Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I, too, acknowledge the presence of and welcome the Ukrainian ambassador to our debate.

The actions of the Russian Government this week, in recognising the already occupied territories of Luhansk and Donetsk and moving its military forces across legally recognised international borders, are the most serious threat to European peace since the end of the Cold War. Extensive diplomatic efforts involving an array of European leaders, Macron, Scholz and Johnson among them, together with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, have sought in recent weeks to broker a peaceful outcome, and I strongly commend these efforts.

At the core of this crisis is the aim and intention of the Russian President. He is clearly enjoying the focus of international attention, but we cannot as yet be certain of what he ultimately wishes to achieve or what means he is willing to deploy to achieve that. The character of the regime led by Vladimir Putin has been clear to us all for many years. He deployed the nerve agent Novichok to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018. This followed the killing of the Putin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, using radioactive polonium in Russia in 2006. The annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014 and the effective occupation by proxy of part of the Donbas region of Ukraine at the same time has resulted in ongoing conflict, which has already cost 14,000 lives over the past eight years.

We know what the international community is dealing with: a Russian president under whom we have witnessed the poisoning and imprisonment of his main domestic opponent Alexei Navalny, and a person who has dominated the Russian state, the Duma and its media. His vision is for a restoration of Russian hegemony over the countries of eastern Europe where the Soviet Union once held sway.

He wishes, in short, to undo the past 30 years of political history in Europe. Those who doubt that should read the words of Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov when he characterised the countries, many of which are now member states of our European Union while others are members of NATO, not as sovereign nations but as territories orphaned by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Orphans, presumably, to be brought back home to mother.

The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994 was signed by Russia and gave assurances against the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It was on that basis that those three nations, newly independent, gave up their nuclear weapons. Ukraine at that stage was the world's third largest stockpiler of nuclear weapons. We have heard some commentary that former Soviet-dominated countries could never join NATO. The NATO-Russia Founding Act was a political agreement signed in 1997, 25 years ago. It established an agreed co-operation between an enlarged NATO and Russia and stated that countries admitted to NATO will have full rights and responsibilities of membership and, further, the door to membership will remain open to all emerging European democracies.

More fundamental to this Parliament and to Ireland, where we battled so hard to regain our national independence and to control our destiny and sovereignty, is the right of nations to make their own decisions and not have powerful neighbours make decisions for them. The phrase we hear often now in a different context, "nothing about us without us," had its origins in central European political traditions. Too often smaller European nations were simply pawns to be directed by powerful nations and traded over by others without their involvement or consent. We thought we had put all that behind us, that small nations stand equal to larger nations, entitled to make their own decisions about any international organisation they want to belong to or not. We thought we did not have any more overarching spheres of influence where large nations determine what smaller nations can or cannot do. President Putin's speech to his nation on Monday was truly illuminating, describing the now independent nations of the former USSR as "our country" and blaming "Bolshevik" leaders, presumably former President Gorbachev, for the nation's break-up - developments President Putin clearly wishes to undo, beginning with Ukraine.

Ireland has to stand clearly and strongly with the people of Ukraine, with the principle of self-determination and the inviolability of a nation's boundaries. International law must be upheld and Ireland must be very clear in that. I have introduced legislation into this House known internationally as the Magnitsky Act. I ask that one of the actions we take is to fast-track that and enact it into the law of this State.

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