Mr. Chairperson,   

I would like to thank the OSCE Chairpersonship of North Macedonia for convening this special meeting.

The russian regime continues its genocidal war against Ukraine unabated, even despite Easter festivities and breaks in the work of the OSCE.

This is crucial that our Organization remains vigilant against the developments on the ground. 

And I would like to thank the Chairpersonship for inviting Daria Herasymchuk, a President's Commissioner for Children's Rights and Children's Rehabilitation, as a special guest today.

I am grateful to Daria Herasymchuk for her very detailed briefing. What we heard is heartbreaking.

There must be no place for such a crime in Europe, when families are separated, when children are forcible assimilated. Children do not deserve this.  

This is important that with the invocation of the Moscow mechanism the OSCE will use this opportunity to step in further.

At the same time, apart from ruining lives of minors, the russian regime kills children.

Last Sunday, on night russia shelled Zaporizhzhia. A private residential building was destroyed. With three people inside.

As a result, this attack has claimed lives of a man and his daughter.

The girl, her name was Iryna, would have turned 11 this year.

To conduct this attack russians used S-300 missiles.

On the same day, they fired two S-300 missiles at a civilian infrastructure facility in Kostyantynivka, Donetsk region.

This is how the terrorist state celebrated Palm Sunday.

On the following day, four S-300 missiles hit Kramatorsk, also in the Donetsk region. Apart from S-300 missiles, there is a new trend.

Russians intensify the use of guided air bombs – modified version of simple 500-kilogram air bombs.

These cheaper and more massive air bombs are being equipped with unified module for gliding and guidance systems.

This is how they are trying to escape from Ukraine’s air defense systems.    

These bombs pose a special risk for settlements adjacent to the border and frontline.

To mitigate these risks, providing Ukraine with modern combat aircrafts would be a feasible solution.

Russia continues also relying upon Iranian drones to strike Ukrainian critical infrastructure.

The most recent drone attacks took place on March 31 and on April 4.

At the same time Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Mariinka remain the places of еру highest kinetic activity.

Over the past day, our defenders repelled about 52 enemy attacks.

A day before – 58 attacks. This is the average tendency.

In parallel, every day several dozen settlements are shelled in different regions of Ukraine – Sumy, Zaporizhzia, Kherson, Chernihiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv.

For instance, two days ago, a hospital was hit in the city of Kherson.

As verified by the World Health Organization there have been 24 attacks on health care in the first three months of this year alone.

In 2022, nearly 70 per cent of all attacks against health care worldwide happened in Ukraine.

These attacks have negative impact on the civilians in general – access to the health care is affected.

This is yet another dimension of russia’s genocidal war. 

Furthermore, yesterday russians shelled a church in Kherson.

Despite it being Holy Week, they are shelling religious sites.

As the Ukrainian delegation has already noted, the russians destroyed or damaged about 500 of churches and religious objects. 

And the worst thing is that this genocidal war against the Ukrainian people is not only tolerated by the leadership of the russian Orthodox Church but also supported.

Let me quote Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew during his visit to Lithuania at the end of March, who said that the russian authorities were using the Church as an “instrument for their strategic objectives”.

“The church and the state leadership in Russia cooperated in the crime of aggression and shared the responsibility for the resulting crimes, like the shocking abduction of the Ukrainian children”. End of quote.

Furthermore, russians killed and tortured to death dozens of clergymen in the occupied territories as well as conduct systematic religious persecution therein.

What we observed for years in the occupied Crimea is now applied in a broader context.

In view of this, the convening of a meeting of the russian Security Council by the russian president on April 5 is a matter of special concern.

Intentions of the occupying power to ensure public security in the territories of Donets, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are worrying.

No doubts, ensuring public security would mean more repressions and terror against locals.

This would entail new crimes, illegal detentions, kidnapping, torture, and so on.

There are also reports about a new cycle of the passportization campaign in the occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which is usually accompanied with blackmailing, intimidation and restriction of access to the essential services.

At the same time, moscow tries to encourage russian soldiers to kill Ukrainians.  

As it became known, representatives of the occupation administration in Crimea made a worthless decision to start allocating hundreds of land plots to russian military.

Such “encouragements” to murderers are criminal and will definitely be cancelled, like all other decisions approved by the russian occupation administration in Crimea.

We are firmly convinced that putting an end to the arbitrariness of the currently active criminal occupation administration in the temporarily occupied Crimea and restoring law and order is possible only in one way - by restoring Ukraine's sovereignty over the Crimean peninsula and all other temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.

Dear colleagues, 

As President Zelenskyy said earlier this week, “every bright Christian holiday teaches us that we may not know how, but we must be sure that evil will lose. We have to believe. And we believe. We must bring the defeat of evil closer. And we are bringing it closer. And the world stands with us. Every month, every week, support is increased, the circle of those who support us, who support our grit and our faith in life, increases”.

So, we are grateful to everyone in the world who is with Ukraine now and who is with us in deed.

And to bring evil to defeat there must be no illusions about the possibility of compromises with evil.

Any time one may still think that moscow is negotiable it is worth remembering that it took only four days for the kremlin to break its promises given to China and to announce the deployment of the tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

So, how many days or even hours it would take for the leader of the russian regime to break agreement with any other leaders?

The character of crimes committed by the russian military tells a lot about true goals of moscow.

Videos of beheading Ukrainian soldiers, posted yesterday, in the mid of Holy Week, on russian social media, is yet another evidence of moral bankruptcy of the kremlin regime.  

Let me repeat, russians just cut off the head of the Ukrainian soldier with a knife.

Cold-bloodedly. And it is not an isolated case. It is worth remembering before shaking hands with the russian diplomats next time.    

And that’s why no more empty promises from this russia. No more blank cheques for moscow. No more impunity for russian war criminals.

To achieve lasting peace, there are clear steps to be undertaken by russia as suggested by President Zelenskyy in his 10-point peace formula.

This formula includes nuclear safety, food and energy security, release of all prisoners and return of all deportees, withdrawal of the russian troops and restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, ensuring justice, including through the establishment of a special tribunal, preventing escalation and confirmation of the end of the war.

All these steps are well justified and must be implemented by russia.

I thank you, Mr Chairperson.