Distinguished Co-facilitators,

Excellencies,

I would like to start with expressing my gratitude to the Ambassadors of Germany and Namibia for their invaluable facilitation of the preparation of the Pact. We deeply appreciate your dedication to navigate this process in the troubling waters of nowadays.

Troubling due to wars of aggression and violations of international law that exhaust our resources and undermine our capacities to focus on sustainable development, climate change and food security.

From this perspective, Ukraine believes that our commitment to restore respect to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter should be a centerpiece of any strategic guidelines that are supposed to frame our further cooperation.

In this regard, it is particularly important to enshrine this logic in the Chapter 2 of the draft document, covering the issues of international peace and security.

We agree that national contexts and internal drivers should be properly addressed in responding to many situations of concern across the globe. At the same time, we are convinced that the current security situation requires our primary attention to the issue of inter-State conflicts and armed aggression that targets sovereignty and territorial integrity of UN Member States. The text now lacks this attention.

We see the solution in either scaling up the existing Action to reflect other driving causes of armed conflicts in order not to limit them to internal issues or introducing a separate Action that will address the threat of inter-State armed conflicts.

We deem it essential to create valuable text that will fill all the gaps and help solve major threats and challenges, affecting both the international peace and efficacy of the UN.

With regard to technical aspects of our work, we would like to commend the approach taken by the co-facilitators. In particular, we appreciate the proposed changes to the text's structure. We consider these changes could serve the basis for our further work on the text.

Ukraine also supports the proposal to allow text editing without attribution.

We believe that in pursuit of consensus we should not sacrifice the essence and narrow the text to those paragraphs that are simply agreeable as a lowest common denominator.  

Ukraine firmly believes that the Pact for the Future must serve as a stronghold, ensuring all signatories adhere to the rule of law and respect the UN Charter purposes and principles.

We look forward to continued collaboration to find the best solutions and serve the future.

Thank you.