In a lengthy statement published by the Swiss journal “Zeitgeschehen,” the four signers (Professor Dr. Peter Brandt, Professor Dr. Hajo Funke, General a. D. Harald Kujat and Professor Dr. h. c. Horst Teltschik) make ample reference to several explicit United Nations resolutions that urge talks, and recall that there have been repeated signals from Russian President Vladimir Putin that talks are desired, which have, however, found response neither in the West nor in Ukraine. The Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022 also found no support in the West.
Not talking, but, instead, pumping more weapons into a conflict that cannot be solved on the battlefield, is the more dangerous, because the conflict might then develop into a big war with nuclear weapons, the statement warns. Whereas the First World War is widely seen as the “primary catastrophe” of the 20th Century, everything must be done to prevent the Ukraine war from turning into the primary catastrophe of the 21st Century, the statement urges.
Peter Brandt is the son of late German Chancellor Willy Brandt; Harald Kujat is a retired former General Inspector of the German Armed Forces; Horst Teltschik is a former top diplomat who operated out of the chancellery of Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the time of the Iron Curtain’s fall, subsequently the president of the Munich Security Conference; Hajo Funke is an emerited leading politologist at the Free University of Berlin.
