The Budapest Appeal

History offers rare moments when leadership can prevent an era of irreversible devastation. Budapest can be such a moment.

We call upon you to include, alongside your negotiations for an end to military hostilities, a commitment to end digital hostilities as well. We propose that a meeting mark the beginning of a Digital Peace Process between Russia and Ukraine—an initiative to restore trust, protect civilians, and safeguard the integrity of the global digital commons on which all nations depend.

As a first humanitarian step, we urge the proclamation of a Cyber Ceasefire—a six-month suspension of all offensive cyber operations that may foreseeably harm civilians or critical infrastructure. This act of restraint will not alter borders, but it will save lives, prevent hospital and power failures, and halt the contagion of disinformation and digital chaos. Such a gesture would demonstrate that compassion and rationality can still prevail over technological escalation, reaffirming that even in war, there remains a shared human duty to protect life.

To give substance to this ceasefire, we propose the creation of a Budapest Hotline—a neutral, real-time coordination mechanism managed under the auspices of the United Nations, linking the Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) of the countries involved, along with neutral experts and international observers. The Budapest Hotline would be a channel of peace in a network of war, enabling rapid deconfliction of cyber incidents, transparency regarding emerging threats, and immediate technical collaboration to prevent digital escalation.

Beyond immediate ceasefire mechanisms, this appeal calls for the launch of a Digital Peace Process—a multilateral dialogue to establish norms ensuring the protection of civilians in cyberspace and reaffirming that international humanitarian law fully applies in the digital domain.

Peace is not only the absence of war—it is the presence of justice, fairness, and opportunity. The digital age has opened unprecedented possibilities for dialogue and innovation, yet it has also produced new forms of dependency and exclusion. Today, a handful of global corporations control most of the world's data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures, concentrating power in ways that shape economies, knowledge, and even human attention.

DCF, a global constellation of nonprofits dedicated to advancing human-centric, ethical, safe, and sovereign AI; sovereign data technology; and cyber technologies for peace and the common good, believes that integral peace must be inseparable from integral human development. To achieve complete and sustainable peace, we must also secure digital and economic sovereignty—ensuring that technology serves people, not the reverse.

Sovereign AI, data sovereignty and decentralised infrastructures represent a moral and economic alternative to monopolies over intelligence and innovation. They also enable local communities, small enterprises, and nations to regain agency over their data, creativity, and development models, ensuring a fairer digital economy for all. This approach is not anti-market; it is pro-human. It seeks an economy rooted in dignity rather than dominance—where technological wealth becomes a shared instrument for human flourishing, not a source of inequality.

DCF wishes to support the development of an AI treaty integrating digital and AI sovereign solutions with synergies of the industrial and technological capacities of countries for those impacted by the war and for broader international digital development.

This appeal transcends the present conflict. The next war may not begin with missiles, but with lines of digital code disabling hospitals, nuclear plants, or communication networks. The challenge before us is to ensure that technology—and especially artificial intelligence—becomes a guardian of peace, not a multiplier of destruction.

The world must now commit to ethical self-regulation of technology: a framework of transparency, accountability, and sovereign design that allows nations to retain agency and dignity while sharing responsibility for the digital commons. Budapest, a city of bridges, can once again symbolise what unites humanity. Let it be remembered as the place where leaders chose dialogue over escalation, conscience over automation, and wisdom over code.