President,
I’m addressing the Security Council on behalf of Nordic states Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland.
I’m probably given the honor to do this, because Finland shares 1340 kilometer of border with Russia.
Now, the Security Council has had Ukraine on its agenda for the last 11 years, with few results on paper and even less on the ground. At the same time, it’s quite clear that the General Assembly has overwhelmingly on several occasions condemned the aggression by Russia.
The Council was entrusted with the primary responsibility to maintain international peace and security. And I think it’s quite safe to say that we have failed in that. Ordinary Ukrainian civilians, and actually Russians as well, are paying a high price for this.
Now, quite often I hear the words ”we need to eradicate the root cause of this war”. The root cause is very simple. The root cause is that Russia is not abiding by this, the UN charter. It’s really as simple as that.
It is trying to violate the independence, the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Now, the UN Charter lays out the principles that underpin multilateralism. These principles, in my mind, are universal. Every country has taken a sovereign decision to uphold them when joining the UN. They are the minimum common rules at the core of the whole international system.
We heard that in the speech from the Secretary-General today, and we heard it from the President of the General Assembly.
Now, the prohibition of the use of force, sovereign equality and territorial integrity are fundamental to our co-existence. These rules are violated daily by the Russian Federation in Ukraine. Russia’s war of aggression violates the very essence of who we are. It violates the very essence of the UN charter.
If we allow borders to be changed by the use of force, it will set a precedent with global implications.
If I look around the room here today, I think most of us have had the experience throughout our history of war as a means of expansion. We’ve either been the victims thereof or we’ve been the aggressor.
And I always felt that after 1945, we should have all learned our lesson. And many of us probably believed that after 1989, that lesson had been learned and we’d be moving towards some kind of eternal peace.
But the truth is that when we don’t nurture the international institutions that are the foundations of peace, like the United Nations, we fail.
I think just peace is in our shared interests, and the solution is quite simple. It’s in two phases.
The first phase is a ceasefire. Ukraine has accepted it. The United States has proposed it. Europe supports it. But there’s only one country that doesn’t want a ceasefire, and that is Russia.
And the second phase is very simple. You go into peace negotiations, and peace negotiations can last a long time, but they are indeed the only way we can get out of this. It’s in our interest to ensure that the peace is sustainable and without a relapse.
President Zelenskyi has repeatedly called for a ceasefire and high level negotiations, and Moscow’s response has been more missiles and drones.
The message to my Russian colleagues around this table is: it’s time to talk about peace. There are too many people dying as a cause of this conflict.
I personally think that today could be a game changer for many reasons.
One of them was President Trump’s post on Truth Social, which I didn’t think left any space fo interpretation. It was a clear message that it’s time to end this war. And I think Secretary Rubio noted that President Trump is running out of patience.
Now, of course, Russia is not operating alone. So we urge all states directly or indirectly supporting the invasion to stop.
We live in an era with increasing geopolitical tension and hardening rhetoric in international relations. I think we need to be clear. Might does not make right. Borders cannot be moved by force. Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea and Sevastopol are Ukrainian.
Membership in this Council comes with power, but it also comes with responsibility.
Please use that power to stop the killing and pave the way for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine for the sake of all of us.
And let me finish by quoting my mentor, President Martti Ahtisaari, who was a big friend of the United Nations and who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.
He said that what humans begin they can also end. Please, end this war.
Thank you very much.
