Still open for business. Flickr/Mariano Mantel. Some rights reserved.The House of Lords EU Committee has now joined British political leaders – and even reportedly the heir to the throne – in voicing concern over our alleged “appeasement” of Vladimir Putin. Its report, “The EU and Russia: before and beyond the crisis in Ukraine,” published on February 20, accuses Europe of “sleepwalking” into the crisis, with the Committee Chairman, Lord Tugendhat, criticising “the lack of robust analytical capacity, in both the UK and the EU,” which “effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.”
Unsurprisingly, the report has received plenty of media coverage (at home and abroad) and could provide ammunition for those in Washington and elsewhere calling on western countries to escalate the conflict further by selling weapons to Ukraine. Indeed, it seems to have already pushed David Cameron into a pledge of “non-lethal aid” for the Ukrainian military.
Its publication also comes amid a flood of sensational reports in the British press after the RAF scrambled to intercept two Russian military aircraft off the coast of Cornwall on the same day as Michael Fallon’s warning that Russia poses a “real and present danger” to Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. With the BBC now telling us how to spot Russian aircraft in our skies, and Sir Adrian Bradshaw, second-in-command of NATO’s military forces in Europe, speaking of the possibility of a Blitzkrieg-style Russian assault in Eastern Europe, we could be forgiven for thinking that, after Estonia, we’re next.
