Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the ambassador for his presentation to members today. We in Ireland would empathise with H.E. Mr. Sergii Reva in respecting the integrity of Ukraine's boundaries. We are a small island that still suffers from occupation by a foreign power. We very much stand with Ukraine on the integrity of its borders. In the course of his submission, the ambassador stated: "[I]t is my strong conviction that all problems and misunderstandings which are natural for difficult times can and must be resolved peacefully without foreign intervention with [the] help of [international] security and human rights". I fully agree with that statement. I do not know if the ambassador saw a programme on TV 3, which showed an excerpt of a tape between the US ambassador to Ukraine and one of the female senior diplomats in the US State Department. It showed quite a degree of involvement by the US with some of the political parties in Ukraine. It could be classified on one hand as being of assistance but also, others might interpret it as interfering. What is the ambassador's interpretation of that discussion?

An issue that arose yesterday was that the peaceful protest that emanated in Kiev, since the abandonment of the agreement with the EU at the end of last year, at some stage morphed into something more serious than just peaceful protest. Will His Excellency comment on some of the radical elements who may have infiltrated the protest, and may have gone beyond peaceful protest, ultimately creating the situation that it has given rise to?

Will the ambassador give us a flavour, from his perspective, of how important Crimea is to the Russian Federation, in particular as a source of access to the Baltic Sea? My understanding is that of the 16,000 troops, some 10,000 were already in Crimea, and an additional 6,000 special forces came to buttress them, giving rise to fear of a serious threat of occupation. It is interesting that one army officer who defected from Ukraine to the Russian side yesterday endeavoured to get his colleagues to join him but apparently they all refused. That is significant and shows the degree of solidarity among the Ukrainian military in the Crimea area. That is a positive development.

His Excellency referred to the economic difficulties. I know that Ukraine has suffered from economic difficulties for some time. Will he give us an idea of the fiscal deficit, the rate of unemployment so that we can get a flavour of the severity of the difficulties? Does he agree with the proposition that if Ukraine is to extricate itself from financial and economic difficulties, it will require external assistance that will come from the east and the west, in other words that Russia, the European Union and others have a part to play in that?

Will the ambassador comment on the OSCE observer mission? I understand the mission will only be in the Ukraine for a brief period. Does he have any suggestions on what needs to be done to buttress that initiative?