperson from 1984-1988, and two German-American Greens, Phil Hill and Gretchen Dutschke-Klotz, the widow Rudi Dutschke, who was the most well-known student radical in the German SDS (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund — Socialist German Students’ Union) and leader of the APO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) in the 1960s. Rudi Dutschke spent the 1970s traversing Germany calling for an ecosocialist party to give the APO an electoral arm, which became the Greens.^[11] Phil and Gretchen were active in the American as well as German Greens in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Gretchan Dutschke-Klotz and Rudi Dutschke at a late 1960s protest.

Nonviolence was not a debate between the Fundis and Realos in the German Greens. That debate was mainly about whether the Greens should enter into coalition governments with other parties (Realos) or stay in opposition and not administer the system they started out to oppose until they could form a government on their own or at least lead a coalition government (Fundis). Both Fundis and Realos supported the armed struggles of the Southern African liberation movements at the time, as they had the Vietnamese liberation movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Among prominent Realos with that position were Joschka Fischer, Danny Cohn-Bendit, and Otto Schilly. Among prominent Fundis with that position were Jutta Ditfurth, Rainer Trampert,^[12] and Rudi Dutschke. I heard that position straight from Jutta Ditfurth at the 1987 National Green Gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts and from Gretchen Dutscke-Klotz, Rudi Dutschke’s widow, when she was in the Boston Greens in the late 1980s and early 1990s and again when I met with her in Berlin in November 2024. I also got reports from Murray Bookchin on his discussions in Germany with leading ecosocialists in the Greens – Thomas Ebermann, Rainer Trampert, and Jürgen Reents – which included their views on the question of nonviolence.

Ditfurth explained in 1987 that the German Greens had made nonviolence one of their four pillars not only because they believed that political actions they initiate should be nonviolent on grounds of morality and political efficacy. Nonviolence was also elevated to one of their four pillars in order to shield the Greens from repression by the German state, which was using the violence of the Red Army Faction, aka Bader-Meinhoff Gang, as an excuse for cracking down on the nonviolent extra-parliamentary movements, especially the anti-nuclear power and anti-Euromissiles movements out of which the Greens were emerging.

Rudi Dutschke had been the victim of an assassination attempt by a neo-Nazi in 1968, the lingering effects of which would cause his death in 1979. For a time in 1968 the Dutschkes had considered violence in the form of sabotage against Vietnam War logistics to the point of acquiring dynamite, but ultimately decided against it and dumped the dynamite into the sea.^[13] As they advocated for a party like the Greens in the 1970s, the Dutschkes had “concluded that violence was an obstacle to a fairer society” and that “the Red Army Faction attacks would destroy the achievements the ’68 movement had fought for.”^[14]

But while the German Greens wanted to be clear that their political actions would be nonviolent, they also upheld the right of self-defense. The first federal program of the German Greens reflected that view. It was adopted for the March 1983 elections in which the Greens first elected 28 members to the German national parliament, the Bundestag. The program’s text describing the principle of nonviolence said, “The principle of nonviolence does not affect the fundamental right to defend oneself.” Relevant to Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the text went on to say, “We therefore put forward an active peace policy in international relations. This means that we oppose the occupation of countries….Peace is inseparably linked with the independence of countries.”^[15]

The American Greens have adopted a similar position. The platform of the GPUS says under the Key Value of Nonviolence, “We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in danger.”^[16] The platform section on Foreign Policy recognizes the obligation of the U.S. to participate in military intervention under United Nations authorization to prevent genocide and protect human rights:

We recognize and support the right of the U.N. to intervene in a nation-state engaged in genocidal acts or in its persistent violation and denial of the human rights of an ethnic or religious group within its boundaries, and the right to protect the victims of such acts.

The U.S. is obligated to render military assistance or service under U.N. command to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions.

The U.S. must recognize and abide by the authority of the U.N. General Assembly to act in a crisis situation by passing a resolution under the Uniting for Peace Procedure when the U.N. Security Council is stalemated by vetoes.^[17]

Some 800 participants representing 70 Green parties around the world convened in April 2001 for the first Global Greens Congress in Canberra, Australia. In addition to launching campaigns against global warming and corporate globalization,^[18] they adopted the Global Greens Charter, which founded the Global Greens on the basis of six principles: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Participatory Democracy, Nonviolence, Sustainability, and Respect for Diversity. The Nonviolence principle states:

We declare our commitment to nonviolence and strive for a culture of peace and cooperation between states, inside societies and between individuals, as the basis of global security.

We believe that security should not rest mainly on military strength but on cooperation, sound economic and social development, environmental safety, and respect for human rights.^[19]

Like the German and American Greens’ explanations of Nonviolence, the Global Greens commit to nonviolent action while acknowledging that the defense of peace and security may require armed force in some circumstances.

Armed Force to Stop Genocide in Gaza

The Uniting for Peace procedure in the UN General Assembly was embraced by many American Greens in 2025 as a military means of stopping the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. The Greens’ 2024 presidential candidate, Jill Stein, and Mark Elbourno, the treasurer and a co-chair of GPUS, spearheaded the Lifeline for Palestine campaign, which held a webinar in early September 2025 promoting a Uniting for Peace resolution by the UN General Assembly for military intervention to stop the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide against Palestinians with a “UN protection force to deliver humanitarian aid, protect civilians, preserve evidence of war crimes, and facilitate reconstruction.”^[20]

In August 2025, I had brought to the attention of the Green Party National Committee a call for international military intervention to stop the genocide by Francesca Albanese,^[21] the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, and by the campaign by the British-based organization Protect Palestine^[22] that also called for a Uniting for Peace resolution or a coalition of the willing to send an armed force to Palestine to stop the genocide.^[23] When he spoke to the UN General Assembly in September 2025, Gustavo Petro, the left-wing President of Colombia, called for a Uniting for Peace resolution authorizing a military force to liberate Palestine.^[24]

I think the moral and legal grounds for UN military intervention are unimpeachable. However, I am skeptical of its military feasibility given the arsenal and the attitudes of the nuclear-armed fanatics Trump and Netanyahu who are ruling the United States and Israel. In this case, I think nonviolent action as proposed by the Palestinian-initiated BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement – starting with a U.S. embargo on arms to Israel – is the most effective strategy to force Israel to stop the genocide and its violations of Palestinian human rights. BDS should part of a Uniting for Peace resolution to make it international law that is binding on the international community.^[25]

Two weeks after the October 7 war began, I called^[26] for a U.S. diplomatic surge to reverse its support for Israeli apartheid, settlement expansion, and the genocidal assault on Gaza and to start a peace process toward a political solution that provides equality, human rights, and security for all of the inhabitants of Israel and Palestine. A progressive U.S. government should also use its leverage over Israel to make it allow Palestinian elections to be held. Mustafa Barghouti, who was second for President in the last Palestinian elections in 2005 as the candidate of the progressive secular Palestine National Initiative, has called for new Palestinian elections using proportional representation to create an inclusive Palestinian government that will be a strong effective partner in a peace process because it is legitimate and credible in the eyes of the Palestinians, the international community, and, however grudgingly, the Israelis.^[27]

Petra Kelly – Nonviolent Action Against Oppressors, Not Freedom Fighters

It is morally bankrupt not to recognize the difference between aggressors and defenders, between oppressors and freedom fighters. Pacifists who are uneasy about sending arms to Ukraine for its self-defense are morally obligated to take nonviolent action against Russia’s war on Ukraine, not lecture the Ukrainians to lay down their arms. Pacifists can push for stronger sanctions on Russian oil and gas to defund the Russian military machine.^[28] They can protect Russian anti-war asylum seekers from the U.S. anti-immigrant deportation machine.^[29] They can demand that Russia return the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted to Russia for militarized Russification.^[30] They can demand U.S. provision of economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine to meet human needs during the war and to rebuild after the war.^[31]

Taking nonviolent action against oppressors instead of castigating people who are fighting oppressors is what leading proponents of nonviolence like Petra Kelly, Martin Luther King Jr, and Mahatma Gandhi did. They took nonviolent action against aggressors, not defenders.

Petra Kelly was the most prominent advocate of nonviolence in the early German Greens. But unlike the American Greens who call for the disarmament of Ukrainians in the face of Russia’s aggression, she focused her nonviolent actions on oppressors, not on telling armed resisters to disarm. When she led a group of eight German Green MPs to South Africa to chain themselves together and occupy the German Embassy in Pretoria in September 1985, she did not preach to the African National Congress’ armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), to lay down its arms. Petra Kelly focuses on demanding that Germany end its economic ties with apartheid South Africa.^[32]

We cannot know exactly how Petra Kelly would have handled the question of arms for Ukraine’s self-defense were she still with us today. But Lukas Beckman, one of Petra Kelly’s closest comrades in the Greens, has some thoughts on that question.

Petra Kelly and Lukas Beckman at a German Greens news conference in 1983.

Beckman was a co-founder of the German Greens in 1979, its Federal Executive Director from 1980 to 1984, one of its three spokespersons from 1984 to 1987, its Parliamentary Group Manager from 1991 to 2010, and a co-founder of the Petra Kelly Foundation in Munich in 1997. He was arrested with Kelly at the 1985 German embassy anti-apartheid protest in Pretoria as well as at an earlier action on May 12, 1983 on Alexanderplatz in East Berlin where Greens unfurled two banners: “The Greens – Swords into Plowshares” and “The Greens – Start Now: Disarmament in East + West.” It was during the Euromissiles crisis and the Greens were calling for the immediate withdrawal of the forward-based intermediate range nuclear missiles of both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., to be followed up by total nuclear disarmament in both the East and the West. They also acted in East Berlin to lend support to the independent peace movement within the repressive one-party Communist state in East Germany.

In an October 9, 2024 interview, Beckmann contemplated how Petra Kelly might have handled the Ukraine question today:

One must recognize—and this constitutes one of the Greens’ most significant achievements, as well as a key legacy of Petra Kelly—that peace and human rights are indivisible. There can be no peace without respect for human rights—without people being able to live in freedom—and this is a crucial point if one wishes to understand Petra Kelly: Petra Kelly was committed to non-violence, yet she was not passive. She was acutely aware that even Gandhi could not have imagined confronting German fascism using the very acts of civil disobedience he employed in India—actions for which, notably, he had the tacit consent of Great Britain as the colonial power. He was fully conscious of this distinction; and for me, it is difficult to conceive that Petra Kelly—a woman profoundly shaped by the American Civil Rights Movement, who championed human rights globally—would have said, once diplomatic avenues were exhausted: “No, well then, Ukraine should simply surrender.” That is unthinkable to me—though it is my answer, not hers.^[33]

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Armed Self-Defense

When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke out against the Vietnam War, he did not tell the Vietnamese liberation movement to lay down its arms. He called on the U.S. to end its war of aggression against Vietnam.^[34]

The civil rights movement emphasized nonviolent action in pursuit of its goals. But it was armed for self-defense, protected from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilantes by groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice, as the veteran of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Charles Cobb, describes in his book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.^[35] Martin Luther King, Jr. had guns for self-protection and armed guards outside his house after it was firebombed by the Klan in 1956. When journalist William Worthy and activist Bayard Rustin visited King after the bombing, they found King’s home to be an arsenal. Rustin soon persuaded King to abandon the personal arms and armed guards to strengthen his message of nonviolent action against segregation and poverty.^[36] But Cobb also notes that “Martin King always acknowledged — if you read his writings — the right to self-defense, armed self-defense.”^[37] For example, King agreed to have the Deacons for Defense provide armed protection for the nonviolent March Against Fear across Mississippi in June 1966 after its initiator, James Meredith, the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, was shot and wounded by a Klansman firing from the woods.^[38] In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), King affirmed the right to armed self-defense. “The first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of ‘self-defense,’” he wrote. “In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one’s home and one’s person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.”^[39]

The centrality of guns for self-defense in the southern civil rights movement was brought home to me by Abe Osheroff, a Lincoln Brigade veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a carpenter who went to Mississippi to build a community center during the Freedom Summer of 1964. His car was blown up the night he arrived.^[40] He told me in the early 1980s that when he met Fannie Lou Hamer at her house in Ruleville when he arrived in Mississippi, the first thing she did was give him a pistol to clean. Hamer was a sharecropper who became active in SNCC and famous for her nationally televised gripping testimony before the Credential Committee of the Democratic National Convention in 1964 on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Hamer was active in the nonviolent movement but also armed herself for self-defense. “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom,” she once said, “and the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”^[41]

I also had the opportunity in 2014 to discuss the role of armed self-defense in the civil rights movement with Harvey Johnson, a co-founder of the Deacons for Defense in Jonesboro, Louisiana in 1964. He believed the civil rights workers from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who came to Jonesboro would not have lived to organize without the Deacons’ armed defense of them. Most Deacons were veterans of World War II or the Korean War and many were literally deacons in their churches. They got their name from CORE civil right workers who would say let’s call the deacons when they needed escorts for safe movement. Johnson emphasized that the Deacons for Defense supported and took part in the nonviolent activities of CORE. The Deacons were armed only to deter white violence against the nonviolent activists and the Black community.

(l-r) Law professors Janis McDonald and Paula Johnson of the Cold Case Justice Initiative, Harvey Johnson of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, John Steele of the Mississippi Movement and Freedom Summer, Howie Hawkins, and Shelton Chappell, whose mother, Johnnie Mae Chappell, was killed by a white drive-by shooter during Black civil rights protests in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1964.

We participated on a panel together with two victims of racist violence during the civil rights movement, John Steele of the Mississippi Movement and Freedom Summer and Shelton Chappell whose mother, Johnnie Mae Chappell, was killed by a white drive-by shooter during Black civil rights protests in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1964. The panel was moderated by the two law professors who lead the Cold Case Justice Initiative at the Syracuse University School of Law, Paula Johnson and Janis McDonald. They are still seeking justice for victims of racist violence during the civil rights movement.^[42]

The panel was titled “The Deacons for Defense and Justice: Armed Self-Defense in the Civil Rights Movement.” My contribution to the panel was relating what I had witnessed in Oakland, California in the late 1960s where the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, inspired by self-defense groups in the South like the Deacons for Defense, combined armed defense of the Black community with nonviolent political action and community service programs.

Howie Hawkins speaking on a March 21, 2014 panel on “The Deacons for Defense and Justice: Armed Self-Defense in the Civil Rights Movement” with John Steele (l) and Shelton Chappell (r).

The panel was featured in a conference called “Looking Back, Moving Forward: 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Civil Right Movement, 1964-2014” held at Syracuse University, March 21-23, 2014. The event brought together family members of victims of racist violence during the civil rights movement, foot soldiers in the movement like Harvey Johnson and John Steele, and prominent leaders, including Rev. C.T. Vivian, a co-founder with Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Diane Nash, a co-founder of SNCC; Bernice Johnson Reagon, a co-founder of the SNCC Freedom Singers and later Sweet Honey on the Rock.

The Cold Case Justice Initiative has been documenting the role of armed self-defense in the civil rights movement by working with direct participants like Harvey Johnson. The Deacons were targeted for repeated questioning and intimidation by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Program, which engaged in covert and illegal operations aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, and disrupting political organizations considered subversive by the racist reactionary FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI file on the Deacons released after Freedom of Information Act requests is about 1,500 pages. Harvey Johnson has said that his FBI interviews were aggressive and focused on how the Deacons acquired their weapons, but asked nothing about Deacon’s goals or the violence by the Klan and the Klan-infiltrated local police directed at nonviolent civil rights activists and the Black community.^[43]

Armed self-defense by the civil rights movement was consistent with the Key Value of Nonviolence of the Green Party of the United States, which states both “We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree” and “We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in danger.”^[44]

Gandhi’s Conditional Pacifism

Mahatma Gandhi also recognized that there are situations where armed self-defense is justified. His pacifism was not unqualified, but conditional. He viewed nonviolence as a powerful and effective force for promoting peace and positive social change. But he also recognized that it was unrealistic to expect most people to summon the immense courage and self-sacrifice required when resisting oppressors who will simply kill nonviolent resisters. He acknowledged that most people do not have the capacity for nonviolent resistance where it means likely torture or death. He often stated that if individuals are unable to defend themselves or their loved ones through nonviolent means, they are justified in resorting to violence for self-defense.

Gandhi held this view of the right and indeed duty to armed self-defense throughout his career as an advocate of nonviolence. In 1928 he said, “I have been repeating over and over again that he who cannot protect himself or his nearest and dearest or their honor by non-violently facing death may and ought to do so by violently dealing with the oppressor.”^[45] In 1946, he still maintained this view: “Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defense or for the defense of the defenseless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission.”^[46]

In the context of World War II, where Germany and Japan initiated wars of conquest, which is analogous today to Russia’s war of conquest against Ukraine, Gandhi recognized that the aggressors were wrong and the defenders had a right to self-defense. He said in 1940:

If war is itself a wrong act, how can it be worthy of moral support or blessings? I believe all war to be wholly wrong. But, if we scrutinize the motives of two warring parties, we may find one to be in the right and the other in the wrong. For instance, if A wishes to seize B’s country, B is obviously the wronged one. Both fight with arms. I do not believe in violent warfare, but all the same, B, whose cause is just, deserves my moral help and blessings.^[47]

In 1906, Gandhi first enunciated the philosophy of nonviolence he called Satyagraha, or Truth Force, which emphasizes nonviolent resistance to social wrongs. Yet he encouraged Indians to enlist in the army of the British colonizers of India in World War I in order to demonstrate that Indians were democratic allies and capable of self-rule and self-defense if the British granted India its independence. He organized and participated in the Indian Ambulance Corps to aid the British Army. In his 1918 pamphlet, “Appeal for Enlistment,” Gandhi wrote:

To bring about such a state of things [Indian independence] we should have the ability to defend ourselves, that is, the ability to bear arms and to use them… If we want to learn the use of arms with the greatest possible dispatch, it is our duty to enlist ourselves in the army….Home Rule without military power was useless, and this was the best opportunity to get it. An India trained for fighting will be able to wrest freedom in a moment, and even fight the Empire, should it play foul with us.^[48]

During World War II, the Indian National Congress led by Gandhi denounced the imperialism of the Axis powers, but refused to support Britain and the Allied powers without a commitment from the British to Indian independence. By 1942, even though Britain had not committed to Indian independence, Gandhi was supporting the use of India for British military bases to defend against Japanese expansion, which had reached Burma and would attack northeast India in 1944.^[49]

In 1948, shortly before his assassination, the partition of India and Pakistan at independence had not resolved the status of Kashmir. Pakistani forces had invaded Kashmir. An Indian military officer, L.P. Sen, was put in charge of the Indian response. Gandhi asked Sen for an intelligence briefing. After Sen was done, Gandhi said, “Wars are a curse to humanity. They are so utterly senseless. They bring nothing but suffering and destruction.” After an awkward silence, Sen asked Gandhi, “What do I do in Kashmir?” Gandhi replied, “You’re going in to protect innocent people, and to save them from suffering and their property from destruction. To achieve that you must naturally make full use of every means at your disposal.”^[50]

Gandhi recognized that real world situations arise where the use of armed force is necessary to protect the innocent or defend against aggression. The simplistic moral absolute of no use of arms under any circumstances is not moral in some circumstances. Ukrainian activists committed to nonviolence were faced with such circumstances when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukrainian Pacifists Take Up Arms to Defend Ukraine

Maksym Butkevych was well-known pacifist in Ukraine who organized nonviolent actions in the anti-militarist, anti-fascist, and human rights movements of Ukraine. However, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he volunteered for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.^[51]

When the full-scale invasion began, I realized that human rights protection, which had been my life’s work, ceases to exist for as long as Russia controls the territories it occupied….in late February 2022, the only way to protect human rights in Ukraine, at least for me, was to pick up my AK-74 [Kalashnikov rifle, 1974 model] and join the army. There was no other tool to protect human rights from those who threatened them the most.”^[52]

Butkevych was a veteran of progressive social movements in Ukraine. As a secondary school student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he had participated in Ukraine’s independence movement and the student-led pro-democracy 1990 Revolution on Granite^[53] at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), which also became the center for the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity. In college in the mid-1990s, he was an anarchist anti-fascist activist in the leftwing student trade union Pryama Diya (Direct Action). While studying in Britain in the early 2000s, he was active in the anarchist and anti-globalization movements. Returning to Ukraine in 2006, he worked as a journalist and organized the Human Rights Center ZMINA and No Borders. No Borders campaigned against racism and xenophobia and defended the rights of immigrants and refugees in Ukraine, particularly from Central Asia and, after Russia seized Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014, for displaced people from the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. When the Euromaidan protests broke out in late 2013, he co-founded the progressive community radio organization Hromadske Radio, for which he provided daily reports on the protest movement. He also provided legal aid to protesters charged under laws enacted by the Yanukovych government that criminalized the protests and where undercover paid provocateurs called Titushky working for the Berkut (riot police) would incite violence in order to get protestors arrested.^[54] Hromadske Radio acquired an audience of hundreds of thousands for its credible reporting that was independent of both the state media of the Yanuykovych regime and the corporate media owned by self-serving oligarchs.^[55]

Butkevych fought in the first days of the war in the battle that defeated and repelled Russian army on the outskirts of the capital city of Kyiv. He was then deployed to reinforce Ukrainian forces on the front in the eastern Donbas region. A few months later in June 2022, he was captured by Russian forces in Luhansk oblast. Being a high-profile POW due to his prominence as a human rights activist, his Russian captors tortured him to extract “confessions” for supposed war crimes, which Russian state media made into a show trial, calling this anti-fascist activist a “neo-Nazi.” His sentence was 13 years. In October 2024, however, he was returned to Ukraine in a POW exchange.^[56]

When Donald Trump took office, Butkevych noted that “Trump literally echoes the narratives of Russian propaganda.” Butkevych said he had heard it all before in Russian captivity:

Stories that Volodymyr Zelensky is a modestly successful comedian, that he has no support inside the country, that time is running out, that Ukraine exists only because of American aid, and most importantly – that Ukraine should never have started the war (compare to “Russia doesn’t start wars” Russian propaganda narrative), that we should have negotiated from the very beginning instead of fighting, and that Ukraine is to blame for everything – I heard all of this long before Donald Trump voiced it. These were things told to me by Russian interrogators and local collaborator guards when I was in Russian captivity, particularly in the Luhansk prison. The full set was mostly voiced by officers of either the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) or military counterintelligence (no one, of course, introduced themselves during interrogations).^[57]

Butkevych’s commitment to nonviolence is conditional. In an interview after he returned from captivity, he explained,

A pacifist I am not. It is true that I do not support violence as a method. Yet I understand that military service, in one way or another, involves killing people, and this certainly presents me with a problem, with a moral and ethical dilemma. The situation in which we found ourselves on February 24 of 2022 put us before a choice: either we let our agency be taken from us, or we fight.^[58]

Another Ukrainian pacifist who joined the Ukrainian armed forces after Russia invaded in February 2022 is Artem Chapeye. He is an award-winning author, anarchist, and now a soldier. He had translated works by Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Mahatma Gandhi into Ukrainian. He spent 2005 and 2006 living, working, and traveling in the U.S. and Central America, including time with the Zapatistas in Chiapas and doing Hurricane Katrina relief work with the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans with former Black Panther Malik Rahim of the Green Party.

Even after Russian forces seized Crimea and started its annexationist war in the Donbas, he held on to his pacifist convictions. In a 2024 interview, he was asked, “Before the war you considered yourself a pacificist, right?” Chapeye replied, “Especially since 2014 and Maidan, yeah, because, well, as a young person, I considered myself rather a revolutionary. And then when revolution happened in Ukraine, I was very much obsessed with people dying, and then I went to Donbas [in eastern Ukraine] as a journalist, and saw the war being fought there, and I hoped for another way.”

“And what about now?,” the interviewer asked Chapeye. Chapeye said:

Well, I think that there are times when even pacifists have to fight. It was an interview of some relative of Tupac Shakur who was in the Black Panthers, and that’s what she said. Something like, “I don’t want to fight, I would like to be a gardener, a sculptor, whatever, not a warrior, but if I don’t fight, I would feel that I am compliant to evil and I would feel that I’m an accessory to evil.” So this is the situation right now in Ukraine. I still think that given other choices, I would be a pacifist but now we don’t have such an option.^[59]

Chapeye now calls himself a “practical pacifist.”^[60]

When Russia’s full-scale invasion began, Chapeye wrote an open letter to Noam Chomsky expressing his dismay that Chomsky, the nominal anti-imperialist, justified Russian imperialism by saying the 2014 revolution was really U.S.-backed coup and that Russia was justified in seizing Crimea because it needed the warm-water Black Sea ports there. Of course, Russia has major warm-water ports on the Russia side of the Black and Azov Seas at Novorossiysk, Sochi, and Tuapse. Chapeye addressed Chomsky and some other Western intellectuals who were repeating these Russian propaganda tropes, “Please start your analysis with the suffering of millions of people, rather than geopolitical chess moves.”^[61]

In his 2025 book, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Reflections on War, Chapeye expanded upon his letter and critique of Western campists and pacifists who conduct “rallies with direct appeals not to help Ukraine:”:

…to call on others not to help the victim of a crime is the same thing as to step out of the way during the Nazi extermination of Jews and Communists, Romani and disabled people. You, after all, aren’t the one being exterminated or doing the exterminating. But we’ve seen how this disengagement led to genocide and the world war…. It’s easy to hide behind the abstract idea that “the more weapons there are, the more war there will be” when you yourself are safe. It’s easy to say, “Surrender, because we’re getting scared” (this is, in essence, what a considerable portion of these arguments boil down to). “Sacrifice yourselves for the sake of our peace.” Even if veiled, that’s what these appeals mean. You can only say these things if you’re not the one being attacked and destroyed.^[62]

When Western feminists issued a manifesto called “Feminists Resistance Against War”^[63] that opposed arms to Ukraine for its self-defense, Ukrainian feminists issues a sharp rebuttal in their own manifesto called “The Right to Resist.”^[64] The Ukrainian feminists said the Western feminists “deny Ukrainian women this right to resistance, which constitutes a basic act of self-defense of the oppressed…. Abstract pacifism which condemns all sides taking part in the war leads to irresponsible solutions in practice. We insist on the essential difference between violence as a means of oppression and as a legitimate means of self-defense.”

One of the Ukrainian feminists who issued the Right to Resist manifesto, Oksana Briukhovetska, was in the United States when the mass demonstrations against police brutality and racism after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis in 2020. As an act of solidarity with anti-racist campaigns in the U.S. and to show Ukrainians how their movement for self-determination is connected with other liberation movements, she interviewed participants in the protests and wrote and illustrated a book in Ukrainian called Black Lives Matter Voices.^[65] American Greens should reciprocate that solidarity.

Ukrainian Nonviolent Resistance

Ukrainians did employ nonviolent resistance to the Russian invasion. The rapid whole-of-society self-mobilization by civil society for mutual aid and civil resistance has been legendary. Over 80 percent of Ukrainians have consistently donated or volunteered to support military and humanitarian causes.^[66] For almost all Ukrainians, however, nonviolent resistance has been seen as a complement, not a substitute, for the armed resistance to Russia’s military aggression.

In anticipation of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces had established a National Resistance Center to conduct hands-on workshops, online courses, and the distribution of training manuals to teach nonviolent resistance tactics to the Ukrainian population. Over 100,000 people have downloaded the manual on nonviolent resistance.^[67]

Nonviolent resistance did hinder the advance of the Russian invasion in its early stages through large-scale street protests, road blockades of Russia military movements, graffiti, social media messaging, and fraternizing with occupying Russian occupiers in hopes of disarming their hostility toward Ukrainians and eroding their motivation to violently enforce the occupation.^[68]

However, this nonviolent resistance has not stopped Russian military advances and occupation. As the Russia occupation created one of the most surveilled and violently repressive places on Earth, all resistance in the occupied territories has been forced underground by ubiquitous surveillance cameras, detentions, torture, rape, disappearances, executions, and collective punishment by the Russian authorities. Underground nonviolent resistance continues mostly as anonymous symbolic acts of messaging resistance. But such actions have become lethally risky in occupied Ukraine. Their impact has been minimal because the Russian repression and monitoring of means of communication has instilled fear, distrust, and the atomization of communities.^[69]

An international group of pacifists attempted to intervene with an unarmed civilian protection team early in the war. In the fall of 2022, they began organizing a Zaporizhzhia Protection Project (ZPP) hoping to be a nonviolent force to create a demilitarized zone around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the largest in Europe with six reactors. The Russian army had seized the plant from Ukraine on March 4, 2022 in the second week of its invasion of Ukraine. The plant’s capture by combat had alarmed the world over the safety of the plant and the risk of a catastrophic release of radiation. The ZPP attracted 40 volunteers from around the world, including countries allied with Russia. The project sent two teams of four people in April and September 2023. The first team spent five days in the region, the second team seven days. They spoke with Ukrainian citizens and refugees from occupied Ukraine as well as government and military officials. They visited the capital Kyiv and the villages of the free Ukraine area just across the Dnipro River from the ZNPP. However, despite speaking with Russian officials in Washington, D.C. before their trips, the Russian side would not let them into the Russian-controlled area around the ZNPP. ZPP coordinator John Reuwer, who was part of both teams in 2023, said that as of September 2024, they have been “unable to find sufficient support from civil society on the Ukrainian side, and permission from the Russians to visit the occupied area around the plant.” ZPP has not been able to do an effective nonviolent intervention as it had hoped.^[70]

Ukrainian journalists and Ukraine’s intelligence agencies have become critical of some Western-funded NGO programs encouraging nonviolent resistance because they have failed to provide some of the most elementary security protocols for the activists in occupied Ukraine they were encouraging to act. They say these programs are getting people tortured and killed but doing little to undermine the Russian occupation.^[71]

Just Wars

Another way to think about nonviolence is to consider whether not using armed force to stop armed aggression is worse for protecting lives than using armed force.

Were 180,000 self-emancipated slaves wrong to run away and join in the Union Army to fight and defeat the Confederacy and abolish slavery? Historians such as W.E.B. DuBois and Eric Foner recount how formerly enslaved people transformed the political objectives of the Union forces from simply preserving the union into abolishing slavery through the combination of a nonviolent general strike by enslaved people and the armed force of formerly enslaved people in the Union Army and tipped the military balance toward the Union victory.^[72]

A number of other cases are arguably justifiable military interventions.

• Were the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wrong in 1956 to use the UN General Assembly’s Uniting for Peace procedure to override the Security Council vetoes of Britain and France to halt their invasion of Egypt with Israel to seize the Suez Canal, which Egypt had nationalized?
• Was India wrong to invade Bangladesh in March 1971 to stop a U.S.-backed genocide of up to 3 million people by Pakistani forces during Bangladesh’s fight for independence from Pakistan?
• Was Tanzania wrong to invade Uganda in October 1978 to depose the military dictatorship of Idi Amin in order to stop the mass mass killings of up to 500,000 Ugandan political opponents?
• Was Vietnam wrong to invade Cambodia in December 1978 to stop Pol Pot’s reign of terror that had killed some 2 million people, which was about 25% of Cambodia’s population?
• Was the UN Security Council wrong in April 1993 to send a peacekeeping force to protect Bosnian Muslims from violence by Serbs?
• Was NATO wrong in 1999 to intervene to protect ethnic Albanians from ethnic cleansing and violence by Serbian forces in Kosovo?
• Was the U.S. wrong in 2014 to provide intelligence and air support for Kurdish militias fighting against the genocidal massacres of men and boys and the sexual enslavement women and girls by Islamic State forces laying siege to the Kurdish city of Kobanî, Syria and the Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region of Iraq?
• Were Spain and Italy wrong in 2025 to send ships to protect the Global Samud Flotilla from drone strikes by Israel against nonviolent boats attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gazans?
• Would an armed force be wrong to intervene to stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza?
• Is it wrong for Western countries to send arms to Ukraine for its self-defense against Russia’s annexationist invasion?

Each of these examples can be debated. Without resolving them here, we can recognize that even if these interventions are justifiable, most of the intervenors had self-interested ulterior political and economic reasons. Some interventions succeeded, like the rescue from Islamic State forces of 50,000 Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar by leftwing Kurdish militias of the Syrian People’s Protection Units and the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party with the help of American and British air strikes and air drops of humanitarian supplies.^[73] Other interventions failed, like the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia that failed to use its forces to stop the Serb massacres of Muslims. As Chris Hedges, who reported on Bosnian war for the New York Times, has said about that failure, “When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.”^[74]

That is the question Greens must ask ourselves. If armed force will stop genocide and nonviolent action cannot, we must use it. Greens who oppose armed self-defense under any circumstances, who are more dogmatically pacifist than leading practitioners of nonviolence like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are more Catholic than the Pope, so to speak.

Values can come into conflict with one another at times. For the European Greens, the case of Ukraine pitted their principle of pacifism against their principle of democratic solidarity, as Reinhold Bütikofer, a German Green MEP, explained at the Global Greens Congress in Incheon, South Korea in June 2023. European Greens, he said, decided to prioritize democratic solidarity over pacifism and have been more united than any other party in Europe in supporting Ukraine’s armed self-defense and international sanctions to cripple Russia’s capacity to wage its war of aggression.

Our Green principle of Nonviolence as described in the Global Greens Charter and the platform of the Green Party of the United States is the right approach. As Greens we advocate and use nonviolence as our method of struggle to advance our goals and participate within wider social movements. Greens only support the use of arms in self-defense within a wider practice of nonviolent action. When it comes to international relations, as Greens we should prioritize diplomacy, democracy, and human rights. We should only support the use of armed force to stop genocide or aggression as the last resort. But when it comes to the last resort, we should use it or we become complicit in wars of aggression and genocide.

Within this understanding of nonviolence, it is clear in the case of Russia’s war of aggression and genocide^[75] against Ukraine that Greens should provide moral, political, material, and military support to Ukraine for its self-defense and survival. To not provide that support, including the military support, would not be nonviolence. It would be being an accomplice in Russia’s violence.

1. “Endorse GPAX Statement On War In Ukraine,” October 9, 2022, https://secure.gpus.org/cgi-bin/vote/propdetail?pid=1113. ↑
2. Sam Skove, “How Much Aid Is the U.S. Still Giving Ukraine?,” Foreign Policy, September 4, 2025, https://archive.fo/PdHm2; Abbey Fenbert, “US military aid to Ukraine dropped 99% in 2025, report finds,” Kyiv Independent, February 11, 2026, https://kyivindependent.com/us-military-aid-to-ukraine-dropped-99-in-2025-report-finds/. ↑
3. Fatima Hussein and Eric Tucker, “Trump’s Justice Department ends Biden-era task force aimed at seizing assets of Russian oligarchs,” AP, February 6, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/russia-sanctions-trump-treasury-doj-bondi-85ccedf25d5146db74d83dce01c9958c; Alberto Nardelli and Ewa Krukowska, “Allies Say US Retreating From Push to Enforce Russia Sanctions,” Bloomberg, March 20, 2025, https://archive.fo/Z16NK; Dmytro Basmat, “US renews Russian oil sanctions waiver for 1 month, days after signaling it would not do so,” Kyiv Independent, April 18, 2026, https://kyivindependent.com/us-extends-russian-oil-waiver-for-1-month/. ↑
4. Freddie Clayton, “Trump promises ‘peace agreement’ in Ukraine after Putin summit, reversing calls for a ceasefire,” NBC News, August 16, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-promises-peace-agreement-ukraine-putin-summit-reversing-calls-ce-rcna225344. ↑
5. Antoinette Radford, “Timeline of how Trump’s pledge to end the war in Ukraine hit reality,” CNN, March 31, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/26/europe/timeline-trumps-pledge-to-end-ukraine-war; Shane Croucher, “Zelensky: Ukraine Ready for Immediate Ceasefire,” Newsweek, April 23, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/zelensky-ukraine-ready-immediate-ceasefire-2063003; Lingamgunta Nirmitha Rao, A timeline of how Trump’s stance of Russia-Ukraine ceasefire changed since meet with Putin in Alaska,” Hindustan Times, August 17, 2025, https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/how-trump-s-ukraine-ceasefire-push-shifted-after-alaska-talks-with-putin-a-timeline-of-his-stance-101755395992829.html; Pjotr Sauer, “Zelenskyy calls Trump’s proposal to freeze war at current frontlines ‘good compromise’,” The Guardian, October 22, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/zelenskyy-calls-trumps-proposal-to-freeze-war-at-current-frontlines-good-compromise; FP News Desk. “Trump proposes, Putin disposes: The story of 3 Ukraine peace proposals that failed to bring truce,” First Post, December 18, 2025, https://www.firstpost.com/world/trump-proposes-putin-disposes-the-story-of-3-ukraine-peace-proposals-that-failed-to-bring-truce-13961007.html. ↑
6. Frankie Elliot, “Putin vows to fight ‘until the last Ukrainian dies’ unless Kyiv accepts Trump peace plan,” LBC, November 27, 2025, https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/putin-fight-ukrainian-dies-trump-deal-5HjdNZK_2/. ↑
7. Associated Press, “Where things stand in the talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine,” AP, December 15, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-putin-zelenskyy-trump-253ff2eb24b2dbd1b1b9d8a2ab20e913. ↑
8. Zakhar Popovych, “Right to Weapons. How Can Leftists Support Ukraine?,” Sotsialnyi Rukh, May 20, 2022, https://rev.org.ua/right-to-weapons-how-can-leftists-support-ukraine/; Ukrainian Feminists, “The right to resist. A feminist manifesto,” Commons, July 7, 2022, https://commons.com.ua/en/right-resist-feminist-manifesto/; Oleksandr Kyselov, “You cannot fight fascism with flowers,” Sotsialnyi Rukh, June 26, 2025, https://rev.org.ua/you-cannot-fight-fascism-with-flowers/; Hanna Perekhoda, “The Left and the Question of Defence,” Left Renewal Blog, August 24, 2025, https://leftrenewal.org/articles-en/perekhoda-question-of-defence-en/. ↑
9. Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak, Green Politics: The Global Promise (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984), pp. 35-36. ↑
10. Benjamin Stahl, “Die grüne Gründung,” Das Parliament, December 3, 2024, https://www.das-parlament.de/2019/09-11/kehrseite/die-gruene-gruendung. ↑
11. Rudi Dutschke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke. ↑
12. Rainer Trampert remains engaged politically today as a journalist and columnist on the German left, including pro-Ukrainian solidarity commentary on arms to Ukraine, Russia’s imperial motives for starting the war, Putin being more afraid of democracy than of NATO, and the imperial collusion in Ukraine between Russia and the U.S. under Trump. “If Ukraine lays down its arms, there will be no peace, but a Russian occupation with manhunts, massacres, and cultural cleansing. A Russian victory would be a celebration for all dictators in the world, who would interpret it as proof of the superiority of their form of government,” Rainer Trampert writes in “Russia’s regressive fight against the ‘golden billion’,” Jungle World, May 2023, https://jungle.world/artikel/2023/21/putins-regressiver-kampf-gegen-die-goldene-milliarde. In “Imperialism 2025: Grandiose Destruction,” Jungle World, April 2025, https://shop.jungle.world/artikel/2025/18/imperiale-aggressionen-trump-putin-grandiose-destruktion, Trampert says, “Since every democracy in the neighborhood represents a threat, Putin is helping to crush democracy movements from Belarus to Kazakhstan and, by destroying Ukraine, wants to show everyone what awaits them if they strive for a democratic constitution and a Western way of life.” ↑
13. “On political violence” in Rudi Dutschke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke. ↑
14. Gretchan Dutschke-Klotz interview by Regina Mennig,, “The ‘68 student movement,” Deutsche Welle, May 12, 2012, https://www.dw.com/en/rudi-dutschke-and-the-struggle-of-the-1968-student-movement/a-16429124. ↑
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16. Ten Key Values of the Green Party of the United States, https://www.gp.org/ten_key_values. ↑
17. Platform of the Green Party of the United States, “Foreign Policy,” https://www.gp.org/democracy#demForeignPolicy. ↑
18. Grant Holloway, “Greens to boycott U.S. oil companies,” CNN, April 17, 2001, https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/04/16/australia.green/index.html; Leigh Hughes, “The Green ‘tide’ hits Canberra,” Green Left, April 25, 2001, https://www.greenleft.org.au/2001/445/green-tide-hits-canberra; Polly Stupples, “Green Across the Globe,” Orion Magazine, Winter 2002, https://orionmagazine.org/article/green-across-the-globe/. ↑
19. Charter of the Global Greens, as adopted in 2001 and last updated through 2023, https://globalgreens.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/GlobalGreens_Charter_2023.pdf. ↑
20. Lifeline for Palestine, https://lifelineforpalestine.com; Mark Elbourno, “Join Us for Our First Lifeline for Palestine Webinar – Starting Tomorrow,” National Committee Affairs Listserv, September 4, 2025, https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/private/natlcomaffairs/2025-September/093861.html. ↑
21. Francesca Albanese, X, August 13, 2025, https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/1955694483141493021. ↑
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24. Brett Wilkins, “‘Enough Words’: Colombia’s Petro Urges Armed UN Force to End Gaza Genocide,” Common Dreams, September 24, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/gustavo-petro-un-speech. ↑
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26. Howie Hawkins, “Palestine, Ukraine, and International Socialist Solidarity,” October 24, 2023, https://howiehawkins.us/project/palestine-ukraine-and-international-socialist-solidarity/. ↑
27. Mustafa Barghouti interview, “Israel’s Siege & Bombing of Gaza Are War Crimes. Is Ethnic Cleansing Next?,” Democracy Now!, October 11, 2023, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/11/mustafa_barghouti_gaza_israel_hamas. ↑
28. RazomWe Stand, “Defund Russia’s War: End Fossil Fuel Imports Now,” February 24, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOsT1jJQ398&t=65s; Razom We Stand, https://razomwestand.com. ↑
29. Paul Sonne and Milana Mazaeva, “He Fled Putin’s War. The U.S. Deported Him to a Russian Jail,” New York Times, September 16, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/world/europe/trump-russia-war-deportations-vovchenko.html. ↑
30. Sian Norris, “One in 10 rescued Ukrainian children sexually abused, warns NGO,” Open Democracy, November 20, 2025, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ukraine-russia-child-abductions-abuse-kyiv/. ↑
31. Stephen Silver, “$1,000,000,000,000: The Cost To Rebuild To Ukraine,” National Security Journal, August 25, 2025, https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/1000000000000-the-cost-to-rebuild-to-ukraine/. ↑
32. UPI, “Greens Protest in South Africa,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1985, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-09-10-mn-3446-story.html. ↑
33. Lukas Beckman and Margaret Bause, “Petra Kelly—an inspiration! A fighter for women’s rights, the climate, and peace,” Petra Kelly Siftung, October 9, 2024, Google translation of podcast transcript, https://www.petrakellystiftung.de/de/2024/10/09/petra-kelly-eine-inspiration-eine-kaempferin-fuer-frauenrechte-klima-und-frieden. ↑
34. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967, Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/info/mlk_viet.pdf. ↑
35. Charles Cobb, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed,” SNCC Legacy Project, CSPAN Book Talk, June 28, 2014, https://sncclegacyproject.org/this-nonviolent-stuffll-get-you-killed/. ↑
36. Jonathan Eig, “How Bayard Rustin Inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nonviolent Activism,” Literary Hub, September 25, 2023, https://lithub.com/how-bayard-rustin-inspired-martin-luther-king-jr-s-nonviolent-activism/. ↑
37. Charles Cobb interview with Nichel Martin, “’Guns Kept People Alive’ During The Civil Rights Movement,” NPR, June 14, 2014, https://www.npr.org/2014/06/05/319072156/guns-kept-people-alive-during-the-civil-rights-movement. ↑
38. Akinyele O. Umoja, “The Ballot and the Bullet: A Comparative Analysis of Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Black Studies, March 1999, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2645870. ↑
39. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 57, https://hiskingdom.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Where-Do-We-Go-From-Here-MLK.pdf. ↑
40. Douglas Martin, “Abe Osheroff, Veteran of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Dies at 92,” New York Times, April 11, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/11osheroff.html. ↑
41. Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p. 124, https://www.hoplofobia.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Charles-Cobb-This-Nonviolent-Stuffll-Get-You-Killed.pdf. ↑
42. Jules Struck, “An SU professor fights for answers in decades-old hate crimes in the Deep South,” Syracuse.com, March 29, 2022, https://www.syracuse.com/living/2022/03/an-su-professor-fights-for-answers-in-decades-old-hate-crimes-in-the-deep-south.html. ↑
43. Lance E. Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 70-71, https://archive.org/details/deaconsfordefens00hill_0/mode/2up. ↑
44. Ten Key Values of the Green Party of the United States, https://www.gp.org/ten_key_values. ↑
45. Gandhi in his weekly journal Young India, October 11, 1928, in The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 189, https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mindofmahatmagandhi.pdf. ↑
46. Gandhi in his weekly magazine Harijan, October 27, 1946, in The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 190, https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mindofmahatmagandhi.pdf. ↑
47. Gandhi in his weekly magazine Harijan, August 18, 1940, in The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p. 194, https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mindofmahatmagandhi.pdf. ↑
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51. Maksym Butkevych, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10165844963140237&set=a.10151784475285237. ↑
52. Maksym Butkevych, “Reflections on Love, Captivity, Freedom, and Responsibility: A Speech by Maksym Butkevych at the Green Academy 2025,” Hienrich Böll Siftung, Kyiv, Ukraine, December 1, 2025, https://ua.boell.org/en/2025/11/10/rozdumy-pro-lyubov-polon-svobodu-ta-vidpovidalnist-vystup-maksyma-butkevycha-na-zeleniy. ↑
53. Coilin O’Connor and Halyna Tereshchuk, “The Revolution On Granite: Ukraine’s ‘First Maidan’,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 15, 2020, https://www.rferl.org/a/the-revolution-on-granite-ukraine-s-first-maidan-kyiv/30892599.html. ↑
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55. Marta Dyczok, “Voices During the Maidan as Captured by Public Radio Ukraine,” Wilson Center, April 1, 2015, https://infosphereinvaders.wilsoncenter.org/publication/voices-during-the-maidan-captured-public-radio-ukraine; “Hromadske Radio’s global fundraising campaign,” February 14, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ0T1O4AFOQ. ↑
56. Orysia Hrudka, “He fought Putin’s prisons for 10 years – then spent 913 days in one,” Euromaidan Press, December 23, 2024, https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/12/23/he-fought-putins-prisons-for-10-years-then-spent-913-days-in-one/. ↑
57. Maksym Butkevych, “Ukraine: I’ve heard this before,” Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, February 20, 2025, https://europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article73692. ↑
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59. Matt Gallagher, “Ukrainian Writer Artem Chapeye On His Decision To Fight for His Country,” Electric Lit, April 4, 2024, https://electricliterature.com/ukrainian-writer-artem-chapeye-on-his-decision-to-fight-for-his-country/. ↑
60. Luke Johnson, “The Ukrainian Anarchist Pacifist Writer Putin Drove to Take Up Arms,” The New Republic, October 17, 2025, https://newrepublic.com/article/201807/artem-chapeye-ukrainian-poet-putin. ↑
61. Artem Chapeye, “A Ukrainian translator of Noam Chomsky responds to his recent comments on the Russian invasion,” Literary Hub, March 3, 2022, https://lithub.com/a-ukrainian-translator-of-noam-chomsky-responds-to-his-recent-comments-on-the-russian-invasion/. ↑
62. Artem Chapeye, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War (Seven Stories Press, 2025), pp. 24-25. ↑
63. Feminists Against War, “Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto,” Spectre, March 17, 2022, https://spectrejournal.com/feminist-resistance-against-war/. ↑
64. The Feminist Initiative Group, “The Right to Resist: A Feminist Manifesto,” Commons, July 7, 2022, https://commons.com.ua/en/right-resist-feminist-manifesto/. ↑
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