H.E. Mr. Yuriy Filatov:

There are no spy ships to the west of Ireland, as far as I know. Maybe there are some that nobody knows of, but as far as I know, there is none. We have covered the matter of the transponders a number of times already. There are no military aircraft in Irish space. Ireland has responsibility for a huge area of air traffic control. For decades, there have been training flights by our military aircraft in that area. That is always done under strict rules and procedures, designed to keep it safe with no hindrance to anyone. I do not accept the analogy about peeking in at the neighbour. There is nothing to be concerned out. I do not think our exercises are provocative for Europe. I will get back to the nature and scale of these exercises. As far as I know, they were planned well before this period of tension. If we were to send any signal to Europe, I do not think that would be it. It could have been done in any other way, but not in this particular way.

Regarding the question of the UK before Ireland, I do not know. There might be some procedure of air traffic control channels. I am not particularly well aware of those. One does not have to put much into that. It is very much a technicality.

Regarding our friends in Belarus, we have been with them throughout the recent period of tension and turmoil. It is a delicate thing. Tempers flare and sometimes there are over-reactions. We look at what happened in Kazakhstan recently. I would not want that kind of thing in Belarus or elsewhere. People have cut heads off police officers who tried to maintain some semblance of order. We have done what we can under the circumstances. There have been requests from the Government of Kazakhstan to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, which comprises Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kirghizia. We have a peacekeeping force which can be deployed efficiently to assist, within 24 hours. We have been on the verge of that but there have been no requests from the Government of Belarus, which is an independent and sovereign state as much as Ukraine is, probably even more so under these circumstances. There are many friends of ours in the world, not only Governments but elsewhere. We maintain a close dialogue with them.

The matter regarding NATO in Ukraine is quite clear. I agree with the Chairman. The core issue of security is not about Ukraine per se. It is one aspect, though it is a very vivid access. If, for example, ground-to-ground missile sites of NATO are in the vicinity of Dnipropetrovsk, it is a range of just 500 km from Moscow. The posture of NATO has been decidedly anti-Russian over recent years. On top of that, there is the hostility of the Kyiv Government towards Russia. This is a recipe for a real threat to our national security, which we cannot ignore. We are trained to achieve results through dialogue and diplomacy. The president has said that if it fails, then we will have to think about other measures to safeguard our own security. I hope it will not come to that.

I do not think there has been any real change, as members might imagine from press reports, in the military posture in the western region of Russia. This is striking to me. I have seen just one photograph republished over and over again, of Yelnya. Yelnya is a small town in the Smolensk region. It is ridiculous. It resembles the late Secretary Colin Powell. I respect him as a gentleman, but he was often at the UN with a small vial of white powder, saying that it was a weapon of mass destruction. The current situation resembles that. Secretary Powell has been upstaged by US intelligence. I hope the whole story now will not go in the same direction.

Senator Craughwell's information on Georgia resembles some news stories in the Tblisi newspapers. They are not necessarily true. I know he is a man of integrity but I ask him to take this stuff with a grain of salt. There are no signs of life, proving constantly there is no military activity there whatsoever on the part of South Ossetian troops. There is no reason for that. I hope Georgians understand that too.

The question on Crimea requires a long time to answer. I suggest we could meet specifically to discuss that matter. I will try to respond in a few words. Crimea has always been Russian and it always will be. The only period of interruption was under the Soviet rule when nobody cared and Khruschev transferred the administrative command over Crimea from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Nobody cared. Come 1991, the Crimean people cared and, on the break-up of the Soviet Union, they wanted to go to Russia where they belong. Unfortunately and tragically for them, nobody in Moscow listened to them. Those in Kyiv made every effort to keep Crimea within the newly independent Ukraine. There have been three referendums on the issue, all indicating that the will of the people in Crimea is to be with Russia. In the end, the coup in 2014 provoked the people in Crimea to stand aside. There had been no conflict there thanks to the Russian troops that were stationed in Crimea through all those years, under an agreement with the Ukrainians. They essentially played the role of peacekeepers. They made sure there was no intervention by the political parties in Crimea. The referendum that was organised was legal and legitimate under the UN Charter. The people voted overwhelmingly with no machine guns at their heads. It was their initiative and a long-standing belief they demanded and deserved. That was it. This is a stand-alone subject. We, as diplomats, are normally not allowed to show any emotion but I have relatives in Crimea and I know how it went through the years. I know of the jubilation at that time all over the peninsula. It was like spring. It happened in spring and they called it the Crimean spring. I do not want any people to insult the good-natured people in Crimea for their choice with all this political hoopla.

I was also asked about my meeting with General Clancy. It has been played up in the media in a bad way, which is unfortunate and unwarranted. I do not want to repeat anything. There have been enough comments from the defence side and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Defence. It is an absolutely normal diplomatic practice. I asked for a courtesy call with the new chief of staff in November. In a general sense, the more dialogue we have bilaterally the better because we understand each other better. The Chairman made a point about military contacts. Perhaps as a former Minister, he recalls there is an Irish contingent in the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria. We were invited by the Syrian Government to bring Russian military police to the area and that has been the case for some time. They co-operate and maintain a useful and important contact. We touched on that point with General Clancy. We certainly both said that should be continued because it is an important thing. That is what we have in mind. There are other things that do not relate to the military per se. We have regular army games and some Irish servicemen participate. I know a boxer from the Irish Defence Forces took a bronze medal in those games. I do not know what is bad about that. It is a good thing to build trust among servicemen.

I was also asked about de-escalation. The Chairman mentioned an article by the Russian President, unity and so on. In the overall thrust of our position towards Ukraine, one simply cannot find anything pointing to any hostility on our side towards Ukrainians. We are interested in stability and peace and, hopefully, a good neighbourly relationship with Ukraine. That is for sure. We have seen a lot of manipulation by some western powers in their accusations that Ukraine is stimulating nationalism, even radical nationalism. There is a notion that Ukraine is anti-Russia. That is a very unfortunate way of analysing the situation. I believe those powers are simply using Ukraine as a tool to maintain some sort of instability on the Russian border and in that way putting political pressure on Russia. That is our assessment of the intention of some people in Washington and beyond.

I agree that there was slight movement recently when the representatives of the political council within the Normandy format met in Paris under the initiative of France, and we welcomed that. We took part in that. It was good. Ceasefire is good. It is something Luhansk and Donestk tried to maintain for years. There is always a chance of shelling. We have supported the idea of disengagement, which would physically prevent this kind of stuff going on. When forces disengage to the point of 30 km or 40 km, it is okay because artillery fire cannot reach the other side. That was not the case for many years. Some 13,000 people have died there, the majority of whom came from the civilian population of the Donestk and Luhansk regions. Those fatalities were a result of shelling from the Ukrainian side. That is a fact. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE, monitors who are there attest to that in their reports.

I was asked about the role of Ireland and there is a distinctive role it can play.

I hope it will be played by Ireland because of the real independent, in some ways, perspectives on international affairs and principles we share on the central role of the UN, the peaceful resolution of conflicts, the preference for dialogue instead of guns and the peacekeeping experience Ireland has had. All of that combines into a force for good. I respectfully suggest that Ireland uses this right now to help this very important dialogue we have started. The obvious way would be to tone down the rhetoric. This is extremely important. Every day you listen to reports and you see repeated statements by Josep Borrell, or the UK foreign minister, that tomorrow there will be destructive sanctions, we will crush Russia etc. What point is made by that? Do they want to frighten us? They will not frighten us. The only result of this is spoiling the atmosphere. It makes it a little bit more difficult to proceed with the dialogue, that is the only result. If Ireland, and I see some signs of this in the recent comments by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and others, I see there is a certain movement towards understanding the importance of the moment and the political side of things, not exchanging verbal shells, not about guns and munitions but about getting down to business at the table and negotiating. We will not be going public with that, we will work hard but let us keep our fingers crossed.