Sir, – The letter by Jim Roche of the Irish Anti-War Movement (May 19th) is long on indignation but unhappily short on facts.
The proposal, not “a diktat”, by the democratically elected national parliament to rescind legislation from August 2012 concerning additional rights for speakers of Russian and a range of other minority languages was vetoed by the interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov, almost immediately and not at a distance of some months, as Mr Roche appears to think. There was no “application to join Nato” by the interim administration.
The interim cabinet contains four, not six, members of the far-right Svoboda party. Andriy Parubiy is not “defence secretary” (a position which does not exist within the Ukrainian government), but rather an elected MP and the current secretary of the RBNO, an advisory body to the president on matters of state security and defence. An independent MP, Col General Mykhailo Koval, is the current Ukrainian minister of defence.
Nato policy does not call for the “continued military encirclement of Russia” – an odd thought given Russia’s vast size and the location of Nato members. But instead, it reiterates Nato’s “full support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders”. That sovereignty and integrity has been merrily trampled over by the current Russian government, a fact by which Mr Roche seems unmoved.
Mr Roche’s comment concerning “the rampant militarism of the US, EU and Nato” suggests he is unaware that the UK and the US have made it clear they will not intervene militarily within Ukraine, despite both countries being guarantor signatories of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for it giving up its nuclear arsenal. – Yours, etc,
ROBIN HILLIARD,
Westland Square, Dublin 2.