 Mr Chairman, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to be here today at the Institute for International and European Affairs to address you on the topic of Ukraine. This is a place that has become very close to my heart after a series of intense mission visits there over an 18-month period from the summer of 2012 until November of 2013. I thought I might begin and forgive me for this because in such an institute and with a self-invited audience people will already know things but I thought it is useful given our geographic distance from Ukraine to actually start by locating Ukraine if I might with a few remarks. If we look at the the political map of Europe, Ukraine is shown, I don't have a point but you can see Ukraine in that kind of movie pink shade beside Russia and just looking at it, where it is placed and looking at its size, perhaps the first remarks. It's a very large state. It is a state that in many ways because of the iron curtain and all that went with it but at least for the public in the West was hidden in full public view for a very long period. Territorially we know it's big but in fact when we look at it compared to some of the landmassive states we're more familiar with it gives a sense of its scale. It's two and a half times the landmass of the United Kingdom, twice the size of Italy, one in three quarters the size of Germany. This is a big country geographically. Its population of 46 million is ethnically 78% Ukrainian and 17% Russian. The remainder are Belarusians, Tatars, Romanians and others. Linguistically Ukrainian is the native language of about two-thirds of the population with Russian being the mother tongue of about one-third of Ukrainians. There aren't have been historically distinct differences between the East and the West of Ukraine but not so deep as to prevent a genuine sense of belonging together in Ukraine for the vast majority of the population. A little bit on Ukraine's history. Like so much of Europe, Ukraine's evolving borders through the first half of the 20th century are a collage of the geopolitical traces of history on geography. Ukraine was in a state of almost constant war from 1917 to 1921 against the backdrop of the closing stages of World War I, the Russian Revolution and a civil war. Eventually Ukraine was subsumed into the Soviet Union, gaining territory from southern Russia in its southeast. So if we come down here to the Luhansk Donetsk Donbas area, this is the area that would have come in as part of the subsuming of Ukraine into the Soviet Union that would have been originally territorially part of Russia during the period of the Czar's and the Russian Empire. The civil war in Ukraine, so that period up to independence, was estimated to have cost one and a half million Ukrainian lives. Under Stalin in the 1930s, in the early 1930s, 32 and 33, there was an event which I only learned of when I went to Ukraine called Haldomor. Haldomor is a word that means extermination by hunger. This was Ukraine's equivalent of the Holocaust where millions starved to death in no small part due to Stalin's mass repressions, especially those associated with the brutal collectivization of agriculture and the war on the Kulaks, the Ukrainian and Russian peasants. The Haldomor was only officially admitted in Russia in the late 80s in the era of Glasnost. The records are indeterminate, so the figures are always disputed, but probably more than six million died during this period, and the vast majority who died were Ukrainian. Between Nazi invasion and subsequent Soviet liberation, Ukraine found itself as a swing state on the front line in both directions, both Nazis going east and the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union going west. 700 towns and cities were destroyed, with up to 8 million war dead among Ukrainian forces and citizens. A drought in the immediate post-war period, together with this devastation, led to a famine in 1946 and 47, which claimed the lives of at least hundreds of thousands, with some estimating and suggesting up to one and a half million. So what's the point of telling this quick hop, skip and jump through Ukrainian history in the 20th century? In a century marked by so much brutality, few states comparatively relative to their size and population base suffered so gravely as Ukraine did in the early decades of the 20th century. It has made me, as I became familiar with this history, totally convinced that if there was ever a people in Europe that deserved a break, the Ukrainians are such a people. Ukraine's borders finally were settled in 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine. He spent many years working in Donbas. He was born just on the other side of the Russian border, but his father came to live in Donbas. He went to school there, technical college, worked in the mines there. He was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1938 to 1949, prior to becoming the first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. This led President Putin publicly to speculate in the speech he gave in St. George's Hall in the Kremlin and the day Russia formally annexed Crimea on the 18th of March of this year, as to whether the gesture by Khrushchev was, and I quote President Putin, a desire to win the support of the Ukrainian political establishment or to atone for the mass repressions of the 1930s in Ukraine. Now if I show you the map of Crimea, the purpose is really to observe one thing. You can see, of course, it is classically a peninsula with just a little land bridge to Ukraine, but no actual land bridge to Russia. The curse straight here is the main point, Russia, Ukraine. And as the Ukrainian ambassador can attest, this is a place of enormous traffic jams each way where you can spend many hours waiting to get across and so on, so it's a real bottleneck. But if you see Crimea connected in that way to Ukraine, whatever about its geopolitics, it's geographically logical that it might be so. And so one of the issues that's now prevailing and beginning to assert itself is whether directly or through proxies Russia can break away through from the Russian border directly down to the territory of Crimea, but that little map gives a sense of the the geography of that connection. I might add, if I go back for the sake of completeness, that there were territories added under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact from Romania and a big slice of Poland and at the end of the war some Czech territories. So Western Ukraine was a construction of add-ons through and after the period of the war. Part of Eastern Ukraine was an add-on from the early years of the Soviet Union and 54 was the gift by Khrushchev from Russia to Ukraine of the Peninsula of Crimea. On the 1st of December 1991, Ukraine, which was economically and politically the second most powerful republic in the Soviet Union behind Russia, held a referendum on independence. On a turnout of 84%, the S-Vote won 92% support. No part of Ukraine, East or West, including Crimea, voted against independence. No part. On the following day the newly independent state won universal international recognition. Of course it was already in the United Nations being a founder member with some of the other Soviet Socialist republics of the United Nations and an early signatory of its charter in 1945. One other general comment before I move on to more specifics and it's just a very quick, for an Irish based audience, a very quick reflection on unrealized potential. Ukraine's territory is enormous compared to Ireland. Its population is 10 times greater than that of Ireland. Its money GDP in US dollars, according to the latest World Bank data, is only 80% of the Irish equivalent. Limited and crude, though this index of comparison may be, it establishes the magnitude both of the development cap and of the unrealized potential of this big state, which currently is the third largest grain exporter in the world and which boasts 40% of the best soil in the world, that heavy loam soil, which is wonderful for agricultural production. That was a bit really to, as I said, locate Ukraine. Permit me for a moment to locate myself. What am I doing here and what was I doing there? On the 30th of March 2012, after several years of negotiation, the chief negotiators of the European Union and Ukraine initialed the text of an association agreement, which included provisions also to establish a deep and comprehensive free trade area agreement as an integral part. However, by the time the chief trade negotiators on both sides initialed the trade agreement in July of 2012, relations between Kiev and Brussels and the capitals of many EU member states had become strained due to charges of selective justice leveled against the Anokovych administration. This related to the imprisonment of four former opposition members of government, Mr. Philip Chuk, Mr. Iveschenko, Mr. Lutsenko, and the former prime minister, Mrs. Timushenko. The prosecutions that imprisoned these former members of government were based on articles of the criminal procedure code that lay unreformed since Soviet times. The cases are complicated and I don't want to divert into them, except to observe there was an element of the show trial about these, but there were other bits as well, so complicated cases. An agreement in this context was reached in the 16th of May 2012 in Brussels between President Schultz of the European Parliament and Prime Minister Razarov of Ukraine to appoint a high-level monitoring mission related to the disputed criminal cases. Together with former president of Poland, Aleksandr Kozneskiy, as determined as remarked, I had the privilege to be appointed to join this on orthodox and challenging pro bono publico mission on the 6th of June of 2012. The negotiation of the association agreement and the trade agreement already was completed and initialed and this was done through the normal institutional and governmental channels and formed no part of the mandate of our mission. The reason I remarked that because I've been reading some strange things in some Irish publications about what Alek was doing and wasn't doing, so I'm happy to be responsible for what I should be responsible for. Over the next 18 months, Kozneskiy and myself made 27 mission visits to Kiev, Kharkiv, Yalta, and Maina Penal Colony. Courtroom, prosecution service, prison and hospital doors were open to us through the good offices of Prime Minister Razarov. In terms of meetings, among others, we met the Prime Minister 25 times, President Yanukovych 17 times, 18 times, Yulia Timoshenko 17 times, 13 meetings around Roy Cluy of the head of national security, 21 meetings with leaders of the opposition, 30 plus meetings with lawyers and family of the prisoners, 16 debriefing meetings with the heads of diplomatic missions of the EU, 13 debriefing meetings with the US ambassador to Kiev, numerous institutional meetings with NGOs and others, and numerous meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg connected to our work with all of the senior, the most senior officials of EU institutions, both commission, council, and parliament. Let me share with you some general impressions from our mission which constitute a backdrop to where I want to bring this. Though more than two decades since independence, Ukraine was still struggling with the legacies of 70 years as a Soviet Socialist Republic. The mentality that we described as that of homo Sovieticus was alive and well and affecting the functioning of many institutions and of the wider society. There was widespread evidence of systematic corruption at all levels of public administration, a glaring absence of the separation of powers as evident from a politicized judiciary and the politicized prosecution system, a court system that appeared to privilege the prosecution over defendants and where it appeared to be that one had a presumption of guilt rather than of innocence as the norm if one was prosecuted. The legacy effect was also evident in the high concentration of power and wealth accumulated in the hands of a small group of oligarchs. These exerted a considerable but opaque influence in the politics of Ukraine and generally benefit irrespective of who is in power. Many of these, and we met some of them, seemed to be torn between the long-term attractiveness of a Europe of values that through its legal order and transformative capacity could add to their net worth over time and shorter-term considerations related to the price of energy, particularly the price of gas and access to Russian markets. All of them most likely, I don't know this but they all seem to be pretty logical chaps, spread their political bets so as to ensure that they would have a roof afraised from that region over their heads affording protection no matter who ruled. Nationally foreign trade policy foreign and trade policy had two vectors. There's a great analysis but I'll cut to the chase, described by one analyst we met as the two cow policy which I thought was a great description of milking as best it could both Brussels and Moscow. Now there's nothing wrong we're good at milking things ourselves in Ireland so I don't tell this in a pejorative way that's why we're a good agricultural country but in reality Ukraine's elite appeared to be more adept in my view at relentlessly milking just one cow, the Ukrainian cow, to a point where lactation was threatened if for no other reason than a frustrated public opinion stretched to the limits of its tolerance and willingness to endure was prepared finally to break. This of course drove the Irish Revolution between November 2004 and January 2005 presaging what we see in Maidan in 2013-2014 and the Irish Revolution and its hopes were ultimately betrayed by a failure to fundamentally reform the system. The public appetite for change lay dormant. I'm bound to tell you it wasn't immediately evident on arriving in Kiev on those missions but though not immediately apparent it had not disappeared but instead it awaited its hour of expression. Legislative elections in October 2012 were free but fell short on the fairness criterion. Outcomes were contested in several constituencies and indeed there were some reruns of votes. The parliament was dysfunctional with the near impossibility of conducting ordinary business. While I accept that politics everywhere is contested between government and opposition parties in the case of the Vrkhovna Rada the parliament in Kiev there was absolutely no trust whatsoever between both sides. The next major elections foreseen at that time were the presidential elections of March 2015 and I would venture to suggest that the parliament found itself in a state of paralysis locked between the unfinished and contested business of the last election and anticipating the next election. Some specific observations the following is a flavor of what was reported to the European Parliament by our mission in October 2012 four months into that mission and I'm quoting. Concerning the legal dimension of the mandate we observed the trials of Yulia Timoshenko, Yuri Lutsenko and Valery Iveshenko and consulted hundreds of pages of documents related to their cases. It was not our role to judge or to contest judicial decisions. This is a matter for courts of law and especially we believed for the European Court of Human Rights. However our observations raised serious doubts as to whether the cases were dealt with in full compliance with international law compliance with the national law of Ukraine also seem to be open to question in some instances be it through action or in action. The standards set by the European Convention of Human Rights do not appear to be systematically applied in Ukraine. The most important deficiencies that we detected related to pre-trial detention, medical treatment of prisoners, the principle of a fair trial, the overly powerful role of prosecution and the objectivity and independence of the justice system, all manifestations of the system's post-Soviet legacy. One of the key aspects of our mandate related to the humanitarian situation of Yulia Timoshenko, an area in which we believe progress was made not only through the persuasive but potentially also through the dissuasive effects of our representations. Taking Mrs Timoshenko to court against her will or returning her from her Kharkiv clinic back to prison or removing her from the care of German doctors were all possibilities against which we strongly advised. In effect the trial in Kharkiv, this was a second trial that was due, was suspended thus giving Mrs Timoshenko and her medical team the opportunity to concentrate their collective attention on her treatment and recovery close quote. I should add just as a footnote Mrs Timoshenko was eventually released in February of this year after the flight of President Diano Kovic and is now leading her motherland Bakushina party in the elections. They will get enough votes to get into parliament but are unlikely to form part of the coalition. But I'm bound to say from my exposure to Ukraine I would rule nothing out ever. As regards the other cases that were part of our mandate, the conditional release of Valery Iveshenko at an appeal court in Kiev in August of 2012 was a source of great joy for his family and modest comfort for our mission in the light of the representations we made. The eventual release in April 2013 of Yuri Lutsenko a former minister for the interior and someone who was now playing a prominent role in President Polushenko's party marked a high point for our mission but one that was not to be replicated during the period of our mandate with regard to the remaining prisoner Yulia Timoshenko. I open a bracket here not in my text that the quality of the relationships between the President and Mrs Timoshenko were so profoundly hostile that the prospect of having her released in his period in office always appeared remote and the more one met both the more remote it appeared. We concluded that and I quote the legal basis in the current criminal code in which many of the charges are founded gives rise to fear of the post facto criminalization of political acts being done for what you did in office after the event and potentially of selective justice. It is our belief we said that in all three cases it should be the court of public and opinion and not a court of law that would ordinarily be the normal democratic testing ground for the exercise of political choices made in government. Beyond prisoner release or improvements in conditions of detention and treatment in the case of Mrs Timoshenko the mission made strenuous efforts to secure fundamental reform of the criminal procedure code and the prosecution system. We did this in consultation with the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe and the European Commission. Our purpose I should stress was not to substitute for legal expertise but rather to draw on its analysis and to seek to channel its reforming capacity into deliverable political outcomes. This involved intensive contacts with the government through the Prime Minister and his key cabinet colleagues and in the Vrkhobna Rada through the speaker and the main parties. Our approach was to acknowledge openly the total absence of trust between the parties in parliament of which they spoke openly so this was not a an aggravation for them but also to seek to secure consensus at least in those issues vital to the modernization of Ukraine and as a footnote to the signing of the association agreement. A number of general preconditions had also been set by the Foreign Affairs Council of the EU including various reforms of electoral prosecution and criminal codes and also making progress on the disputed prisoner issues with which we were dealing. I should say in closing this element that a new criminal code entered into force on the 12th of November 2012 its most significant immediate benefit touched tens of thousands of families when the use of pre-trial detention as a standard practice ceased and reportedly some 36,000 detainees were released. This statistic I should say was produced at an official meeting and I have no independent corroboration but it's the only note I have in it. The other reforms proved at that time to be politically and institutionally more contested and to stick your proposition. Let me turn now if I can against that background a little bit of what's Ukraine a little bit of what I'm doing there to the the the core of my remarks Ukraine the EU and Russia's response. With mounting evidence that Ukraine was serious about signing the deal with the EU at the Vilnius summit foreseen for late November of last year Russia began an economic war with Ukraine in the late summer of 2013. In spite of this President Yanukovych in a short state of the nation speech to mark the opening of the parliamentary session on the 3rd of September last year which I attended repeated a commitment to modernize and reform Ukraine through engagement with the EU. They saw the EU as transformative in terms of their modernization process. On the 18th of September just two weeks later the government formally agreed at cabinet to sign the association agreement. At this point President Putin turned up the heat with sanctions targeted against a wide range of sectors and specific enterprises particularly in eastern Ukraine and especially in the industrial heartland of Donbass. So this area here where all the trouble is now the Nets, Luhansk and so on the Donbass area was the area where the enterprises were especially targeted. These included metallurgy, locomotives, steel pipes, vehicles, chemicals, food and confectionery. All were targeted by a combination of spurious non-target barriers to trade and by the unilateral obligation of contracts. Whole locomotives were stopped at the border and the contracts obligated even though the manufacturing process and testing had been completed. Russia also continued to charge Ukraine a very high price for gas. This was one of the rows with Mrs Timoshenko, a deal done between Herlin Putin in the Kremlin with no one else in attendance in the small hours of the morning in January of 2009 when there was a whole switch off the gas crisis to do with Ukraine and Europe. A deal was done where Ukraine would pay $430 per thousand cubic meters of natural gas. To locate that for you that would be considerably more than the price charged to Germany for the same natural gas from the same Gazprom which had a higher transit cost because it had to make its way to Germany. So gas is a weapon and energy is a weapon deployed in those terms. The effects were devastating in terms of output, short time working and threatened redundancies. In macroeconomic terms Ukraine was approaching a funding cliff. Putin's political force was real, immediate, and a language of power easily understood by a post-Soviet political elite. Europe's political force by comparison was institutional, methodical, slow and abstract, process-based, more than strategic and lacking in agility. And while that is very summary it seems to me to go to the heart of the matter and if the EU is going to learn strategic lessons some of the things I've described as weaknesses have to be turned to strengths or the policy will turn to dust and those are the choices. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that increasingly we, and I'm talking about Kwasniewskiy myself and our interlocutors in Ukraine, were culturally divided by a common language. And here I'm not talking about Russian, Ukrainian, English. I'm talking about the words and concepts we use and the abstractions we use and how they meant different things on both sides of the table even though we were apparently discussing the same thing. The ground was shifting. High-level direct and indirect contacts between Kiev and Moscow multiplied, asked about their content President Yanukovych to us to simulate it. Prime Minister Razarov was becoming increasingly distressed by the weight of the unfolding economic and financial crisis. Though not part of the observation mission's mandate, this economic reality was impossible to ignore and was dutifully reported to the relevant EU and US authorities by us counseling an urgent response. With one week to go to the Vilnius Summit at meetings in Kiev, President Yanukovych signaled to us that he planned, and I quote, to press the pause button, close quote. The Prime Minister announced to us the following day on the 21st of November a government decree suspending preparations for signing the association agreement. Our mission's last official act was to be the first to receive this news and to report it back to Brussels. The Vilnius Summit took place one week later, 28-29 November of last year. As it ended, literally as it ended, the first protests on Maidan began on Independence Square in Kiev. A deal was negotiated subsequently with Moscow, where the trade barriers would be lifted, a macroeconomic package of up to 15 billion US dollars would be provided, the gas price would be reduced from 430 dollars per thousand cubic meters to 260, and Russian banks would agree to increase their investments in Ukrainian enterprises. The Russian ambition was not just economic, however, but also political. President Putin wanted Ukraine to be part of his Eurasian Union and to reassert a post-Soviet politics of the near abroad. In effect, Ukraine, though sovereign and independent, was not free to choose. Any return to the status quo ex ante with the EU inevitably would be more complex, and so it has proved to be. Let me turn to Maidan. Maidan, so it is freedom square, the heart of Kiev, Kiev is a very beautiful city, and Maidan is a very beautiful square. Maidan started with students, but ended up mobilizing an entire society. It was not clear how long or if it would last. The freezing Kiev winter, so Count Minus 15 and going down, and the Orthodox Christmas in January were speculated on widely as break points, but in fact the mass protest movement continued to grow. Like any mass movement, it was diverse and attracted many strands, but to describe it as driven by anti-Semite Rossofob neo-Nazis is a travesty. A self-serving big lie that no amount of Russian repetition and propaganda should be allowed to defend. A heavy-handed intervention by the security police against unarmed students in the small hours of the morning on the 30th of November backfired and brought thousands more onto the streets, outraged by what they saw as the swaggering sense of impunity of the Berkut who were the special police. The protesters flew the flags of the EU and Ukraine. They wanted change, not vague promises. They wanted to rid their country of corruption. They saw the EU as a beacon of freedom, democracy, hope and opportunity. They'd witnessed its transformative capacity through their near-neighbour Poland, whose progress left them trailing far behind, although starting from a broadly similar post-Soviet point of departure. They were choosing in the collective to step into a different future and not back to a jaded past. They were not stuges to be manipulated by any external hidden hand. This movement came from somewhere deep within the consciousness and will of the Ukrainian people themselves. And just as it had bags and baggage, I'm sure it did, but the core of this movement was something very real and very Ukrainian and powerfully motivated. Schooled in the old ways and reverting to them, the authorities introduced an ill-advised legislative package on the 16th of January 2014 that interalier criminalized protesters and thus thousands of citizens. This was like pouring petrol and flames. Tension escalated and the first deaths occurred on Maidan and the legal package was withdrawn as hastily as it had appeared. The government was struggling to contain the situation. As the weeks went on and I'll skip along to them on the 20th of February, more than 100 protesters, as we know, were gunned down on Independence Square. Public opinion was outraged. The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland, together with Vladimir Lukin, President Putin's personal representative and President Yanukovych, together with the leaders of the opposition parties, met in Bankova, the President's palace, into the early hours of the 21st of February and concluded a deal, witnessed and signed by all, except Mr. Lukin on behalf of Mr. Putin. So he witnessed it but didn't sign. Sensing that the game was up, Yanukovych and his closest advisers packed up and fled to Russia and their next TV appearance was from Rostov-on-Don, which is just over the border here, not far from Donbass. The Verkhovna Rada met in emergency session and appointed Alexander Turchinov as Speaker and to act as interim President of Ukraine under the Constitution. Unwisely, one of its first votes was to reverse the law on the status of the Russian language. Wisely, Turchinov refused to sign it into law and it never entered into force. But Mr. Putin seized the opportunity to reinforce his hypothesis and propaganda that Maidan, though including decent people with reasonable aspirations, was in effect a neo-Nazi, Russo-Foab conspiracy. Let me move my hand from Maidan to what I call the Putin Doctrine and here forgive me but I've quite a number of quotes because I think it's better to go to the source than have me trying to do indirect interpretation. President Putin is enjoying record popularity at home in Russia, which has gone up in the light of recent events. On the 18th of March, he addressed State Duma deputies, Federation Council members, heads of Russian regions and civil society representatives in the Kremlin, in the Gilded Splendour of St. George's Hall. It was the occasion to mark his call for ratification of the treaty, admitting Crimea and Sevastopol to the Russian Federation after the referendum of March 16. With the weakness of a Ukrainian government struggling to establish itself in Kiev, President Putin struck in Crimea with what the economists described as and I quote, dazzling speed and efficiency and it certainly was that dazzling speed and efficiency. The independent Ukraine is barely 23 years in existence. In 1994, it surrendered its stockpile of post-soviet nuclear weapons and in return received guarantees for its territorial integrity from the signatories of the Budapest memorandum. This included the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France and Russia. 20 years later, 94 to 2014, 20 years later, to the delight of his listeners, Mr. Putin was by his account writing the rungs of history. I quote, in people's hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia, he said. Quote, this firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation over time. Under any circumstances, despite all the dramatic changes our country went through during the 20th century, close quote. He criticized openly Khrushchev's 1954 gift of the peninsula to Ukraine as quote, a clear violation of the constitutional norms that were in place even then. Crimea was not the only focus of the president's remarks. He also criticized the Bolsheviks, who after the revolution, quote, may God judge them, added large sections of the historical south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine, close quote. So those are the bits over here in Donbas and up towards Kharkiv. This, of course, was not especially reassuring for anyone listening in Ukraine or elsewhere in the context of the annexation of Crimea and the current state of territorial armed insurrection and separatism in those regions. This is not the first time that President Putin evoked such themes. In the State of the Union speech in 2005, he remarked that, and I quote, above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century, close quote. Adding, quote, also certain is that Russia should continue its civilizing mission on the Eurasian continent. This mission consists in ensuring that democratic values combined with national interests enrich and strengthen our historic community. Our historic community is a restatement of the Soviet politics of the nearer broad and of its earlier imperial antecedent based on spheres of influence. Again, to quote President Putin, we considerably said, international support for the respect of the rights of Russians abroad, an issue of major importance, one that cannot be subject to political and diplomatic bargaining. We hope that the new members of NATO and the European Union in the post-Soviet area will show their respect for human rights, including the rights of ethnic minorities through their actions, close quote, which is a reasonable hope for anyone to have about co-ethnics to do with their human rights. He returned to this theme in his recent Kremlin speech, quote, many people both in Russia and in Ukraine, as well as in other republics, hoped that the common wealth of independent states, which was created at the time after the collapse of the USSR, would become the new common form of statehood. They were told that there would be a single currency, a single economic space, joint armed forces. However, all this remained empty promises while the big country, meaning Russia, was gone. It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered, close quote. Now, Crimea, as I remarked earlier, was part of Ukraine since 1954, but implicitly only became part of a different country after Ukrainian independence by this logic. The Greater Russia was invoked in the speech of the 18th of March, quote, millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world, to be divided by borders, close quote. I'm bound to say when I was reading this speech, although not all of its rhetoric was similar, that its philosophical foundations reminded me of the speech of Slobodan Milosevic, given in Kosovo Polya, in the field in March of, I think it was, of 1989, marking the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Serbs by the Ottomans, and the Serbs like the Irish had lots of defeats and therefore found triumph and failure as part of the national narrative. But it reminded me some way of the philosophy of part of that speech. Mr. Putin's, Mr. Putin champions the Eurasian Union, as I've recalled earlier. In fact, he published an article in his Vestia in October, 2011, when he contemplated returning to the presidency, because he was twice in, then he got to the back of the tandem as President Medvedev got to the front, and then they swapped places on the tandem and he was the president and Medvedev became prime minister. But as he contemplated his third presidency, he outlined his main foreign policy priority. He said he wanted to bring ex-obvious states into, quote, a Eurasian Union building on an existing customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. We are not going to stop there, he wrote, and they're setting an ambitious goal to achieve an even higher integration level in the Eurasian Union. He envisaged the new union as a suple national body that would coordinate the economic and currency policy between its members. So kind of a mirror of the EU but in the Russian sphere. It would be open to new members such as the Central Asian Republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He also made available criticism of Ukraine that chose to stay outside the union, citing its commitment to European integration, but he said this was the wrong choice. He wrote arguing that membership in the Eurasian Union, apart from direct economic benefits, will enable its members to integrate into Europe faster and from a much stronger position. In the recent Kremlin speech, he criticized the EU's endless foot-dragging in talks with Russia about visa and other issues, which is a very sore point of your talk with Russians over a long period of time. Mr Putin spoke about, quote, those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine. They wanted to set to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continued to set the tone in Ukraine to this day. Herein lies, I think, the central difference in appreciation of what happened on Maidan and its aftermath. Russian propaganda relentlessly has focused on a big lie that what happened in Kiev was a neo-Nazi, Russophobes, anti-Semitic coup. This propaganda has endured for months and has been a constant theme on Russian television and media. Although there's no tangible evidence whatsoever of any threat to life and limb of anyone in Crimea, Mr Putin justified his intervention, arguing, and I quote, those who opposed the coup. So read for that, the people in Crimea. The Russian-speaking Crimea were in the first line. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, which were not being evidently threatened, but turned for help in preventing the events that were unfolding and that are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and other Ukrainian cities. Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded. We could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been a betrayal in our part, close quote. I would just say this about that citation. Anyone familiar with 20th century European history will find very unhappy echoes in such a justification, if I might put it in quotes, of the annexing of the home territory of coethnics. It's not the first time it happened in Europe, and I hope, but shouldn't be naive about whether it would be the last. Putting all these quotes together, and there's a lot more where that came from, but I think it's right that you should hear Mr Putin in his own words. The Putin doctrine asserts a Russian right of intervention in its near abroad, in defense of Russians and Russian interests. This includes overt military intervention, such as in Georgia, and the increasingly implausible assertion of plausible deniability, in the case of covert and proxy operations, such as in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. The president was dismissive of Western concerns and the violation of international law, and more or less said that the Americans make it up as they go along, so forget the international law argument. There's a longer quote, but I don't do it in injustice. And referring to what happened in Ukraine, he remarked, we understand what is happening. We understand that these actions were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration. We've every reason he said to assume the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, continues today. And so this is deep down part of the Russian sense of where things are that there is a policy of containment in all of these exercises. For Mr. Putin to use his words, this is, quote, an historic turning point, close quote, that demonstrates, quote, the nation's maturity and strength of spirit, close quote. Putin is playing a long game, has time on his side, practices containment and suppression at home, and selective aggression in the nearer broad, and in effect is accountable only to himself and his inner clique. This is a considerable geopolitical strength as compared with the bureaucratic machinations and slow decision-making process in EU. To turn, Chairman, if I can, towards the crisis today, Ukraine is undergoing a period of unprecedented change and strain. Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch closely associated with Maidan, was elected president of the 25th of May. He called legislative elections for next Sunday, 26th of October, and his bloc, the Poroshenko bloc, led by Yuri Lutsenko, who got out of prison during our term, is likely to emerge as the largest party, but he will need to find coalition partners. Ukraine's territorial integrity has been breached by Russian revanchism and Crimea. It is trying to cope with armed separatists in eastern and southern Ukraine. The government in Kiev has inherited a deep budgetary and financial crisis. GDP, according to the World Bank, is expected to fall by at least 9% this year. The currency, the Ryfna, has lost more than a quarter of its value. Russia, having lowered the price of gas in December, then put it back up again when it was no longer in the driving seat in Kiev. And again, Ukraine is paying one of the highest prices per thousand cubic meters in Europe if it can get gas. The question of gas price, winter supplies, and gas debt repayment is the subject of ongoing negotiations between Russia, EU and Ukraine. Progress is reported from meetings this week in Brussels, but still they are short of full agreement. The talks resume next week after the legislative elections. In this, Russia holds the Trump card, especially as the winter approaches, and may play it an hour later, as it pleases, to stabilize or destabilize the new administration in Kiev and more generally the EU. Ukraine badly needs more financial assistance as a matter of urgency. This will be an expensive macroeconomic package of not less than 20 billion US dollars or more, whose cost would be surpassed only by the costs of inaction or inadequate action to assist Ukraine through this existential moment. The dynamics of failing to do this certainly will cost more in the long run, both politically and economically. Fighting on the ground has gone through many phases to give you a flavor. In Donbas, as earlier in Crimea, green men in military fatigues without insignia and well armed arrived and occupied strategic buildings. They then retreated from view to be replaced in part by indigenous separatists. The green men, of course, were not from Mars, but officially also not from Russia. One recalls the statement attributed to Bismarck that nothing is true until it is officially denied. Russia maintained the threat of a large and well armed battalions of large and well armed battalions close to the Ukrainian border, and if I just skip along this map which comes from the Ukrainian defense source and so always in war, you have to be careful about whose truth you're looking at. But what you see on the Russian side gives you a sense of the armor that was there that apparently is going back to barracks, but not maybe I've got there yet. And some of the firepower is inside Donbas itself in that context. Russia maintained this threat on the border. In July, after intense fighting, government forces consisting of volunteer militia and troops liberated Sloviansk from rebel control, and Sloviansk is in that Donbas zone that we looked at earlier. I don't have it marked up here, but it's there in Sloviansk. It was a source of considerable fighting at that time. This was a combination of volunteer militia and regular troops, and the volunteer militia on both sides greatly complicates how you would settle this issue eventually if it could be settled. What is clear is that the Ukrainian forces were beginning to get the upper hand. On the 17th of July, Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 was... No, that's another one, I haven't heard enough. Yes, yes. You see in the lower map, the little red boxes, the Donbas Donetsk-Luhansk area and the craft site where the missiles were fired from and so on, that was shot down over rebel-held territory, resulting in the death of 280 passengers and 15 crew. Whatever about the who-done-it part, and you know as much about that as I do or as little, this stiffened the EU's resolve and resulted in the initiation of so-called Phase III sanctions that absent previous unanimity were not implemented up to that point. Government military successes continued as the rebel-held territory began to shrink. And this prompted an escalation in Russia's response. This is still officially denied, in spite of videos of captured Russian troops and stories of dead and injured Russian troops, including in some media in Russia itself. Iloviask, about 30 kilometers from Donetsk, became a new front throughout the month of August. By month's end, in 72 hours of fierce fighting, Russian-backed rebel forces destroyed several hundred Ukrainian armored vehicles and killed a very substantial portion of Ukraine's fighting forces. I have personally spoken to witnesses of this massacre in Kiev some weeks ago. Russian, quote, humanitarian aid, close quote, convoys, consisting of close to 300 trucks, unchecked by the international Red Cross of the Kiev authorities, crossed over the porous borderline into Donbass. This exercise was repeated on several occasions and was widely seen and reported as an exercise in resupply of munitions and material and as facilitating acid stripping of plant and equipment from the Donbass military industrial complex and bringing it to Russia. A new front was opened heading south towards Mariupol, which is between the Russian border and Crimea. So Mariupol is over here. And the new front remains, in spite of this fragile ceasefire, under constant bombardment and threat. Kiev now had no option. It had dead bodies all over the place after the Ilyask massacre. It had lost a huge part of its equipment. A new front was opened to the south in Mariupol and they came to the ceasefire table and agreed in Minsk a ceasefire in the 5th of September. I received daily reports since my work in Ukraine and I do insist you have to account in all war truth as a casualty, but you can delineate the main lines if you're reading them over time. And what is clear that every day since the ceasefire started, you can count an average of at least 10 people between civilian and military who are killed. And even as recently as the report which I read coming in here today from yesterday, there are reports of shelling and of injuries and death. Whether Ukraine should be a bridge or a border between the EU and Russia is an issue that I've addressed elsewhere. But unfortunately today I think such a proposition is of a somewhat academic quality, at least in the short term. Ukraine is neither a bridge nor the border. It's a front line. It should not be abandoned to its own fate but should be assisted to realize its own freely chosen destiny. If this fails, if Ukraine fails, it would be culpably naive to suppose that this would be the end of the matter so far as the Putin doctrine is concerned. Ukraine today, where tomorrow. To close Mr. Chairman, a few remarks on the international order in the EU. The process should not be a zero sum game of winners and losers. It should not be a return to an older European politics of the balance of power. It should not be a signal that liberal democracy is a spent force incapable of mobilizing an effective response to aggression. As regards territorial integrity, the Charter of the United Nations, the founding principles of the Council of Europe and of the Helsinki Final Act are all challenged by the annexation of Crimea and what happens in eastern Ukraine and its incremental disintegration by proxy. It is disappointing to record and I do it here today in this institute that 69 member states of the United Nations either abstained or voted against the General Assembly resolution condemning the breach of UN principles in Crimea as regards territorial integrity. These included Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa to name but some. Is this a glimpse of tomorrow's world? The total irrelevance of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 that was a guarantee of territorial integrity for a non-nuclear Ukraine is a poor advertisement for nuclear non-proliferation. The post-war settlement, this is post-Second World War settlement, in terms of the international order and some of its associated liberal democratic assumptions, in my view, from this can no longer be taken for granted. As for the EU, this crisis reminds us of our energy vulnerability. The EU's energy dependence is running at more than 65 percent and on its current estimates, the Commission suggests it could grow to 80 percent by 2030. Russia accounts for 27 percent of EU gas imports and 22 percent of EU oil imports. The formulation of a genuine common energy policy is overdue. This is a crisis that should not be wasted. The EU needs to reduce its dependency in imported energy, accelerate the diversification of supply and deploy its collective bargaining power in energy procurement and, of course, as regards climate change, continue to invest in energy efficiency and the development of indigenous energy sources. There are still too many energy islands within the single market and greater attention needs to be paid to the development of infrastructure, especially interconnectors. This is now in the European Council's agenda of this week and this is a moment not to be squandered. On sanctions, these have given rise to some debate and there's no doubt the sanctions are hurting. The European economy is in trouble and the sanctions add to the trouble. But the sanctions also add some trouble to the state of the Russian economy. The sanctions are a signal of disapproval. It's not that they are so effective but they are better than nothing and they have been escalated as the crisis has escalated and in that sense have established a ratcheting effect of kind of one for one. They do have a cost for both sides but if you've nothing on the table, you've nothing to negotiate with if there is a negotiation in the end and in the end if there were no sanctions what exactly would the EU have to say or do in respect of the alternatives? Finally, let me turn very briefly to the common foreign and security policy. I believe that this is challenged by Ukraine and I think it poses a question. Does the European Union aspire to be the weakest 29th policy of 28 member states and the lowest common denominator in its dealing with Russia? The reason I'm posing that question is because my view is that the view from Moscow is that they have some very strong bilateral relations privileged with certain EU capitals and that the EU is something frankly that is quite marginal in terms of its presumptions. Why I would ask for example has the high representative been an absent partner at the foreign policy negotiating tables about Ukraine and Berlin? This after all is a common EU policy and if the EU is absent does it not suggest the re-nationalization of the modestly common policy that was there namely the Eastern partnership? There is much that the EU needs to get serious about. The Ukrainian crisis is a test not just for Ukraine but a test for the EU itself and this is a test that cannot afford failure. Thank you for your attention.