Prime Minister Edi Rama is in Rome to participate in the “Ukraine Recovery Conference 2025,” one of this year’s most important international forums, aimed at supporting Ukraine and contributing to its reconstruction following the devastating consequences of the war. Upon arrival, Prime Minister Rama was welcomed by the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni.

This forum, backed by global leaders, senior representatives of the European Union, the G7, international organizations, financial institutions, and the private sector, seeks to coordinate concrete aid and strategic investments in key sectors in Ukraine.

Prime Minister Rama addressed the forum with a keynote speech, emphasizing Albania’s commitment to support Ukraine during this difficult period and to contribute to the country’s post-war reconstruction process.

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I promised to be atypically short. My dear sister, Georgia, has reminded everyone today that all roads lead to Rome.

Dear Antonio, It has been a great experience, the joyful, chaotic, and peaceful crossroads you organized here to show everyone that there is no safer place than Italy, where all security and protocol divisions are meaningless. And I’m sure that even Volodymyr has enjoyed the bath of humanity in the Nuvola, where all his bodyguards, for the first time since the war, felt completely useless.

So, what to say, Albania is a very small country, modest resources, no power to change much in the battlefield, but we have been and we will be together with Italy and the European friends and partners whenever and wherever Ukraine will need us to be.

And as we were told to speak only three minutes, and I want to lead by example at the end, I just want to say that whomever spoke before me and whomever will speak after me has said and will say enough for me to not be able to add anything interesting for your time to be spent.

However, I want to share with you in this city that not long ago gave the farewell to a great man of peace named Pope Francis, that while supporting Ukraine to fight and also to rebuild, we should do our best to not leave peace in the second row of our thoughts. We should not leave the word peace, divide further our democratic societies and alienate further parts of our societies and fuel dissent among our societies. And we should not let anyone also out of the democratic Europe borders lecture us, the European community, about what peace is and how peace sounds like.

We are not a community of warmongers and Ukraine is nor the aggressor and neither the perpetrator of that bloody war at the gates of Europe every day and night. No one has a magic formula, of course, and myself far less so. Just talking about peace does not make the war stop and neither makes Vladimir Putin a peace lover.

Nevertheless, I want to conclude by sharing with you the belief that while we are doing all the right things to not let Ukraine down, we will not be strong enough to end this war and save Ukraine if we will not have our own bold, credible and attractive plan for peace.

Peace is the only future Europe can talk about and as the late Pope Francis once said in Rome, I feel the presence not of the past but of the future.

Thank you!