COMUNICATION
The Academy of Yuste Denounces the War in Ukraine
News
A year into the war in Ukraine, the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste has adopted the Declaration of Yuste, where it condemns “so much unnecessary and undeserved human suffering” while expressing its “sincere and profound solidarity” with the Ukrainian people, who have been “ravaged by unjustified and condemnable military aggression by a neighbouring nation that has been culturally and spiritually linked to it for centuries”. (23/02/2023)
The Declaration of Yuste recalls that for almost a year now, the spectre of the horror of war has returned “in the wake of untold suffering among the civilian population, which has been pushed to forced emigration from their ancestral homes to try to survive”, which has struck the hearts of all Europeans “because it makes one rekindle and contemplate the brutality of a well-known human phenomenon, but one that is highly abhorred from the very origins of the European civilisation”.
The Academy of Yuste’s text adds to the appeal made a few months ago by the International Union of Academies (UAI), an organisation that was founded in 1919 after the cataclysm of World War I, in order to support and develop peaceful international cooperation between academics and researchers and for the benefit of progress in the study of human and social sciences.
Along these lines and like the UAI and many other fraternal academic organisations, the Academy of Yuste subscribes to the hope that “it will be possible to reach a rapid end to hostilities thanks to the efforts of the United Nations Organization and the European Union to restore the rule of international law”.
The Declaration of the Academy of Yuste recalls the beginnings of European construction in 1957 when six countries set out on the road “to the integration of their economies and societies in the hope of bequeathing a better life to all their citizens”. A “project that has been able to generate the greatest phase of political stability, economic prosperity, cultural flourishing and social welfare recorded in the old continent throughout its millenary and dense history”.
Yuste’s Declaration is a text signed in February 2023 by historians Paul Preston, Enrique Moradiellos, Gustaaf Janssens and Manuela Mendonça; sociologists Peter Piot, Zsuzsa Ferge and Abram de Swaan; cardiologist and researcher Valentín Fuster; politicians Ramón Jaúregui, Marcelino Oreja, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra and Monica Luisa Macovei, and music director Franz Welser-Möst.
