Mr. Francis M. O'Donnell:

I thank the members. I am excited by their questions and I would love to answer them in the detail and the richness of a good debate. I will try to do justice to them and I will go through my notes from the beginning. I will, therefore, begin with Deputy Byrne. There is a huge challenge to us in the international community - and this is an irony, if not a paradox, of today's information revolution that we so often speak about - first to understand where is the truth in all that we are hearing about Ukraine and to what extent there is any veracity in the many Russian claims made about the situation there. I believe there is some. Can we believe everything that is said from the other side of fence - the western or EU sides? It is difficult.

In a way, it comes down to questions of honesty, transparency, accountability and the extent to which we can corroborate and verify the evidence and determine what it suggests. If we want to examine Russia's activities, particularly those of President Putin, we must ask what exactly is occurring and his motivation. Have we been asleep at the switch for years without recognising the significance of the Georgian experience and other events?

I note that Transnistria did not figure particularly prominently, or at all, in the remarks but I am very concerned that Russia will not stop with Crimea and push into eastern Ukraine imminently. I have been saying to those on whom I feel I have an influence and who can influence events that the presidential elections on 25 May are what I consider to be the outside limit of what Mr. Putin believes to be his window of opportunity to seize what he wants in Ukraine. It is unlikely that he will wait until the day before the elections prior to acting. Irrespective of whether one relies on General Breedlove of NATO or the British Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, whose very interesting report I read last night, all the indicators suggest the build-up is ready to move. The Russian forces are, to all intents and purposes, ready to move, regardless of how poorly reformed they may be and how poorly co-ordinated they might turn out to be in practice. If this is the case, the world at large has no time to lose. I hesitate to say the west because the matter should not be cast in these polar terms. We in the world at large have no time to lose in bringing pressure to bear on Mr. Putin personally and on his regime to have him back off from the horrendous move he has made into Ukraine and the devastating gesture he has made towards the international rule of law. The move has come from a Big Five superpower with a nuclear arsenal. The question of truth is fundamental. It is perhaps very difficult to discuss this when views can be so polarised, as members rightly pointed out.

Why did we in the west not project ourselves better? Much of the substantive background analysis and information on Mr. Putin's motives and what was occurring has been available. What has been missing, and what is usually missing, as with the risk of Rwandan genocide, on which I spoke to a multi-faith forum in New York six months prior to that genocide's occurrence, and as with problems in the Balkans over 20 years ago, is a political leadership that ought to be informed about and conscious of the risks. The political leadership does not take these matters into account when it ought to. I sit here today to try to do my bit to alert the committee, in our humble nation on the fringe of Europe, to the grave risks that we all face.

Let me address the question of what I think of the concept of the Eastern Partnership. It was, on the whole, an effort in very good faith to try to afford the possibility of integration into the European Union to those countries on its periphery. Such countries are getting closer and closer to the Russian frontier. I was asked what I mean by "creative". There is a Eurasian union on the cards, if not coming into being, and there is the European Union and the gap between the two. There is still a black hole in the Balkans, whose states have still not been integrated into the European Union although they are completely surrounded by it. It would not take too much to imagine an arrangement between the European Union and the Russian Federation with some involvement across the Atlantic in support of this on the basis of some further political configuration that is not as intensive as the European Union but which does not compromise the existing unity between its member states.

I hope the Union can be improved and reformed further and that we can get rid of the democratic deficit that is so often spoken about. I am talking about bringing Russia closer to a looser type of arrangement like the European Union, making it part of such an arrangement and giving it some kind of prominence, while also giving the other central Asian countries a role in addition to the Caucasus and so forth. In a way, this ought to be possible.

Curiously, I believe former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, when in office, and others spoke about a Euro-Mediterranean union. When we look to the south, we look beyond the European Union towards some sort of more open and inclusive arrangement that involves the relevant countries in a wider set of challenges and opportunities. The same should be done in the east. The same needs to be done with Russia. Russia cannot be made to feel excluded from what is happening. We need to think outside the box and determine how this can be achieved. However, we are too slow in the west. In Europe, we are far too slow to move forward with these types of ideas, flesh them out and debate them. Instead, what has been happening is that Mr. Putin and his elite have been pursuing a different, more imperialist vision of a resurgent Russia, very much influenced by Mr. Ivan Ilyin and other such people. There is an ideology in Russia today based on a form of monarchism that regarded the tragedy of the 20th century as being the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also on what President Putin's philosophical mentor Ivan Ilyin has described as the tragedy of the Russian Revolution.

It is very important to understand the philosophical underpinnings of what Mr. Putin is doing, what makes him think, what drives the elite, and where the interests mesh with the oligarchic class. Unfortunately, a book that was to be published by Cambridge University Press on the connections that may or are alleged to exist between criminal networks, organised oligarchs and the Putin regime has been pulled back by the publisher out of fear of litigation from the Russian side.

There is a need for us to understand, at a wider level and not just at the level of policy experts, much more deeply what is happening in the part of the world in question and not be swayed too much by the ideological clichés that arise from time to time. We should not regard this as a left–right issue in the classic sense of Irish politics, for example. This is not an issue of the left and right wings, nor is it an issue of the west of Europe versus the east of Europe. Even in Ukraine, it is not an issue of the west of Ukraine versus the east of Ukraine. Outside the main urban centres where Russian is the predominant language, the language in the rural areas is primarily Ukrainian. One should not think that when one sees a linguistic map of Ukraine, it is showing one the political configuration, even in Kharkiv, for example.

We are speaking English in this room today. Can one imagine the outcome if, after President Higgins’s visit to London over the past few days, soccer hooligans were to come over here fomenting unrest against Gaelgóirí and people began stating we must speak up for the rights of English speakers, with the result that Her Majesty's Government became very concerned about the matter and British forces started coming here without their insignia to take over Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan so as to annexe them to Northern Ireland and declare the Republic of Ulster, which would be suddenly annexed by Great Britain? This should not be done but it is exactly what Mr. Putin has done in Crimea. It is exactly what he would not fail to do if he had the chance in the rest of Ukraine.