©Reuters Ukrainian soldiers who had tried to defend Debaltseve from Russian-backed rebels gather in Artemivsk to the north
A damning parliamentary inquiry has accused the UK government of “sleepwalking” into the Ukraine crisis and called for further sanctions against Russia.
The report by the EU committee of the House of Lords also found there had been a “catastrophic misreading” of events by European diplomats as relations between Russia and the west worsened.
For too long the EU’s relationship with Moscow had been based on the “optimistic premise” that Russia was becoming a democratic country, it said.
Lord Tugendhat, the committee chairman, said cuts at the Foreign Office and a “lack of robust analytical capacity” meant that the UK and EU had been “slow to reappraise the relationship and to adapt to the realities of the Russia we have today”.
The committee suggested extending sanctions against Russia, highlighting the US practice of targeting close allies of President Vladimir Putin rather than middle-ranking officials.
Brussels should consider extending sanctions to the Russian financial sector, and the UK should hold an international donor conference in London, the report said.
As a signatory to the 1994 Budapest memorandum, an international agreement assuring the territorial integrity of Ukraine, “the UK had a particular responsibility towards the country and it has not been as active or as visible as it could have been”.
The report concluded that “the EU, and by implication the UK, was guilty of sleepwalking into this crisis”.
The Foreign Office said no one could have predicted the scale of the Russian intervention. “The UK has played a leading role in supporting Ukraine’s right to chart its own future by ensuring that the EU imposed tough sanctions on Russia for seeking to dictate these choices,” it said.
The policy stance of David Cameron, the prime minister, has come in for criticism. Early this month, while Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and François Hollande, the French president, were preparing for a diplomatic mission to Moscow to address the Ukraine crisis, Mr Cameron was meeting soap opera actors.
Sir Richard Shirreff, Britain’s former top commander in Nato, has said the prime minister’s failure to be more active over Ukraine had turned him into a “foreign policy irrelevance”.
French and German diplomats who led the talks that resulted in the Minsk accord were on Friday trying to hold together the increasingly fragile ceasefire in east Ukraine.
Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, has called for UN and EU peacekeepers to monitor the ceasefire, a proposal rejected swiftly by Russian-backed rebels as a breach of the latest agreement.
In the UK, RAF Typhoon fighters were scrambled to escort two Russian Bear bombers off Cornwall after Michael Fallon, defence secretary, warned that Russia posed a “real and present danger” and could repeat tactics used in Ukraine to destabilise the Baltic states on Nato’s eastern flank.
Alexander Lukashevich, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, retorted on Thursday that Mr Fallon’s comments were “already beyond diplomatic ethics”. He added: “The characterisation of Russia is completely intolerable. We will find a way to respond to the comments.”
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