The demonstration was staged by Humanity for Peace, an international peace coalition, to mark the anniversary of the world's first deployment of an atomic bomb by the United States in the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.
Protesters gathered at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza outside the UN head office. They carried placards that read "No more war," "End NATO Now" and "Don’t worry, Nuclear War will cancel your student debt."
Diane Sare, an independent candidate for US Senate from New York State, suggested that the Biden administration had to admit that it had no moral standing in the Ukrainian crisis and step back to allow other leaders to take charge of the peace process, which she said should begin without any preconditions.
"The current US policy with regard to Ukraine is criminally insane. Particularly the latest move by Biden to send cluster munitions, which can be killing children for generations to come, is a crime against humanity, and it indicates that we have no moral standing in this crisis," she told Sputnik.
Mike ter Maat, a candidate for presidential nomination by the Libertarian Party, said he believed that US long-term interests were not served by it engaging in what he called a proxy war with Russia.
"I think the hundred billion dollars that we put into it, the thousand troops that we have there are not spent in our interests… In the long run I believe that we need to avoid conflicts like this and in the short run I believe that we need to do everything we can to pressure both sides into a settlement as quickly as possible," he said.