Thank you very much. I want to thank President Sandu, I want to thank Moldova for this very important event, for the role that Moldova is playing in these tough times. My greetings to all colleagues.

I think that this event has a particular value, and a particular flavour, for we celebrate it while, near here, Ukrainians, President Zelensky, impress the world, showing how difficult it can be to [make] a free people and a sovereign nation [yield]. In doing it, we know that they defend also our security and international law, without which no one tomorrow would be safe. We celebrate this event here in Moldova which is another nation which would risk an aggression if Ukrainians didn’t defend themselves as they are doing, and if we didn’t help them to do that. We celebrate this event in a time in which different crises we have been facing – the pandemic crisis, and now the aggression of Russia against Ukraine – show us our difficulties, but it means also an occasion, for crises are always an occasion. The occasion to discuss ourselves and to go deep into the problems we have, trying to understand what didn’t function to solve it. So, why are we here? We are here first of all I think to remind ourselves that Europe is not a club, it is not simply rules and it is not simply interests. Europe is, moreover and before everything, a civilisation which was founded on the idea that men are free and equal. Values on which depend also ideas like solidarity, subsidiarity, the rule of law. We are here to remind that we will not allow that those principles are discussed, that those principles are destroyed by who thinks that can bring us back to the most difficult years of the past century. That is why we will be near Ukraine, helping Ukraine at 360 degrees for all the time that will be needed. That is why we sustain also the walk that Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, but also the Western Balkans are doing to accession to the European Union, which does not mean enlarging the European Union; it means coming back all together, for that is what we are.

We are here to remind ourselves that there is not an [‘A-league Europe’ and a ‘B-league Europe’]; there is only Europe and that Europe needs, as Giovanni Paolo II, the Pope, said, to breathe with two [lungs] - the West and the East. If Europe is moreover our destiny, if in front of the crises we are facing, we win or we lose together, it is together that we have to find the solutions to those crises. Crises such as the security of our continent, which means the energetic one, sources, the capacity that we have to control our future; crises such as connectivity, which is a way to put each one of us nearer to the other and become all together stronger; and crises or problems such as those that geopolitics puts in front of us and I think we should remember also the relations with our global partners. I think, for example, about Africa, for they need us, also not to be victim of that narrative who wants to say there is a West and all the rest. It means also solving problems that we have to face like, for example, illegal migration, that we [can] solve only if we help those nations. It means there is lots of work to do but we have to do it if we want a Europe that, after being a protagonist of the past, is a protagonist also of the future.

Thank you.