Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

To delete all words after “Dáil Éireann” and substitute the following:“calls on the European Union and the United States to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine”.

I too am surprised that the Minister of State is giving such wholehearted support to the new, unelected government of Ukraine. Is the Government concerned by NATO's plans to bolster defences in eastern Europe at the moment? Media reports state that a leaked NATO paper proposes opening a NATO liaison office in Moldova, military training for Armenia, and projects in Azerbaijan aimed at securing its Caspian oil and gas fields.

There is no doubt that Russia and the United States are finding it difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions in the area. Looking at the long-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous break-up of the Soviet Union, which was not well done. It somewhat mirrored the Versailles treaty many years ago and, more recently, the break-up of Yugoslavia. People who were content to be a national minority in an internal administrative unit of a multinational state - Russians in the Soviet Ukraine and south Ossetians in Soviet Georgia - felt very differently when those units became states to which they felt little loyalty.

In the case of Crimea, which was only transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in the 1950s, that is clearly true for the Russian majority. Contrary to undertakings given at the time, the US and its allies have relentlessly sought to expand NATO up to Russia's borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian military alliance in Europe.

The European association agreement, which provoked the Ukrainian crisis, also included clauses to integrate Ukraine into the EU defence structure. It appears that as long as Washington believed the Russian leaders would do its bidding then everything was grand. Yeltsin's attack on the Russian parliament in 1993 was justified in the western media. The wholesale assaults on Chechnya by Yeltsin and later by Putin were treated as a little local problem with support from George Bush and Tony Blair. After his meeting with Putin in 2000, Blair said: "Chechnya isn't Kosovo".

Rape, torture, homeless refugees and tens of thousands dead was the fate of the Chechnyans. No problem there for Washington and its EU allies. In the calculus of western interests there is no suffering, whatever its scale, which cannot be justified. Chechnyans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis are of little importance. Nonetheless, the contrast between the west's attitude to the Chechen war and Crimea is startling.

The Crimean affair led to barely any loss of life and the population clearly wanted to be part of Russia. The White House's reaction has been the opposite of its reaction to Chechnya. Why? Because Putin, unlike Yeltsin, is no longer prepared to play ball. He has become "Evil man No. 1".

We need a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists. We also require a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy, economic support that does not pauperise the majority in the form of austerity, an end to the terrible abuse of women's rights in Ukraine, and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict and we will be adding to the problems rather than helping to solve them.

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