Thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of Boston Sunday, calling for peace in Ukraine. Later in the day, the crowd split into two smaller groups gathering on the Boston Common, each representing a different way forward for an end to the conflict.
Near Park St. station, around 75 people from anti-war groups around the state held signs reading “no to NATO expansion” and “the U.S. war machine is the real threat to peace.”
Foreign military involvement would only intensify and worsen the conflict, Dr. Joseph Gerson, Executive Director of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, told the crowd.
“Russia's invasion of Ukraine and repeated threats to resort to genocidal nuclear war if the West intervenes more directly have to be universally condemned and opposed,” Gerson said. “We must press for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of all foreign troops from Ukraine in negotiations.”
Russian-American activist Michael Victor argued that pitting "imperialist" powers against one another in the name of peace has never been an effective strategy.
“They're just putting more pressure and they're putting more money into wasted hands because they want the war machine to continue,” Victor said, gesturing over to the crowd across the park at the bandstand. “Whereas over here, we want peace and respect.”
At the bandstand, around 200 people at a rally organized by the Ukrainian Cultural Center of New England held Ukrainian flags and chanted “glory to Ukraine.”
“Ukrainian people are fighting strong, but they need help. They need your help. They need your country's help,” Artem Dinh, a Ukranian and Vietnamese Tufts student told the crowd. “Let's unite together and make Putin fail once and for all.”
Nika Chelnokova, a 20-year-old Suffolk student with family in Poltava, Ukraine, agrees.
“We are not saying we are for the war, we are fighting to save our lives,” Chelnokova told GBH News. “If Russia will stop the war, there will be no war. If Ukraine will stop fighting, there will be no Ukraine.”
Despite repeated pleas from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and members of his government, NATO and the United States have refused to institute a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Standing in the crowd near the bandstand, 73-year-old Sophia Mitelman leaned against her walker with a sign propped on top reading “Russian battleship, go f*** yourself,” a quote from a Ukrainian soldier during a recent attack from a Russian warship.
“I mean, I didn’t make it, the young people did,” Mitelman said, laughing. “But when I got here, I took it and I loved it.”
Mitelman, a Jewish immigrant from Belarus, was "refusenik," the term for Jews denied permission to emigrate out of countries in the Eastern Bloc controlled by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s. “We got support from people around the world, it was the freedom march in Washington D.C. that finally let us out, just before the Soviet Union fell apart,” Mitelman said.
The protests on either side of the Common were fighting for the same goal, Mitelman said — a demand for peace and the ongoing fight to protect innocent civilians.
“When I see on TV, women with children, I see myself,” Mitelman said. “I went through four countries by bus with my kid to cross the border between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. We are people of conscience united, it doesn’t matter who you are.”
And Mitelman said the violence could come to America as well.
“This generation should learn from the old generation who were our leaders, it was non-violent resistance. But now resistance gets violent. Now it's crazy. Young people have a lack now in leadership, they don’t have skills of non-violent resistance,” Mitelman said. “It’s a very dangerous time, and if good people will not unite, you will be next hiding in the basement.”
