Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you all for this opportunity to address the Security Council and to provide a briefing on the issue of peace as it relates to Ukraine and its connections with people in this country and all over the world.
As a journalist, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and of the United National Antiwar Coalition, and as a citizen of the United States, the nation which has taken a lead role in continuing this crisis, I am very eager to speak to this issue. As of now, the U.S. government has allocated nearly $175 billion for the Ukrainian war effort and to support the workings of Ukraine’s civilian government.
For the last two years we have seen a terrible war which would end if this country and others would stop providing arms and instead seek peace. There were opportunities for that very thing to happen in March and April of 2022, when the government of Turkiye hosted peace talks between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. The possibility of peace was lost when my country and others subverted these talks by promising the government of Ukraine that it would receive an endless supply of weapons with which to achieve a military victory. Not only has that victory been elusive, but thousands of Ukrainians, the people this country claims to care so much about, have lost their lives. And of course, many Russians have also perished in the fighting. The goal should be for the death toll to end for both nations.
We don’t have to guess why this huge sum of money has been spent. We need only recall what the president of the United States and his foreign policy team have said publicly. The Secretary of Defense famously said in a rare moment of candor, that the U.S. wanted to “see Russia weakened.” This is a dangerous goal for the United States to have at all. The world needs cooperation. It is the only way to avoid escalation and disastrous outcomes between the major powers. The U.S. shouldn’t be attempting to weaken any nation but should be continuously engaged in finding ways to prevent and to end conflicts.
Not only is the Secretary’s confession dangerous, but it has surely........