As delivered (transcribed from audio recording)

Thank you, Ambassador,

Dear Mark and Volodymyr for convening us today,

Mr. President, I was in Ukraine a month ago and I spent time with some of your colleagues to visit a protection center for children who had been returned to Ukraine from Russia.

And I must say – I have three children and two grandchildren – and meeting these young adolescents and hearing the horror they had been through and what they had to go through to get returned – made a deep impression on me.

They were brave but clearly marked by trauma. They have experienced – as we all repeat in our interventions – the worst things you can – to be forced away from family and friends – and the deep uncertainty about the future.

So, it is good that we come together – and basically, this is full hall, but I think all of the United Nations should be behind this. We have the Convention on the Rights of the Child, we have the Geneva Conventions, and this is the explicit number one in both of them.

This is truly unacceptable. The situation for stolen children of Ukraine reminds us of the horrors of this war.

So, the plight of the children is at the heart of any credible path to peace and it was a part of your formula, Mr. President.

I salute Canada for its systematic work, and also the NGOs and the civil society that are backing up this.

No-one wants peace more than the Ukrainians, and no-one deserves peace more that the children of Ukraine.

So, we stand by the demand that Russia must return all the children that have been forcibly deported. A good place to start would be to return the children on the list submitted by Ukraine.

If Russia has any intention of showing good faith – which remains to be seen – this is a place to start.

I will simply conclude by saying that Norway is a committed friend of Ukraine. We stand with you. We have about one hundred thousand Ukrainians living in Norway. We are looking after them, they are looking after us. They are good people.

We support the Office of the ombudsperson and we work closely with Unicef inside Ukraine, and the key priority is to ensure that return and reintegration is done in a safe and orderly way. – Because reintegration is a complex task, as we all know.

We will support the newly established tracing mechanism to make it easier to locate and identity deported children.

So, forcibly deported children is an affront to the world and I would like to salute also First Lady Zelenska and President Trump for their engagement, showing that this is a broad, humanitarian family issue, and it will deepen also the partnership, I believe – and I hope – between the United States and Ukraine.

So, as we develop our coalition to support Ukraine, let us make this dimension, which is a human dimension – key to our efforts.

We support Ukraine with necessary arms to defend itself, we support you economically and humanitarian-wise, but this is real human dimension that we need to lift and also explain to our populations.

I would also like to thank the President of the European Commission for announcing a high-level meeting on this issue, and Norway will do what we can to contribute.

Slava Ukraini!