Good morning Honorable Mr. Minister,

Your Excellencies,  

First of all, I would like to extend my gratitude to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of North Macedonia, Timco Mucunski, for the organization of the working breakfast dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Transatlantic Unity and the upcoming NATO Summit in Washington.

You all well know that Ukraine will be in the focus of the NATO Washington Summit, which will take place next week, and we expect that its decisions will help significantly strengthen the country's defence and the ability to repel the russian aggression.

For us it is also extremely important that the Summit will make Ukraine’s path to NATO irreversible.

For more than 10 years Ukraine resists the russian aggression and at the same time makes huge efforts in order to reconstruct our country.

russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has sparked the most serious crisis in Europe since World War II and shattered the post-Cold War international order.

The world architecture based on rules is no longer valid. It’s there, but nobody knows how to enforce it. We developed and approved a lot of good conventions, but they can’t be effectively applied.

The russian federation is still enjoying the full veto right as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

The infrastructure of arms control has been ruined by russia. russia is already working to weaken the existing nuclear non-proliferation architecture by revoking its ratification of the Nuclear Test ban treaty, stationing its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Most recently, russia declared about its plan to put some sort of nuclear weapons into the space in violation of the existing agreements.

We are convinced that the European security architecture will be incomplete until Ukraine becomes a NATO member state.

In this regard, we hope that the NATO Washington Summit will not only mark the 75^th Anniversary of the most effective Alliance ever, but also set the right foundations for preserving its efficiency for the time to come. 

We are all well aware that the formal accession of Ukraine to the Alliance is possible only after the end of the full-scale war of russia against Ukraine. But it does not mean that we cannot move forward in the accession process now.

Thus, we expect that at the Washington Summit the irreversibility of Ukraine’s path to NATO should be confirmed.

Ukraine is already an integral component of the Euro-Atlantic security. We do not have the umbrella of the 5th article of the Washington Treaty yet, but Ukraine is de-facto defending NATO's Eastern flank with the help of its partners, which includes North Macedonia’s military support.

Ukrainians are grateful to North Macedonia for their help, for making more than 12 decisions to provide Ukraine with defence packages. North Macedonia also confirmed its support for Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic aspirations and an invitation to join NATO when the conditions allow it, and also expressed the hope that the upcoming NATO Summit in Washington will create conditions for Ukraine to be closer to NATO - this is stated in the Joint Declaration signed by Ukraine and North Macedonia.

We hope that in the nearest future a security agreement between Ukraine and North Macedonia will be concluded, the preparation of which you, Honorable Mr. Minister, had the possibility of discussing with our foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, at the Dubrovnik Forum.

All of these steps should help rebuild the world security architecture ruined by the terrorist state-the russian federation.

Thank you!