Let's give a face and a name to every Ukrainian hostage held in Russian prisons!

Let's mobilize local councils to sponsor these innocent people!

Let's stop Russia from wreaking havoc with impunity among the Ukrainian civilian population!

We must reconcile two seemingly disparate scales. On one side, the numbers: more than sixteen thousand, perhaps twenty thousand Ukrainian civilians abducted, detained, and silenced in Russian prisons. And on the other, the faces: those of a man or a woman whose family, somewhere, prays that he or she is still breathing. Between the two lies the arithmetic of a crime—for it is a crime, in the strictest legal sense: hostage-taking is defined as such by the 1979 International Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the Rome Statute.

These people have done nothing wrong. They were taken for what they were: teachers who refused to use the occupier's textbooks, journalists guilty of informing the public, priests, elected mayors, parents who didn't want their children Russified. They weren't removed despite their value to the community; they were removed because of it. It is the very lifeblood of a people that is being erased: its keepers of memory, its leaders, its voices, its witnesses. The Ukrainian century has already experienced this with the Renaissance movement of the 1920s, executed in 1937, the peasantry annihilated during the Holodomor, and dissidents thrown into the Gulag. Erasing a people often begins by erasing those who embody it. Today's disappearances are not a consequence of war: they are its deliberate design.

Three walls stand in the way. The indifference of a public saturated with distant woes. The feeling of powerlessness: what can a citizen do against an empire? And the silence of the foreign ministries, which relegate these lives to the realm of "humanitarian issues" to be dealt with later, after the essential matters—that is to say, never. Yet this is precisely what Moscow wants: for people to tire of uttering these names. Secret detention operates according to this logic: to make a person cease to exist because they have stopped being spoken of. Silence, in this context, is not neutral: it is acquiescence to the jailer.

To those who ask where to act, we answer: in your city. Not by default, but by necessity. The city is the first sphere where public discourse still has a face, where a decision involves neighbors you encounter, where a name inscribed on the facade of a town hall becomes an undeniable fact, impossible to dismiss, where a displayed face ignites a light. It is there that the abstraction of numbers becomes a presence once more.

And this action is not only possible, but legitimate and regulated. The law recognizes the right of municipal councils to express wishes on matters concerning local interests, and the defense of human rights is one such matter, as has long been established by the tradition of cities offering refuge to persecuted writers and the sponsorship of imprisoned journalists. Sponsoring a hostage is not a fleeting, dramatic gesture: it is a resolution that is voted on, passed on, and monitored over time, to which a mayor—often the closest to the lives of their constituents—rarely turns a deaf ear. One hundred cities, two hundred sponsored hostages by the end of 2026: the objective is achievable because it is concrete; let us persevere.

Two names embody this campaign. Anastasia Hloukhovska, a journalist arrested in the summer of 2023, disappeared in Russian prisons; her case, made public in Le Monde , speaks volumes about the repression of a free press. Oleg Chevandine , a kung fu champion abducted in the Donbas in 2015, has been held incommunicado for over ten years. Two faces among thousands, perhaps twenty thousand, all of equal importance. They are not symbols chosen for their brilliance, but the first of countless others whom some would have us forget.

Let there be no mistake about the nature of this campaign: it is first and foremost humanitarian. It stems from a simple question – what can a city do in the face of an imperialist war that targets civilians? It can give a name, a face, and a voice to a prisoner locked in silence two thousand kilometers away. It can refuse to be forgotten. One hundred municipalities sponsoring two hundred hostages: this is the beginning of a European civic shield, a network of vigilant citizens.

And yet, yes, it is also a political act. Not to take sides in a turf war, but in the oldest and highest sense of the term. Politics comes from polis , the city-state: everything a city decides together, in its name, within and beyond its walls, is by definition political. To refuse to allow innocent people to be used as bargaining chips, to demand that no ceasefire be signed at their expense, is to affirm that a human community has the right and the duty to speak out against justice. The ancient city-state considered this rejection of injustice to be the very heart of civic life. Our cities are its heirs.

So here's the appeal. If you know an elected official, speak to them tomorrow. If you're just an ordinary citizen, gather some neighbors, contact your town hall, put a name forward in your community. Everywhere—in France, in French-speaking Belgium, in French-speaking Switzerland—the campaign can take root. All it takes is one first step, and it's all in one email address: appelpourlukraine@gmail.com . Write to us from your town, and we'll be with you every step of the way.