Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In 1991, when there was a referendum on independence in Ukraine, 84% of people turned out. Even in the industrial regions in the east, where there are mostly Russian speakers, the vote for independence was never lower than 83%. Even in Crimea, a bastion of Russian influence, 54% were in favour of independence. As I mentioned earlier, the biggest linguistic category that has grown in recent years, up until the conflict started, comprised those who spoke both Russian and Ukrainian. Therefore, all the divisions were breaking down. What ruined this was the economic shock therapy of privatisation, which enriched a small number of corrupt politicians and the oligarchs, who gained fantastic wealth at the expense of a brutally impoverished population, to the point that in Ukraine last year income per capita was €3,900 per year, by comparison with Hungary, where it was €12,560. In Poland, it was €13,432 and in Russia it was €14,612.

Life expectancy in Ukraine is almost ten years less than in Hungary, Poland or Russia. All of that is a result of the devastation of economic shock therapy of privatisation and neoliberal dogma that was enforced, benefiting the oligarchs, who had been former communist party hacks and apparatchik and now become the new entrepreneurs of Ukraine, in getting fantastically rich at the expense of all of the Ukrainian people, whether they were ethnically Russian speakers or Ukrainian speakers.

This agreement will only further that situation and encourage those on both sides who are turning the population against one another in the most horrendous way, whether by whipping up nostalgia for Stalinism or, on the other side, whipping up nostalgia for Nazism and creating heroes of those who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. We should reject both Russian and European interference in Ukraine and let the Ukrainian people themselves sort this out.

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