Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We have frozen €1.7 billion of Russian funds in the context of those financial services so far linked to sanctions. It is not an insubstantial amount of money. We must, though, be responsible here in respect of any action we take being legally sound.

Regarding the other question concerning the weaponising of food and energy, there is now, unfortunately, a communications battle under way concerning what is causing food insecurity in other parts of the world. If you speak to many African leaders, for example, they would blame all sides for the increase in the cost of food that is having a devastating impact on some of their countries. Russia has been quite successful in trying to convince countries that this situation would not be as difficult as it is if it was not for EU and US sanctions. This is simply a misrepresentation of the facts. The reason the price of grain has increased the way it has is because 22 million tonnes of grain are stuck in Ukraine because it is not possible to get it out of the ports there and into the Black Sea due to a Russian-enforced military blockade. This is the reality. We are trying to find a way of getting past this. I was in Ankara a few weeks ago. We spent a long time speaking to the Turkish minister regarding his conversations with the Russian foreign minister, which are continuing, on how to facilitate Ukraine safely getting ships carrying thousands of tonnes of grain out of not only Odesa but other ports in the general area and then out through the Black Sea. Those efforts continue at a UN and Turkish level and involve Kyiv and Moscow in trying to find a basis of agreement to do that. I am often asked what Ireland is doing in respect of diplomatic efforts to improve circumstances. This is one of the areas where we are active, along with many other countries.

On Ireland and hybrid warfare were more generally, we are familiar with the use of cyberattacks and so on as part of hybrid warfare, but energy and food scarcity are relatively new phenomena in this space. Ireland wants to apply for membership of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, Hybrid CoE, this year.

In fact, I visited that facility a few weeks ago. I think we should very much be part of it. That would represent an important step in supporting efforts to further enhance the State's capacity to defend itself against, and respond to, existing and future threats posed by hybrid threat actors. I plan to bring a memo on that to the Government in the autumn. We are acting in that space. We are going to be part of that centre for countering hybrid threats. We are already a member nation of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, located in Tallinn in Estonia, which I also visited in the last few weeks. One is a NATO-led project and the other is not. I think we should be very much embedded and part of both.

On lessons learned, in some ways now I think many people look back and say that the EU did not respond strongly enough to Russia's invasion of Crimea. These things are easy to talk about with the benefit of hindsight. Efforts were made by a number of prominent EU countries in the two Minsk agreements to try to maintain peace and to keep warring factions apart, but then that collapsed. I think serious efforts were made by the EU with Russia and Ukraine to try to prevent this conflict escalating. In Ukraine, while they expected Russia to invade eastern Ukraine, even two or three days before the full invasion I do not think they expected that there would be a full-scale invasion of all parts of Ukraine in the way that there was on 24 February. That was the perceived wisdom across the EU as well. The US and the UK were saying something different. Their intelligence was telling them something different. To be fair to the US and the UK, I think they were right. Clearly, they were proven to be right. There are lessons learned there. I was at a conference in Munich perhaps two weeks before the invasion. Effectively, most of the defence ministers in the western world were there. There were differing views on what was likely to unfold. Certainly, I think that some lessons have been learned. However, we need to be careful that there is not some sort of blame game with the benefit of hindsight. Undoubtedly, this is about Russia trying to re-exert its influence in a country that unfortunately, many Russians do not respect as an independent country. That is why this war has become so much more than simply a war between Russia and Ukraine. It is also about the protection of sovereignty, international law and a whole range of other things that the EU and other countries are very invested in.

One question that I did not answer earlier was about how we pressurise other countries outside of the EU to be consistent with our way of thinking on sanctions. That is a lot easier said than done. Every country makes its own decisions. We have witnessed it over the last 18 months or so in our time as a member of the UN Security Council. It is a big mistake to make the assumption that because we are passionate about something, another country in another part of the world sees it the same way. Some countries see the focus on Ukraine as hypocrisy from the EU, given the lack of focus on other conflicts in other parts of the world. Other countries see it as an opportunity to build closer ties. I think that is pretty disgraceful, but it is reality. We need to be clear-eyed here on what is actually possible. However, we should not underestimate the influence of the EU and its partner countries in these efforts. The combined influence of the EU, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan is significant. It is a very powerful group of countries that I believe should be using all of that diplomatic and economic muscle to try to bring this war to an end. One of the ways in which we need to do that is to influence other countries not to deliberately undermine the impact of sanctions if we believe that is prolonging this conflict, which I think we do. Let us not be naive. Countries will make their own decisions, often for very different reasons. Of course, that is one of the reasons that make this such a difficult issue to resolve. Russia is a very influential country in many parts of the world, and in some parts of the world where the EU is not that influential. It is using that influence at the moment.

The final point I wish to make is that different countries approach diplomacy differently. Sometimes we interpret silence from a country as tacit support of Russia. That is not always necessarily true. The way in which democracy works in the countries we live in is that we have to stand over the statements we make, and they are covered in the media. There is a lot more transparency around decision-making, decisions and justifications for those decisions. Those kind of democratic systems do not operate in the same way in some countries. In my view, there are some countries that have been a lot quieter on this conflict than they should have been, but that does not mean that they are not concerned about it. We need to use all approaches to try to ensure all countries that have an influence in Moscow are using that influence to good effect to try to bring this war to an end. There are a number of very influential countries that can be helpful here. China, India and Turkey are three obvious ones. Looking at what Turkey is trying to do, while not supporting EU sanctions it is trying to make other interventions which may have a positive outcome, particularly in the context of the work it is doing with the UN in trying to get grain out of Ukraine. It is working with Ukraine and Moscow on that. That is all I am saying. These are not straightforward questions. There are powerful countries and influencers that do democracy very differently, or do not do democracy at all, in fact, but run their countries very differently from how we do. We need to be aware of that as we try to build pressure to bring this war to an end.