Thursday, March 19, 2015

UK Parliamentary seminar on Ukraine crisis

Video of today's two hour UK House of Lords EU External Affairs Sub-Committee Seminar on the Committee’s Report the EU and Russia: Before and beyond the Crisis in Ukraine

Definitely worth watching. Only the Brits do this sort of thing so well..

1 comment:

elmer said...

One of the excellent questions raised by a journalist towards about 3/4 of the way through is:

where are the Ukrainians?

why aren't they at the table?

The chairman of the committee provided 2 excuses - one, there was a general public announcement put out about the meeting, and, for example, the Dutch and Russian representatives are at the meeting;

in fact, Russian reps were actually sitting at the table

second - the committee, in formulating the report, took evidence from the Ukrainian ambassador

The discussion is indeed pretty good, despite the Russian amabassador's mealy-mouthed "we want respect" whining, and "we want a common economic space from Belgium to Vladivostok"

The Polish representative pointed out a signed document, signed by the Russia, about NATO, to buttress the fact that there were never any promises to the Russia about NATO expansion

It is very troublesome and disheartening that no Ukrainian representative had enough initiative to attend this hearing, in which Ukraine is actually a very important topic