National Defence committee  It's not true.

National Defence committee  There was never an export of arms from Ukraine to Russia. There was co-operation between different branches of military industrial complexes. Ukraine produced some parts; Russia produced other parts. That, together with a lot of other aspects of Russia-Ukraine trade, ended two ye

National Defence committee  The interesting thing about the cyberwarfare aspect is that this is nothing new. The first cyber-attack that Russia undertook was against NATO and the EU member Estonia in 2007. I think there was a lot of wishful thinking about Russia. There was an attempt to do a third reset und

National Defence committee  No, I think the west can do a lot more than it's doing. For example, we've just been talking about the export of dirty money, shall we say, from various countries. Here, the Europeans have been terrible, and I say that as a European. The EU consistently complains about corruption

National Defence committee  Since 2014 Ukraine's military has become one of the strongest militaries in Europe. Today it's about 300,000 strong plus the National Guard. Officially, Ukraine spends 5% of the GDP on defence. That's a huge amount of money. In that sense, because of Putin's aggression, Ukraine h

National Defence committee  This is an interesting question, because it's come up already during these hearings. Certainly, the provision of intelligence would be very important for Ukrainian forces on the front line. When we talk about the supply of weapons leading to an escalation, there's been an escalat

National Defence committee  Thank you for a massive question. In a very quick way, since 2014, what has been created with the support of western partners—IMF and such, the European Union—is that all of the institutions are required to combat corruption. The next one that's on the horizon is the special ant

National Defence committee  The war and conflict, as in every war and conflict, has fundamentally changed Ukraine, and opinion polls show that, without any doubt. If there were a referendum held today in Ukraine on NATO membership, 78% would support NATO membership. That has jumped massively from about 30%

National Defence committee  Going back to the question that was raised about Minsk—because this is all related to Minsk as well—in my power point slides, which I sent this morning and which I think the committee has, the second-last slide is all about Minsk. When people say there's no alternative to Minsk,

National Defence committee  I'd like to, first of all, say that there have been approximately five different explanations of the crisis in Ukraine. The first one I would describe as blaming the west. This is a rather curious alliance of left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy and NATO and right-wing real