When I close my eyes, whether to sleep, rest or pray I find my mind going to Central Europe, in particular to a ship docked in Estonia’s principal port, where 2000 Ukrainians, mostly women and children, wait to work out what’s next for them.

It wasn’t that the conditions were bad. It was clean, there was a playroom for the children, free food, free medicines and professional support to access the social system and to help find employment and accommodation.

It’s more that, it brought home to me, powerfully and symbolically, the long, tense wait that millions of people now face as they hope and pray for an end to the war in their home country.

I had spent the last week alongside Friends Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, Director of the Geneva Quaker United Nations Office, and Jeremy Routledge of Southern Africa Yearly Meeting, visiting Central Europe, where upwards of 375,000 soldiers stand “pre-positioned” for war. This is also a humanitarian frontline, which countless people have escaped to or through.   

Quakers in the region are sparse but spirited, and thanks to the generosity of Friends around the world donating money, a group nominated from the Central European Gathering has been able to distribute funds to places and projects where they know it will make a difference.

As part of a talk requested by Friends in Warsaw, Nozizwe quoted one of her Quaker United Nations Office predecessors, who helpfully summarises Friends’ peace testimony as the refusal to kill, relief of suffering and responding to the call to be peacemakers by building the institutions of peace and removing the causes of war. We saw every one of these being manifested in Central Europe.

Firstly, refusal to kill. There are not Quakers that we know of engaged in fighting on any side of this war.

The second part is relief of suffering. In Warsaw we met Friends who described feeling strengthened by Quaker meetings for worship and community to help with sign-language translation, provide pro-bono legal support and distribute hand-made toys made by Friends in North America. In Krakow, we met with staff from a charity assisting refugee families with special needs to access the support they need, supported financially by Quakers. In Estonia, Friends have been helping with distributing essentials to newcomers, with providing access to free activities like ice-skating, and helping establish new institutions to welcome people including a school.

We also heard some tragic stories highlighting fixable problems in European governmental systems for welcoming newcomers. Another set of sad stories concerned relations between newly arrived, traumatised Ukrainians, and ethnic Russians living in the bordering countries. 

Friends in Tallinn are already working with an established psychotherapeutic drama organisation, to organise local-level sessions promoting intercultural understanding, with the hope that this could be replicated elsewhere. On a small scale at least, this is part of building institutions of peace.

On a larger scale, our global Quaker peace institutions are oriented towards the UN. At the time of writing, direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine have broken down. We have been asked though, by grassroots Friends to do what we can to encourage conversations about shared security between the states in the region, leading towards a settlement that meets each country’s needs.  

There are military routes to an end to the present fighting, but all would result in avoidable death. Quakers may be unusual in how consistently we have held to Jesus’ teachings of peace, but we are by no means alone in our concern for a just peace and the negotiated settlement of conflict.

There are about six Friends in Estonia, four in Latvia, even fewer in Lithuania and a few more in Poland and the other Central European states. Proportionate to their size the work the Central European Gathering is supporting is extraordinary. 

We went asking questions about our peace testimony, and returned certain that it is needed now as much as ever. How it manifests in this climate is still emerging. What is certain is that our vocation is to make peace, which the world sorely needs right now.

Tim Gee is General Secretary of the Friends World Committee for Consultation. Tim, Nozizwe and Jeremy visited Central Europe in August 2022, and the statement was drafted afterwards.