Meeting of the Parliament 05 March 2025
I congratulate my colleague Colin Beattie on securing this timely debate.
America’s blunderbuss, broken-bottle-in-the-face approach to diplomacy has shocked the democratic world, as has its appeasement of Russia. Russia’s forces have committed countless atrocities, from Bucha to Mariupol, and it continues to bomb Ukraine indiscriminately and kidnap and Russify Ukrainian children. It is an aggressor set to be rewarded for its vicious, unprovoked invasion with land and trade. Peace, security, territorial integrity and Ukraine’s independence must be the aim, not a 21st-century equivalent of 1938 Czechoslovakia after it was shorn of the Sudetenland and left open to annexation.
Few nations have suffered as Ukraine has since the beginning of the 20th century, with the ravages of world war one, occupation, revolution, pogroms, civil war, conflict with Poland, Bolshevik oppression, forced collectivisation, millions starved to death in the Holodomor, the Stalinist purges, Hitler’s onslaught, the Holocaust, an insurgency in the decade following the second world war, mass deportations to Siberia and the Russification of formerly majority Ukrainian communities, from the Kuban to Kursk.
In 1991, after decades of Soviet stagnation, 92.4 per cent of Ukrainians voted for independence. However, in 2004, Russian meddling led to the near-fatal poisoning of presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko. Following Ukraine’s revolution of dignity, Russia seized Crimea and backed pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine—a conflict that began in 2014, and not 2015, as the US President ignorantly asserted.
Can Europe afford to deter Russian aggression? More pertinently, can it afford not to? Russia’s economy is actually very weak. The International Monetary Fund says that Russia’s economy is smaller than that of Italy, Canada or Brazil. It is only three and a half times bigger than Ireland’s economy, much less than half of that of Germany and not even two thirds of that of the UK. Russia’s economy is only a fourteenth of Europe’s economy, with a quarter of its population and a tenth of the population of China—a country that has long cast envious eyes over Siberia.