Welcome. This is the first of our AI horizons network seminar series. For our first seminar, we will be having Emma Struble. Emma is a Ph.D. student at UMass Amherst. She's going to be talking about her EMPNLP paper, which won Best Long Paper Award 2019, titled Linguistically Informed Self-Attention for Semantic Role Labeling. Emma is a student at Andrew McCallum's group at UMass, previous degree from University of Maine, and has spent time both with the Alexa NLU team and at Google AI in New York City. So broad background, lots of interest, and this should be an outstanding talk. The intent is that everybody will be muted while Emma is talking, and then we'll open it up for questions afterwards. So let's figure across that this will all work for our first seminar. I have the chat window open here, so if you have concerns or you can't hear or something, there's a next chat facility if you can figure out the icons and you can send them to me and we can try to fix them in the background. But without further ado, Emma? Great. All right. Thank you so much for the introduction. So today I'm excited to present Lisa, which is a new method for multitask learning where supervision for transfer between tasks is done through the attention mechanism yielding new state-of-the-art results for SRL. This is joint work with my lab mate Pat Virgo, my collaborators Daniel Andor and David Weiss at Google and my advisor Andrew McCom. And as Brent said, this was originally presented at last year's MLP conference. So over the past 10 years or so, MLP research has made so much progress that it's no longer just an object of study, but something that practitioners want to run at massive scale in order to extract meaning from text. So the most techniques to be computationally efficient while also obtaining high accuracy, not just on news articles, but also across different domains. And the model I'm going to present unifies deep neural network models with linguistic structure in order to perform fast, accurate, and robust MLP. And in this work, we're going to focus on the extraction task of semantic role labeling, which I'm going to briefly introduce now. Okay. So the task of semantic role labeling is typically cast as who did what to whom. And basic models for this can be built by designing rules over parse trees, but this doesn't tend to scale well across diverse sentence structures. So instead, we typically directly label the spans corresponding to the predicates and their arguments in the sentence. So what this looks like is, for example, in this sentence, we would identify the predicate's awards and advance. And we can then extract the arguments with respect to each of these predicates. So with respect to the predicate advance, sorry, awards, the agent argument, or the one who's doing the awarding is the committee. It's theme or the thing being awarded is the Nobel. And the beneficiary or the one receiving the award is Strickland. So that is the labeling with respect to the predicate awards. Similarly, for the predicate advance, that agent is Strickland and the theme is optics. So these are the two semantic role labelings of the sentence with respect to the two predicates. And specifically, we're going to be using the prop bank after all framework, which assigns more general argument labels shared across all the predicates. So this is what those labels actually look like in practice. So we want to extract semantics, but understandably, this task is deeply intertwined with syntax. And historically, SRL models have indeed relied heavily on syntax. So looking at the past 10 years of semantic role labeling on the benchmark 2005 shared task, early SRL models did rely heavily on syntax, typically using a combination of syntactic features on the input as well as syntax-based constraints during inference. More recently, there's been a trend where end-to-end deep neural networks, which use no syntax, are surpassing little linguistically informed counterparts. And this is a trend throughout NLP, not just for semantic role labeling, but across many basic NLP tasks. And these models have indeed improved substantially over models that use syntax. So getting up to 23% error reduction. But the trends I've just described are mainly when evaluating on text that comes from the same domain as the model was trained on. Out of domain, we've seen much less impressive improvements. So in the setting, deep neural models have so far reduced error rate by only 8%. And as I'll describe later, there have been some attempts to inject syntax into neural models, but the results on out-of-domain evaluation of these models has been mixed. So in this talk, I'm going to show that syntax really can help in the midst of deep learning with the right modeling. So our lethal model obtains an additional 10% reduction in error over the best neural network model when evaluating out-of-domain. And it also improves in-domain SRL by an additional 6%. So now I want to overview the key components of the lethal model. The first component is multitask learning across four related tasks. Part of speech tagging, label dependency parsing, predicate detection, and semantic role labeling. But we do more than just simple parameter sharing. The interaction between these tasks is through what we call syntactically informed self-attention. So here we're going to supervise one attention head to attend to syntactic parent. And through the supervision, the model learns to use that attention head as an oracle, providing syntactic information to downstream layers. At test time, we can use either the syntactic structure that's predicted by the lethal model itself, or we can inject syntax from any external parser to improve SRL accuracy without having to retrain the SRL model. And another nice benefit of this multitask learning is that we only have to encode the sequence once to predict all these tasks, unlike most previous work. Okay, so now I've given a broad overview of what Lisa is, and now I want to describe in more detail exactly how it works. So I'm going to begin by describing multi-head self-attention since we modify the internals of that mechanism in order to better model information flow between the different tasks. And for those who are familiar, this is going to be exactly the encoder portion of the transformer model that was introduced by Vaswani and others at Nuritz in 2017. So the way that self-attention works is given a sentence and some embedded representations of these tokens, say at layer P in the neural network. The version of self-attention that we're going to use works by first projecting each token into three distinct representations corresponding to that token's role as a key a query or a value in the self-attention. For each token, its query representation is compared with the key representation of every other token using a scaled dot product. And this gives for each token a score with respect to every other token in the sentence. So, and these are normalized by the softmax function, so this gives attention weights that sum to one between each token with every other token in the sentence. So for each token, these attention weights are then used to perform a unique weighted average over all the value representations of the other token. And then this results in a new attended representation for each token, where that token has observed the representation of all the other tokens weighted by their importance to that token. So this is the basic self-attention model. And an important aspect of the transformer model is what's called multi-head self-attention. And all this means is that at each layer in the network, we actually have H distinct sets of self-attention parameters, which are normalized separately, and so therefore they're learning H distinct self-attention functions. So this sort of just adds more capacity to the model. Okay, so these H outputs of each attention hand for each token are concatenated. And then that concatenated representation is passed through a feed-forward layer. So finally, this representation is added to the initial input of the layer via residual connection. And then this gives us the representation at layer P plus one, which is then the input to the next layer. Okay, so we stack J layers of this self-attention. And on the input, we use pre-trained word representations. And in our experiments we used, we tried both using glove, word representations, and then LMO contextualized word embedding.  But first, I want to put our approach into a little bit more context to help explain how we arrived at our technique for integrating syntax into a neural network SRL model. So one straightforward approach is to combine SRL and parsing through multitask learning with hard parameter sharing. But just like a single task end-to-end model, this will overfit to the training domain. And the model will have to be retrained from scratch in order to improve, in order to leverage improved syntax models or data. So more recently, other people have incorporated syntax into neural models for dependency-based SRL, either through dependency path embeddings or a graph CNN over the parse tree. And while these techniques can leverage new syntax without retraining, they only incorporate limited syntactic context, sort of limited to like a window around a given token. And it's perhaps for this reason that they have observed mixed results on out-of-domain data. So this brings us to our model, syntactically-informed self-attention. So I think this is a really natural way to incorporate syntactic information. Essentially, each token just attends to its likely syntactic parent. So this allows the model to learn more global features over the parse, since in subsequent layers, each token attends to all the other tokens. It's effectively observing not only its own parents, but those of all the other tokens with sort of like increasing distance as the model gets deeper. And it combines the best of both worlds of these previous models. So as in typical multi-task learning at test time, the model can use its own predicted parse or like methods that use dependency path or graph CNNs and externally generated parse from a separately trained parser can be supplied to improve the SRL performance without having to retrain the SRL model. Okay. So now I'm going to depict exactly how this works. So returning to our depiction of multi-head self-attention, typically each attention head is left to learn its own attention function from the data. And instead, what we do is we train one attention head to attend a syntactic parent. And we do this by replacing the query and key mechanism in that attention head by a fine syntactic parser of dozen and manning. So this is like a really good just graph-based syntactic parser. So this produces a matrix of edge scores between each pair of tokens. And we can simply drop this matrix in to replace the attention matrix that would typically be generated by the query key pairs. So otherwise, this layer acts like any other self-attention layer. And we choose one layer in the network as a syntactically informed layer. It's basically like which layer that is essentially a hyperparameter. Okay. So now to describe how we incorporate syntax into the attention mechanism, I want to describe the other important aspect of Lisa, which is how we do all these tasks, including predicate detection and just one single pass through the network. Okay. So here's the network I've described so far. So at an early layer, we predict parts of speech and predicate. And since the two labels are highly related, so like predicates are very often verbs, and in order to reduce the complexity of training the multitask model, we predict into the joint cross product space of part of speech and binary predicate labels. So at the syntactically informed layer following dozen and manning, we share the parameters of the parser to also predict like the edge, the parser that predicts edge dependencies to also predict dependency labels on those edges. Okay. So that's how we get labeled dependency parsing. All right. So now I'm going to demonstrate how we do semantic role labeling with respect to each predicate. So this is in contrast to previous work where predicates are provided on the input by modifying the predicate word with like an indicator embedding, which requires them that you feed the sentence through the network independently with respect to each of the predicted predicates. But since we predict predicates in the model, we can't have we can't do that because we don't have that a prior information. So now I'm going to describe how we model this. Okay. So we first project each final layer token representation into an argument specific representation of that token. So representing that token's role as an argument to a predicate. And then for each token that was predicted to be a predicate, we project that token to a predicate specific representation of that token. And we then combine these representations using a bilinear operator to score the compatibility between each token with each of the predicates. So here I've depicted scoring Nobel with respect to the predicate awards. And what we actually want to score for each token is not just a binary like representation, it's which SRL label that token has with respect to that predicate. So we actually have a bilinear matrix scoring the predicate with the token for each SRL with respect to each SRL class label. And then this gives us SRL label predictions with respect to that predicate. And so in the same way we score each token with the first predicate to get a complete labeling of the sequence with respect to that predicate. And we do the same for each predicted predicate. So in this case, we have one other predicate advanced. Okay. And this gives us a semantic role-living of a sentence with respect to each of the predicted predicates. And this is a nice model because in practice, this is really fast because we can actually score all predicates with respect to all tokens for an entire batch of sentences using just two big matrix multiplies. So this is like particularly fast on specialized tensor processing hardware like GPUs and TPUs. Okay. And this is the Lisa model in its entirety. So we have multitask learning across four related tasks with the signal for syntax shared in this special way through the attention mechanism. So I get a really dry throat, so I need to drink a lot of water. If you're not looking at me, that's what those pauses are. Okay. Okay. So now to describe the model, I want to highlight some of our experimental results. So we evaluate our model primarily on two benchmark datasets for symmetric role-labeling. And these are the column 2005 and 2012 shared tasks. So in this presentation, for the sake of time, I'm going to focus only on a subset of the column 2005 experiments, but I encourage you to check out the paper or ask me questions at the end if you're interested in more full experimental analysis and results. All right. So we present in-domain experiments on news data and out-of-domain experiments on novels from the Brown corpus. We experiment with both 100-dimensional glove embeddings and ELMO contextualized word representations that come from multiple layers of bidirectional LCM pre-trained on with a language modeling objective. And today I'm going to present only experiments in the more challenging setting of using predicted predicates. But in the paper, we also run experiments using gold predicates, which is like a pretty standard benchmark and so we can compare to more prior work. And our baselines are the state-of-the-art models on PropBank SRL. None of what she's syntax. These are highlighted here. And we look at three versions of our own model. The SA model, which is the Lisa model except with no syntax. The Lisa model when using its own predicted parses. And the Lisa model with parses from an externally trained parser, as well as with gold parses. So this allows us to see what the upper bound is for how much we could, how much SRL would benefit from parsing in our model if the parses were perfect. So here's some results. So these here are the previous state-of-the-art numbers on the college 2005 shared task. These don't use syntax. Okay, so in domain, our SA model already outperforms the state-of-the-art when using glove embeddings and performs comparably to the state-of-the-art with Elmo representations. And we see a similar trend when evaluating out-of-domain. Okay, so our Lisa model with Lisa parses performs comparably to the syntax-free SA model. So in domain. So we think this suggests that even without syntactic supervision, the SA model is able to learn information that is sort of equivalent to a reasonably accurate parser. So with glove embeddings, yeah, okay, so more detail, unlike a parsing accuracy. With glove embeddings, the Lisa model achieves an unlabeled attachment scores with like parsing accuracy around 95, which is really high. And with Elmo, it's above 96. So out-of-domain, we see that with glove embeddings, the Lisa parser performs comparably to the SA model, while the Lisa model using Elmo performs much better than the syntax-free model. And so again, this difference is due to the higher accuracy of the Lisa parser when using Elmo embedding. So it's like about three points higher out of domain. So at this high accuracy, the pars is actually providing information that the model can use to generalize better out-of-domain. So this is a really nice result. We see here that having this explicit representation of syntax does help over even a really strong end-to-end neural work model. And so finally, we also experiment with feeding in the external dos and emitting pars at test time. And this gives us the best results. So particularly with the glove embeddings, we see an overall increase over the previous state of the art by nearly 2.5 f1 end-domain absolute, and more than 3.5 f1 out-of-domain. So with Elmo, the increases are a little bit smaller. So our best model improves over the previous state of the art by almost 1 f1 absolute end-domain and by more than 2 f1 out-of-domain. And the fact that the end-domain improvement using Elmo is so small compared to out-of-domain is actually, I think, a really interesting result because it suggests that although, but Elmo representations are doing a pretty good job of learning the useful parts of syntax for this task. But that's why this, you know, we don't see huge increase when using syntax end-domain. But the syntactic representations are sort of like overfitting to the data that the model is trained on. So out-of-domain providing external syntax still does help. This is an interesting thing. Okay. So now I want to do a little analysis. So I'm going to switch to development results. And I want to show you how well the model does when it's provided with gold parses at test time. So with glove embedding, we see more than a three-point improvement over our best model. Yeah, three-point additional improvement, and nearly 2.5 additional points over our best Elmo model. So this is actually pretty substantial considering the accuracy of the parser we're using, which is 96.5 UAS. It's like, seems like kind of like the upper bound of how accurate a parser is going to be. So we did some analysis to figure out what types of errors the gold parses are actually fixing over the predictive parses. So here we performed the same analysis as was originally performed, presented by Lujanja and others in their 2017 paper on SRL. So what this is doing is starting from the model predictions, we incrementally fix common error types until essentially we've fixed all the errors. So one error type example is fixed labels, which corresponds to correcting the labels on spans whose batteries are predicted correctly. And another example is merging or splitting spans. So this corresponds to either splitting a predicted span into two gold spans, or on the other hand, merging to adjacent predicted spans into one span, which is a gold predicted span. So first we see that the most substantial source of errors across all the models is from the labels on the span. So if you just fix the labels on the spans you predicted correctly, you'd get about five F1 points, absolute. And then next we see that using the gold parse helps the model mainly to identify span boundaries much better. So all these error types that kind of like close the gap between the gold parse and the predicted parse are all sort of like, yeah, fixing these span boundaries. So this suggests that although the parse attachment score is really high, its representation of spans is somehow really hurting the SRL's model, the SRL model's ability to identify spans. Or otherwise, like attachment score is not really maybe a good metric for evaluating parse accuracy. So I think this could be some like interesting suggestions for future work. So I've presented Lisa. This is a multi-task, a model for multi-task learning where a transfer between the tasks is done through the attention mechanism. In this work we demonstrated that this approach works well for SRL, but I also think that this could help with other tasks across NLP and even maybe in computer vision. We've shown that injecting syntax helps even a really strong neural network model, particularly when evaluating out of domain. And we observed in practice this model is more efficient than alternatives, but part of future work is going to involve quantifying this difference between multi-task learning and like a pipeline of models more precisely. So in conclusion, we believe this approach is the foundation for an NLP pipeline that will provide everyone with the accuracy, computational efficiency, and robustness they need to run NLP on the entire web. And the models and code are available online. So this concludes my talk. Thanks for coming, thanks for listening, and I'm very happy to take any questions that you have. Thank you very much, Emma. Everybody is giving you a standing ovation, but audio is all on mute. First off, let me just compliment you. It is so hard to present without an audience giving you feedback. You pasted it beautifully, so thank you very much. Everybody is on mute. You should be able to get off mute by clicking the little microphone at the bottom of the screen if you have a question. Otherwise, if you're confounded by that, there is a chat window which clicks a little speech bubble at the bottom, and you can type it in, and either drew or I will try to read your questions. So are there any questions for them? Here's a question from Amada. In the page where you say are fixing various errors improved the model, exactly what do you do for fixing the errors, fixing the training data, or something else? Oh yeah, okay. So this is all in the development set. So we take that output of various models. I can go back to that slide if that's helpful. Yeah, so this is a slide that you're talking about. Yeah, so each of these colored lines corresponds to the output, like the labeling on the development set of a different model. And it's models that differ in sort of like how much syntax and how correct that syntax is that they have access to. So then essentially we incrementally, so each of the kicks on the x-axis corresponds to an error type. And so that means we went through those predictions on the development set, and we identified all the errors of that type. So for example, fixed labels means we identified of all the correct spans that are predicted by each model. We augment the predictions such that the labels on those spans are correct, and then we reevaluate with respect to this correction. And then the next one is like moving arguments around to the correct place. So then we again, we apply that correction and then evaluate the accuracy.  And so when you see like the gap between the lines on here, and like when that gap closes, it's sort of showing like those types of errors where like the difference between these, the outputs of these models. Does that make sense? Yes, thank you. And just to follow up on that. So sometimes if you get the spans wrong, that could also mean the labels are wrong, right? So how do you separate these two separate errors? Yeah, I mean, I think this is like not a perfect system. It's sort of like a heuristic to see, you know, how like what types of errors the model is making. I'm sure you could like modify it, like do some like more complex, like basically just have like more buckets of error types to help with this. But like, yeah, yeah, so yeah, but it's a good. CSD, can you hear me? Yeah. So first of all, great talk is interesting. My question was, what kind of effects did you notice depending on like what layer you would add to send syntactically where attention heads and like the supervision on part of speech and dependency parsing? Like what kind of effects did you see? Yeah, this is a great question. And it's basically like we didn't really do that analysis. So yeah, we treated like the layers where we added the supervision for the different tasks, essentially as a hyper parameter, like subject to some constraints, like some sensical things like we want part of speech tags to come before parsing, which comes before symmetric role labeling and things like this.  And so yeah, so I've done this question a lot. And I think it's a really interesting question. But basically, we haven't done like a more deeper analysis for yeah, how that changes like the error types and stuff like this. But I think it would be really interesting to see, especially given all these like interesting analysis that people like more sort of model probing stuff that people have done, especially in these like pre-trained language models, sort of that looking at the different layers and some of them are kind of more like better at part of speech tagging and then later layers are more better at semantic tasks and stuff. Yeah. So I think, yeah, it'd be really interesting, but I don't have, I don't really have insights on that. Where you put the multitask, like where you put the objectives, it does change the accuracy up to like a few points. And also we optimized for only SRL performance, unfortunately. So yeah. Okay. So when you were using it, were you kind of like a like deeper layers, like earlier on in the network for your best models? I'm just curious. Oh, yeah, yeah.  If it would be better to apply kind of more general supervision earlier on, because I think that there are a lot of the multitask papers that use kind of general objectives, say that like more general objectives should be like earlier on in your architecture. Oh, interesting. And so more general in this case, like how would you rank generality? Like, like NER would be more general than normalization or like disambiguation or like part of speech tagging would be more general than NER. Sure. Okay, yeah. So general, like using those objectives early in the network would lead to better results, I think, is what I've seen in other papers and stuff. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So we were familiar with some of that work. And so like the constraints that we applied, sort of like close the hyper parameter space of like different possible objectives on different layers did make the assumption that we wanted to do that. So we definitely had part of speech tagging on earlier layers, and then parsing on later layers. And something that we did find is, so yeah, we experimented with like the Conal 2005 dataset and also the Conal 2012 dataset, which is kind of like a bigger dataset, kind of like messier data, a little bit harder, I think. And so we found that we were quite like, for parsing performance to be high, we sort of like needed more layers before we're like super like asking the model to predict parses compared to the Conal 2005 dataset, which is like only news and like pretty well formed. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't have a good answer to it. Sorry. Do we have other questions? I was trying to ask a question, but speak on a mute. Okay. This is Luis. That's better. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So my, this is my question. So if you really think about this in abstract, what you've done is you've taken, it's produced in a center kind of low level information, which is the syntax, and then producing higher level information, which is in this case, the, this imaginary leveling. And we know that, you know, as we assemble systems, we tend to go higher, higher level. For example, next might be Q&A and next might be dialogue over data and that sort of thing. Right. So my question is, isn't here what you really are uncovering a more general direction of using lower level structure to point to how to do attention on higher level tasks? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think, yeah. And we see this as kind of like a different way of doing multitask learning that's like a little bit more informed, like by kind of giving it a little bit like harder, making a little bit like, yeah, what am I trying to say? Like injecting more concrete sort of structure from lower level tasks to assist for higher level tasks. Right. So the natural progression would be, well, maybe we, maybe we can do Q&A better if we can inject this into that layer where attention is used for matching, you know, context queries, for example, and so on and so forth. Is that, is that kind of the idea here? Yeah, absolutely. Right. Okay. Cool. Yeah. That's what I thought. Yeah. I would love to collaborate with people who want to use it for higher level tasks. Yeah, we're working here, we're working on sort of expanding this to co-reference right now, which is like not quite as high level as Q&A, but yeah. It makes sense. Thank you. Other questions? Yeah, I guess my question is how do you, all the questions, how do you deliver a presentation with such a little time? What's the trick? Sorry. No, it's just a compliment. It was a very clearly, clear presentation in a very little amount of time. That was very good on you. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I appreciate it. I definitely, was not the first time I've given this presentation and I, yeah, I spent a decent amount of time on it because I knew I'd be presenting it to a lot of people, so I was pretty anxious. But thanks a lot. Yeah, I worked hard on it. Hey, more questions? As if you're composing them or still trying to figure out how to get off a mute, I'll remind everybody that our next seminar is on Monday, April 22nd at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. And that will be recurrent progress in adversarial robustness of AI models by Pinyu Chen from IBM Research. And these should come a pace once a week, if it all goes well. Okay, any other questions for Emma? Also, feel free to email me if you think of something later. Like, I do try to respond to email. And I'll repeat one thing from the chat. Our goal is, I mean, we are recording this and our goal is to post these to the YouTube channel and as soon as we figure out how to do that. Posting it to YouTube is trivial. Posting it to an IBM YouTube channel probably requires at least one step. I don't know.  Or just figuring out a magic incantation. So, any other questions for Emma? Okay, but again, one more time. I want to thank you very much for being our leadoff speaker and doing such an amazing job. Thank you very, very much. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for inviting me. All right. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.


Mr Chairman, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to be here today at the Institute for International and European Affairs to address you on the topic of Ukraine. This is a place that has become very close to my heart after a series of intense mission visits there over an 18-month period from the summer of 2012 until November of 2013. I thought I might begin and forgive me for this because in such an institute and with a self-invited audience people will already know things but I thought it is useful given our geographic distance from Ukraine to actually start by locating Ukraine if I might with a few remarks. If we look at the the political map of Europe, Ukraine is shown, I don't have a point but you can see Ukraine in that kind of movie pink shade beside Russia and just looking at it, where it is placed and looking at its size, perhaps the first remarks. It's a very large state. It is a state that in many ways because of the iron curtain and all that went with it but at least for the public in the West was hidden in full public view for a very long period. Territorially we know it's big but in fact when we look at it compared to some of the landmassive states we're more familiar with it gives a sense of its scale. It's two and a half times the landmass of the United Kingdom, twice the size of Italy, one in three quarters the size of Germany. This is a big country geographically. Its population of 46 million is ethnically 78% Ukrainian and 17% Russian. The remainder are Belarusians, Tatars, Romanians and others. Linguistically Ukrainian is the native language of about two-thirds of the population with Russian being the mother tongue of about one-third of Ukrainians. There aren't have been historically distinct differences between the East and the West of Ukraine but not so deep as to prevent a genuine sense of belonging together in Ukraine for the vast majority of the population. A little bit on Ukraine's history. Like so much of Europe, Ukraine's evolving borders through the first half of the 20th century are a collage of the geopolitical traces of history on geography. Ukraine was in a state of almost constant war from 1917 to 1921 against the backdrop of the closing stages of World War I, the Russian Revolution and a civil war. Eventually Ukraine was subsumed into the Soviet Union, gaining territory from southern Russia in its southeast. So if we come down here to the Luhansk Donetsk Donbas area, this is the area that would have come in as part of the subsuming of Ukraine into the Soviet Union that would have been originally territorially part of Russia during the period of the Czar's and the Russian Empire. The civil war in Ukraine, so that period up to independence, was estimated to have cost one and a half million Ukrainian lives. Under Stalin in the 1930s, in the early 1930s, 32 and 33, there was an event which I only learned of when I went to Ukraine called Haldomor. Haldomor is a word that means extermination by hunger. This was Ukraine's equivalent of the Holocaust where millions starved to death in no small part due to Stalin's mass repressions, especially those associated with the brutal collectivization of agriculture and the war on the Kulaks, the Ukrainian and Russian peasants. The Haldomor was only officially admitted in Russia in the late 80s in the era of Glasnost. The records are indeterminate, so the figures are always disputed, but probably more than six million died during this period, and the vast majority who died were Ukrainian. Between Nazi invasion and subsequent Soviet liberation, Ukraine found itself as a swing state on the front line in both directions, both Nazis going east and the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union going west. 700 towns and cities were destroyed, with up to 8 million war dead among Ukrainian forces and citizens. A drought in the immediate post-war period, together with this devastation, led to a famine in 1946 and 47, which claimed the lives of at least hundreds of thousands, with some estimating and suggesting up to one and a half million. So what's the point of telling this quick hop, skip and jump through Ukrainian history in the 20th century? In a century marked by so much brutality, few states comparatively relative to their size and population base suffered so gravely as Ukraine did in the early decades of the 20th century. It has made me, as I became familiar with this history, totally convinced that if there was ever a people in Europe that deserved a break, the Ukrainians are such a people. Ukraine's borders finally were settled in 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine. He spent many years working in Donbas. He was born just on the other side of the Russian border, but his father came to live in Donbas. He went to school there, technical college, worked in the mines there. He was the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1938 to 1949, prior to becoming the first secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. This led President Putin publicly to speculate in the speech he gave in St. George's Hall in the Kremlin and the day Russia formally annexed Crimea on the 18th of March of this year, as to whether the gesture by Khrushchev was, and I quote President Putin, a desire to win the support of the Ukrainian political establishment or to atone for the mass repressions of the 1930s in Ukraine. Now if I show you the map of Crimea, the purpose is really to observe one thing. You can see, of course, it is classically a peninsula with just a little land bridge to Ukraine, but no actual land bridge to Russia. The curse straight here is the main point, Russia, Ukraine. And as the Ukrainian ambassador can attest, this is a place of enormous traffic jams each way where you can spend many hours waiting to get across and so on, so it's a real bottleneck. But if you see Crimea connected in that way to Ukraine, whatever about its geopolitics, it's geographically logical that it might be so. And so one of the issues that's now prevailing and beginning to assert itself is whether directly or through proxies Russia can break away through from the Russian border directly down to the territory of Crimea, but that little map gives a sense of the the geography of that connection. I might add, if I go back for the sake of completeness, that there were territories added under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact from Romania and a big slice of Poland and at the end of the war some Czech territories. So Western Ukraine was a construction of add-ons through and after the period of the war. Part of Eastern Ukraine was an add-on from the early years of the Soviet Union and 54 was the gift by Khrushchev from Russia to Ukraine of the Peninsula of Crimea. On the 1st of December 1991, Ukraine, which was economically and politically the second most powerful republic in the Soviet Union behind Russia, held a referendum on independence. On a turnout of 84%, the S-Vote won 92% support. No part of Ukraine, East or West, including Crimea, voted against independence. No part. On the following day the newly independent state won universal international recognition. Of course it was already in the United Nations being a founder member with some of the other Soviet Socialist republics of the United Nations and an early signatory of its charter in 1945. One other general comment before I move on to more specifics and it's just a very quick, for an Irish based audience, a very quick reflection on unrealized potential. Ukraine's territory is enormous compared to Ireland. Its population is 10 times greater than that of Ireland. Its money GDP in US dollars, according to the latest World Bank data, is only 80% of the Irish equivalent. Limited and crude, though this index of comparison may be, it establishes the magnitude both of the development cap and of the unrealized potential of this big state, which currently is the third largest grain exporter in the world and which boasts 40% of the best soil in the world, that heavy loam soil, which is wonderful for agricultural production. That was a bit really to, as I said, locate Ukraine. Permit me for a moment to locate myself. What am I doing here and what was I doing there? On the 30th of March 2012, after several years of negotiation, the chief negotiators of the European Union and Ukraine initialed the text of an association agreement, which included provisions also to establish a deep and comprehensive free trade area agreement as an integral part. However, by the time the chief trade negotiators on both sides initialed the trade agreement in July of 2012, relations between Kiev and Brussels and the capitals of many EU member states had become strained due to charges of selective justice leveled against the Anokovych administration. This related to the imprisonment of four former opposition members of government, Mr. Philip Chuk, Mr. Iveschenko, Mr. Lutsenko, and the former prime minister, Mrs. Timushenko. The prosecutions that imprisoned these former members of government were based on articles of the criminal procedure code that lay unreformed since Soviet times. The cases are complicated and I don't want to divert into them, except to observe there was an element of the show trial about these, but there were other bits as well, so complicated cases. An agreement in this context was reached in the 16th of May 2012 in Brussels between President Schultz of the European Parliament and Prime Minister Razarov of Ukraine to appoint a high-level monitoring mission related to the disputed criminal cases. Together with former president of Poland, Aleksandr Kozneskiy, as determined as remarked, I had the privilege to be appointed to join this on orthodox and challenging pro bono publico mission on the 6th of June of 2012. The negotiation of the association agreement and the trade agreement already was completed and initialed and this was done through the normal institutional and governmental channels and formed no part of the mandate of our mission. The reason I remarked that because I've been reading some strange things in some Irish publications about what Alek was doing and wasn't doing, so I'm happy to be responsible for what I should be responsible for. Over the next 18 months, Kozneskiy and myself made 27 mission visits to Kiev, Kharkiv, Yalta, and Maina Penal Colony. Courtroom, prosecution service, prison and hospital doors were open to us through the good offices of Prime Minister Razarov. In terms of meetings, among others, we met the Prime Minister 25 times, President Yanukovych 17 times, 18 times, Yulia Timoshenko 17 times, 13 meetings around Roy Cluy of the head of national security, 21 meetings with leaders of the opposition, 30 plus meetings with lawyers and family of the prisoners, 16 debriefing meetings with the heads of diplomatic missions of the EU, 13 debriefing meetings with the US ambassador to Kiev, numerous institutional meetings with NGOs and others, and numerous meetings in Brussels and Strasbourg connected to our work with all of the senior, the most senior officials of EU institutions, both commission, council, and parliament. Let me share with you some general impressions from our mission which constitute a backdrop to where I want to bring this. Though more than two decades since independence, Ukraine was still struggling with the legacies of 70 years as a Soviet Socialist Republic. The mentality that we described as that of homo Sovieticus was alive and well and affecting the functioning of many institutions and of the wider society. There was widespread evidence of systematic corruption at all levels of public administration, a glaring absence of the separation of powers as evident from a politicized judiciary and the politicized prosecution system, a court system that appeared to privilege the prosecution over defendants and where it appeared to be that one had a presumption of guilt rather than of innocence as the norm if one was prosecuted. The legacy effect was also evident in the high concentration of power and wealth accumulated in the hands of a small group of oligarchs. These exerted a considerable but opaque influence in the politics of Ukraine and generally benefit irrespective of who is in power. Many of these, and we met some of them, seemed to be torn between the long-term attractiveness of a Europe of values that through its legal order and transformative capacity could add to their net worth over time and shorter-term considerations related to the price of energy, particularly the price of gas and access to Russian markets. All of them most likely, I don't know this but they all seem to be pretty logical chaps, spread their political bets so as to ensure that they would have a roof afraised from that region over their heads affording protection no matter who ruled. Nationally foreign trade policy foreign and trade policy had two vectors. There's a great analysis but I'll cut to the chase, described by one analyst we met as the two cow policy which I thought was a great description of milking as best it could both Brussels and Moscow. Now there's nothing wrong we're good at milking things ourselves in Ireland so I don't tell this in a pejorative way that's why we're a good agricultural country but in reality Ukraine's elite appeared to be more adept in my view at relentlessly milking just one cow, the Ukrainian cow, to a point where lactation was threatened if for no other reason than a frustrated public opinion stretched to the limits of its tolerance and willingness to endure was prepared finally to break. This of course drove the Irish Revolution between November 2004 and January 2005 presaging what we see in Maidan in 2013-2014 and the Irish Revolution and its hopes were ultimately betrayed by a failure to fundamentally reform the system. The public appetite for change lay dormant. I'm bound to tell you it wasn't immediately evident on arriving in Kiev on those missions but though not immediately apparent it had not disappeared but instead it awaited its hour of expression. Legislative elections in October 2012 were free but fell short on the fairness criterion. Outcomes were contested in several constituencies and indeed there were some reruns of votes. The parliament was dysfunctional with the near impossibility of conducting ordinary business. While I accept that politics everywhere is contested between government and opposition parties in the case of the Vrkhovna Rada the parliament in Kiev there was absolutely no trust whatsoever between both sides. The next major elections foreseen at that time were the presidential elections of March 2015 and I would venture to suggest that the parliament found itself in a state of paralysis locked between the unfinished and contested business of the last election and anticipating the next election. Some specific observations the following is a flavor of what was reported to the European Parliament by our mission in October 2012 four months into that mission and I'm quoting. Concerning the legal dimension of the mandate we observed the trials of Yulia Timoshenko, Yuri Lutsenko and Valery Iveshenko and consulted hundreds of pages of documents related to their cases. It was not our role to judge or to contest judicial decisions. This is a matter for courts of law and especially we believed for the European Court of Human Rights. However our observations raised serious doubts as to whether the cases were dealt with in full compliance with international law compliance with the national law of Ukraine also seem to be open to question in some instances be it through action or in action. The standards set by the European Convention of Human Rights do not appear to be systematically applied in Ukraine. The most important deficiencies that we detected related to pre-trial detention, medical treatment of prisoners, the principle of a fair trial, the overly powerful role of prosecution and the objectivity and independence of the justice system, all manifestations of the system's post-Soviet legacy. One of the key aspects of our mandate related to the humanitarian situation of Yulia Timoshenko, an area in which we believe progress was made not only through the persuasive but potentially also through the dissuasive effects of our representations. Taking Mrs Timoshenko to court against her will or returning her from her Kharkiv clinic back to prison or removing her from the care of German doctors were all possibilities against which we strongly advised. In effect the trial in Kharkiv, this was a second trial that was due, was suspended thus giving Mrs Timoshenko and her medical team the opportunity to concentrate their collective attention on her treatment and recovery close quote. I should add just as a footnote Mrs Timoshenko was eventually released in February of this year after the flight of President Diano Kovic and is now leading her motherland Bakushina party in the elections. They will get enough votes to get into parliament but are unlikely to form part of the coalition. But I'm bound to say from my exposure to Ukraine I would rule nothing out ever. As regards the other cases that were part of our mandate, the conditional release of Valery Iveshenko at an appeal court in Kiev in August of 2012 was a source of great joy for his family and modest comfort for our mission in the light of the representations we made. The eventual release in April 2013 of Yuri Lutsenko a former minister for the interior and someone who was now playing a prominent role in President Polushenko's party marked a high point for our mission but one that was not to be replicated during the period of our mandate with regard to the remaining prisoner Yulia Timoshenko. I open a bracket here not in my text that the quality of the relationships between the President and Mrs Timoshenko were so profoundly hostile that the prospect of having her released in his period in office always appeared remote and the more one met both the more remote it appeared. We concluded that and I quote the legal basis in the current criminal code in which many of the charges are founded gives rise to fear of the post facto criminalization of political acts being done for what you did in office after the event and potentially of selective justice. It is our belief we said that in all three cases it should be the court of public and opinion and not a court of law that would ordinarily be the normal democratic testing ground for the exercise of political choices made in government. Beyond prisoner release or improvements in conditions of detention and treatment in the case of Mrs Timoshenko the mission made strenuous efforts to secure fundamental reform of the criminal procedure code and the prosecution system. We did this in consultation with the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe and the European Commission. Our purpose I should stress was not to substitute for legal expertise but rather to draw on its analysis and to seek to channel its reforming capacity into deliverable political outcomes. This involved intensive contacts with the government through the Prime Minister and his key cabinet colleagues and in the Vrkhobna Rada through the speaker and the main parties. Our approach was to acknowledge openly the total absence of trust between the parties in parliament of which they spoke openly so this was not a an aggravation for them but also to seek to secure consensus at least in those issues vital to the modernization of Ukraine and as a footnote to the signing of the association agreement. A number of general preconditions had also been set by the Foreign Affairs Council of the EU including various reforms of electoral prosecution and criminal codes and also making progress on the disputed prisoner issues with which we were dealing. I should say in closing this element that a new criminal code entered into force on the 12th of November 2012 its most significant immediate benefit touched tens of thousands of families when the use of pre-trial detention as a standard practice ceased and reportedly some 36,000 detainees were released. This statistic I should say was produced at an official meeting and I have no independent corroboration but it's the only note I have in it. The other reforms proved at that time to be politically and institutionally more contested and to stick your proposition. Let me turn now if I can against that background a little bit of what's Ukraine a little bit of what I'm doing there to the the the core of my remarks Ukraine the EU and Russia's response. With mounting evidence that Ukraine was serious about signing the deal with the EU at the Vilnius summit foreseen for late November of last year Russia began an economic war with Ukraine in the late summer of 2013. In spite of this President Yanukovych in a short state of the nation speech to mark the opening of the parliamentary session on the 3rd of September last year which I attended repeated a commitment to modernize and reform Ukraine through engagement with the EU. They saw the EU as transformative in terms of their modernization process. On the 18th of September just two weeks later the government formally agreed at cabinet to sign the association agreement. At this point President Putin turned up the heat with sanctions targeted against a wide range of sectors and specific enterprises particularly in eastern Ukraine and especially in the industrial heartland of Donbass. So this area here where all the trouble is now the Nets, Luhansk and so on the Donbass area was the area where the enterprises were especially targeted. These included metallurgy, locomotives, steel pipes, vehicles, chemicals, food and confectionery. All were targeted by a combination of spurious non-target barriers to trade and by the unilateral obligation of contracts. Whole locomotives were stopped at the border and the contracts obligated even though the manufacturing process and testing had been completed. Russia also continued to charge Ukraine a very high price for gas. This was one of the rows with Mrs Timoshenko, a deal done between Herlin Putin in the Kremlin with no one else in attendance in the small hours of the morning in January of 2009 when there was a whole switch off the gas crisis to do with Ukraine and Europe. A deal was done where Ukraine would pay $430 per thousand cubic meters of natural gas. To locate that for you that would be considerably more than the price charged to Germany for the same natural gas from the same Gazprom which had a higher transit cost because it had to make its way to Germany. So gas is a weapon and energy is a weapon deployed in those terms. The effects were devastating in terms of output, short time working and threatened redundancies. In macroeconomic terms Ukraine was approaching a funding cliff. Putin's political force was real, immediate, and a language of power easily understood by a post-Soviet political elite. Europe's political force by comparison was institutional, methodical, slow and abstract, process-based, more than strategic and lacking in agility. And while that is very summary it seems to me to go to the heart of the matter and if the EU is going to learn strategic lessons some of the things I've described as weaknesses have to be turned to strengths or the policy will turn to dust and those are the choices. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that increasingly we, and I'm talking about Kwasniewskiy myself and our interlocutors in Ukraine, were culturally divided by a common language. And here I'm not talking about Russian, Ukrainian, English. I'm talking about the words and concepts we use and the abstractions we use and how they meant different things on both sides of the table even though we were apparently discussing the same thing. The ground was shifting. High-level direct and indirect contacts between Kiev and Moscow multiplied, asked about their content President Yanukovych to us to simulate it. Prime Minister Razarov was becoming increasingly distressed by the weight of the unfolding economic and financial crisis. Though not part of the observation mission's mandate, this economic reality was impossible to ignore and was dutifully reported to the relevant EU and US authorities by us counseling an urgent response. With one week to go to the Vilnius Summit at meetings in Kiev, President Yanukovych signaled to us that he planned, and I quote, to press the pause button, close quote. The Prime Minister announced to us the following day on the 21st of November a government decree suspending preparations for signing the association agreement. Our mission's last official act was to be the first to receive this news and to report it back to Brussels. The Vilnius Summit took place one week later, 28-29 November of last year. As it ended, literally as it ended, the first protests on Maidan began on Independence Square in Kiev. A deal was negotiated subsequently with Moscow, where the trade barriers would be lifted, a macroeconomic package of up to 15 billion US dollars would be provided, the gas price would be reduced from 430 dollars per thousand cubic meters to 260, and Russian banks would agree to increase their investments in Ukrainian enterprises. The Russian ambition was not just economic, however, but also political. President Putin wanted Ukraine to be part of his Eurasian Union and to reassert a post-Soviet politics of the near abroad. In effect, Ukraine, though sovereign and independent, was not free to choose. Any return to the status quo ex ante with the EU inevitably would be more complex, and so it has proved to be. Let me turn to Maidan. Maidan, so it is freedom square, the heart of Kiev, Kiev is a very beautiful city, and Maidan is a very beautiful square. Maidan started with students, but ended up mobilizing an entire society. It was not clear how long or if it would last. The freezing Kiev winter, so Count Minus 15 and going down, and the Orthodox Christmas in January were speculated on widely as break points, but in fact the mass protest movement continued to grow. Like any mass movement, it was diverse and attracted many strands, but to describe it as driven by anti-Semite Rossofob neo-Nazis is a travesty. A self-serving big lie that no amount of Russian repetition and propaganda should be allowed to defend. A heavy-handed intervention by the security police against unarmed students in the small hours of the morning on the 30th of November backfired and brought thousands more onto the streets, outraged by what they saw as the swaggering sense of impunity of the Berkut who were the special police. The protesters flew the flags of the EU and Ukraine. They wanted change, not vague promises. They wanted to rid their country of corruption. They saw the EU as a beacon of freedom, democracy, hope and opportunity. They'd witnessed its transformative capacity through their near-neighbour Poland, whose progress left them trailing far behind, although starting from a broadly similar post-Soviet point of departure. They were choosing in the collective to step into a different future and not back to a jaded past. They were not stuges to be manipulated by any external hidden hand. This movement came from somewhere deep within the consciousness and will of the Ukrainian people themselves. And just as it had bags and baggage, I'm sure it did, but the core of this movement was something very real and very Ukrainian and powerfully motivated. Schooled in the old ways and reverting to them, the authorities introduced an ill-advised legislative package on the 16th of January 2014 that interalier criminalized protesters and thus thousands of citizens. This was like pouring petrol and flames. Tension escalated and the first deaths occurred on Maidan and the legal package was withdrawn as hastily as it had appeared. The government was struggling to contain the situation. As the weeks went on and I'll skip along to them on the 20th of February, more than 100 protesters, as we know, were gunned down on Independence Square. Public opinion was outraged. The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland, together with Vladimir Lukin, President Putin's personal representative and President Yanukovych, together with the leaders of the opposition parties, met in Bankova, the President's palace, into the early hours of the 21st of February and concluded a deal, witnessed and signed by all, except Mr. Lukin on behalf of Mr. Putin. So he witnessed it but didn't sign. Sensing that the game was up, Yanukovych and his closest advisers packed up and fled to Russia and their next TV appearance was from Rostov-on-Don, which is just over the border here, not far from Donbass. The Verkhovna Rada met in emergency session and appointed Alexander Turchinov as Speaker and to act as interim President of Ukraine under the Constitution. Unwisely, one of its first votes was to reverse the law on the status of the Russian language. Wisely, Turchinov refused to sign it into law and it never entered into force. But Mr. Putin seized the opportunity to reinforce his hypothesis and propaganda that Maidan, though including decent people with reasonable aspirations, was in effect a neo-Nazi, Russo-Foab conspiracy. Let me move my hand from Maidan to what I call the Putin Doctrine and here forgive me but I've quite a number of quotes because I think it's better to go to the source than have me trying to do indirect interpretation. President Putin is enjoying record popularity at home in Russia, which has gone up in the light of recent events. On the 18th of March, he addressed State Duma deputies, Federation Council members, heads of Russian regions and civil society representatives in the Kremlin, in the Gilded Splendour of St. George's Hall. It was the occasion to mark his call for ratification of the treaty, admitting Crimea and Sevastopol to the Russian Federation after the referendum of March 16. With the weakness of a Ukrainian government struggling to establish itself in Kiev, President Putin struck in Crimea with what the economists described as and I quote, dazzling speed and efficiency and it certainly was that dazzling speed and efficiency. The independent Ukraine is barely 23 years in existence. In 1994, it surrendered its stockpile of post-soviet nuclear weapons and in return received guarantees for its territorial integrity from the signatories of the Budapest memorandum. This included the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France and Russia. 20 years later, 94 to 2014, 20 years later, to the delight of his listeners, Mr. Putin was by his account writing the rungs of history. I quote, in people's hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia, he said. Quote, this firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation over time. Under any circumstances, despite all the dramatic changes our country went through during the 20th century, close quote. He criticized openly Khrushchev's 1954 gift of the peninsula to Ukraine as quote, a clear violation of the constitutional norms that were in place even then. Crimea was not the only focus of the president's remarks. He also criticized the Bolsheviks, who after the revolution, quote, may God judge them, added large sections of the historical south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine, close quote. So those are the bits over here in Donbas and up towards Kharkiv. This, of course, was not especially reassuring for anyone listening in Ukraine or elsewhere in the context of the annexation of Crimea and the current state of territorial armed insurrection and separatism in those regions. This is not the first time that President Putin evoked such themes. In the State of the Union speech in 2005, he remarked that, and I quote, above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century, close quote. Adding, quote, also certain is that Russia should continue its civilizing mission on the Eurasian continent. This mission consists in ensuring that democratic values combined with national interests enrich and strengthen our historic community. Our historic community is a restatement of the Soviet politics of the nearer broad and of its earlier imperial antecedent based on spheres of influence. Again, to quote President Putin, we considerably said, international support for the respect of the rights of Russians abroad, an issue of major importance, one that cannot be subject to political and diplomatic bargaining. We hope that the new members of NATO and the European Union in the post-Soviet area will show their respect for human rights, including the rights of ethnic minorities through their actions, close quote, which is a reasonable hope for anyone to have about co-ethnics to do with their human rights. He returned to this theme in his recent Kremlin speech, quote, many people both in Russia and in Ukraine, as well as in other republics, hoped that the common wealth of independent states, which was created at the time after the collapse of the USSR, would become the new common form of statehood. They were told that there would be a single currency, a single economic space, joint armed forces. However, all this remained empty promises while the big country, meaning Russia, was gone. It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered, close quote. Now, Crimea, as I remarked earlier, was part of Ukraine since 1954, but implicitly only became part of a different country after Ukrainian independence by this logic. The Greater Russia was invoked in the speech of the 18th of March, quote, millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world, to be divided by borders, close quote. I'm bound to say when I was reading this speech, although not all of its rhetoric was similar, that its philosophical foundations reminded me of the speech of Slobodan Milosevic, given in Kosovo Polya, in the field in March of, I think it was, of 1989, marking the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Serbs by the Ottomans, and the Serbs like the Irish had lots of defeats and therefore found triumph and failure as part of the national narrative. But it reminded me some way of the philosophy of part of that speech. Mr. Putin's, Mr. Putin champions the Eurasian Union, as I've recalled earlier. In fact, he published an article in his Vestia in October, 2011, when he contemplated returning to the presidency, because he was twice in, then he got to the back of the tandem as President Medvedev got to the front, and then they swapped places on the tandem and he was the president and Medvedev became prime minister. But as he contemplated his third presidency, he outlined his main foreign policy priority. He said he wanted to bring ex-obvious states into, quote, a Eurasian Union building on an existing customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. We are not going to stop there, he wrote, and they're setting an ambitious goal to achieve an even higher integration level in the Eurasian Union. He envisaged the new union as a suple national body that would coordinate the economic and currency policy between its members. So kind of a mirror of the EU but in the Russian sphere. It would be open to new members such as the Central Asian Republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He also made available criticism of Ukraine that chose to stay outside the union, citing its commitment to European integration, but he said this was the wrong choice. He wrote arguing that membership in the Eurasian Union, apart from direct economic benefits, will enable its members to integrate into Europe faster and from a much stronger position. In the recent Kremlin speech, he criticized the EU's endless foot-dragging in talks with Russia about visa and other issues, which is a very sore point of your talk with Russians over a long period of time. Mr Putin spoke about, quote, those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine. They wanted to set to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continued to set the tone in Ukraine to this day. Herein lies, I think, the central difference in appreciation of what happened on Maidan and its aftermath. Russian propaganda relentlessly has focused on a big lie that what happened in Kiev was a neo-Nazi, Russophobes, anti-Semitic coup. This propaganda has endured for months and has been a constant theme on Russian television and media. Although there's no tangible evidence whatsoever of any threat to life and limb of anyone in Crimea, Mr Putin justified his intervention, arguing, and I quote, those who opposed the coup. So read for that, the people in Crimea. The Russian-speaking Crimea were in the first line. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, which were not being evidently threatened, but turned for help in preventing the events that were unfolding and that are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and other Ukrainian cities. Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded. We could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been a betrayal in our part, close quote. I would just say this about that citation. Anyone familiar with 20th century European history will find very unhappy echoes in such a justification, if I might put it in quotes, of the annexing of the home territory of coethnics. It's not the first time it happened in Europe, and I hope, but shouldn't be naive about whether it would be the last. Putting all these quotes together, and there's a lot more where that came from, but I think it's right that you should hear Mr Putin in his own words. The Putin doctrine asserts a Russian right of intervention in its near abroad, in defense of Russians and Russian interests. This includes overt military intervention, such as in Georgia, and the increasingly implausible assertion of plausible deniability, in the case of covert and proxy operations, such as in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. The president was dismissive of Western concerns and the violation of international law, and more or less said that the Americans make it up as they go along, so forget the international law argument. There's a longer quote, but I don't do it in injustice. And referring to what happened in Ukraine, he remarked, we understand what is happening. We understand that these actions were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration. We've every reason he said to assume the infamous policy of containment, led in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, continues today. And so this is deep down part of the Russian sense of where things are that there is a policy of containment in all of these exercises. For Mr. Putin to use his words, this is, quote, an historic turning point, close quote, that demonstrates, quote, the nation's maturity and strength of spirit, close quote. Putin is playing a long game, has time on his side, practices containment and suppression at home, and selective aggression in the nearer broad, and in effect is accountable only to himself and his inner clique. This is a considerable geopolitical strength as compared with the bureaucratic machinations and slow decision-making process in EU. To turn, Chairman, if I can, towards the crisis today, Ukraine is undergoing a period of unprecedented change and strain. Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch closely associated with Maidan, was elected president of the 25th of May. He called legislative elections for next Sunday, 26th of October, and his bloc, the Poroshenko bloc, led by Yuri Lutsenko, who got out of prison during our term, is likely to emerge as the largest party, but he will need to find coalition partners. Ukraine's territorial integrity has been breached by Russian revanchism and Crimea. It is trying to cope with armed separatists in eastern and southern Ukraine. The government in Kiev has inherited a deep budgetary and financial crisis. GDP, according to the World Bank, is expected to fall by at least 9% this year. The currency, the Ryfna, has lost more than a quarter of its value. Russia, having lowered the price of gas in December, then put it back up again when it was no longer in the driving seat in Kiev. And again, Ukraine is paying one of the highest prices per thousand cubic meters in Europe if it can get gas. The question of gas price, winter supplies, and gas debt repayment is the subject of ongoing negotiations between Russia, EU and Ukraine. Progress is reported from meetings this week in Brussels, but still they are short of full agreement. The talks resume next week after the legislative elections. In this, Russia holds the Trump card, especially as the winter approaches, and may play it an hour later, as it pleases, to stabilize or destabilize the new administration in Kiev and more generally the EU. Ukraine badly needs more financial assistance as a matter of urgency. This will be an expensive macroeconomic package of not less than 20 billion US dollars or more, whose cost would be surpassed only by the costs of inaction or inadequate action to assist Ukraine through this existential moment. The dynamics of failing to do this certainly will cost more in the long run, both politically and economically. Fighting on the ground has gone through many phases to give you a flavor. In Donbas, as earlier in Crimea, green men in military fatigues without insignia and well armed arrived and occupied strategic buildings. They then retreated from view to be replaced in part by indigenous separatists. The green men, of course, were not from Mars, but officially also not from Russia. One recalls the statement attributed to Bismarck that nothing is true until it is officially denied. Russia maintained the threat of a large and well armed battalions of large and well armed battalions close to the Ukrainian border, and if I just skip along this map which comes from the Ukrainian defense source and so always in war, you have to be careful about whose truth you're looking at. But what you see on the Russian side gives you a sense of the armor that was there that apparently is going back to barracks, but not maybe I've got there yet. And some of the firepower is inside Donbas itself in that context. Russia maintained this threat on the border. In July, after intense fighting, government forces consisting of volunteer militia and troops liberated Sloviansk from rebel control, and Sloviansk is in that Donbas zone that we looked at earlier. I don't have it marked up here, but it's there in Sloviansk. It was a source of considerable fighting at that time. This was a combination of volunteer militia and regular troops, and the volunteer militia on both sides greatly complicates how you would settle this issue eventually if it could be settled. What is clear is that the Ukrainian forces were beginning to get the upper hand. On the 17th of July, Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 was... No, that's another one, I haven't heard enough. Yes, yes. You see in the lower map, the little red boxes, the Donbas Donetsk-Luhansk area and the craft site where the missiles were fired from and so on, that was shot down over rebel-held territory, resulting in the death of 280 passengers and 15 crew. Whatever about the who-done-it part, and you know as much about that as I do or as little, this stiffened the EU's resolve and resulted in the initiation of so-called Phase III sanctions that absent previous unanimity were not implemented up to that point. Government military successes continued as the rebel-held territory began to shrink. And this prompted an escalation in Russia's response. This is still officially denied, in spite of videos of captured Russian troops and stories of dead and injured Russian troops, including in some media in Russia itself. Iloviask, about 30 kilometers from Donetsk, became a new front throughout the month of August. By month's end, in 72 hours of fierce fighting, Russian-backed rebel forces destroyed several hundred Ukrainian armored vehicles and killed a very substantial portion of Ukraine's fighting forces. I have personally spoken to witnesses of this massacre in Kiev some weeks ago. Russian, quote, humanitarian aid, close quote, convoys, consisting of close to 300 trucks, unchecked by the international Red Cross of the Kiev authorities, crossed over the porous borderline into Donbass. This exercise was repeated on several occasions and was widely seen and reported as an exercise in resupply of munitions and material and as facilitating acid stripping of plant and equipment from the Donbass military industrial complex and bringing it to Russia. A new front was opened heading south towards Mariupol, which is between the Russian border and Crimea. So Mariupol is over here. And the new front remains, in spite of this fragile ceasefire, under constant bombardment and threat. Kiev now had no option. It had dead bodies all over the place after the Ilyask massacre. It had lost a huge part of its equipment. A new front was opened to the south in Mariupol and they came to the ceasefire table and agreed in Minsk a ceasefire in the 5th of September. I received daily reports since my work in Ukraine and I do insist you have to account in all war truth as a casualty, but you can delineate the main lines if you're reading them over time. And what is clear that every day since the ceasefire started, you can count an average of at least 10 people between civilian and military who are killed. And even as recently as the report which I read coming in here today from yesterday, there are reports of shelling and of injuries and death. Whether Ukraine should be a bridge or a border between the EU and Russia is an issue that I've addressed elsewhere. But unfortunately today I think such a proposition is of a somewhat academic quality, at least in the short term. Ukraine is neither a bridge nor the border. It's a front line. It should not be abandoned to its own fate but should be assisted to realize its own freely chosen destiny. If this fails, if Ukraine fails, it would be culpably naive to suppose that this would be the end of the matter so far as the Putin doctrine is concerned. Ukraine today, where tomorrow. To close Mr. Chairman, a few remarks on the international order in the EU. The process should not be a zero sum game of winners and losers. It should not be a return to an older European politics of the balance of power. It should not be a signal that liberal democracy is a spent force incapable of mobilizing an effective response to aggression. As regards territorial integrity, the Charter of the United Nations, the founding principles of the Council of Europe and of the Helsinki Final Act are all challenged by the annexation of Crimea and what happens in eastern Ukraine and its incremental disintegration by proxy. It is disappointing to record and I do it here today in this institute that 69 member states of the United Nations either abstained or voted against the General Assembly resolution condemning the breach of UN principles in Crimea as regards territorial integrity. These included Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa to name but some. Is this a glimpse of tomorrow's world? The total irrelevance of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 that was a guarantee of territorial integrity for a non-nuclear Ukraine is a poor advertisement for nuclear non-proliferation. The post-war settlement, this is post-Second World War settlement, in terms of the international order and some of its associated liberal democratic assumptions, in my view, from this can no longer be taken for granted. As for the EU, this crisis reminds us of our energy vulnerability. The EU's energy dependence is running at more than 65 percent and on its current estimates, the Commission suggests it could grow to 80 percent by 2030. Russia accounts for 27 percent of EU gas imports and 22 percent of EU oil imports. The formulation of a genuine common energy policy is overdue. This is a crisis that should not be wasted. The EU needs to reduce its dependency in imported energy, accelerate the diversification of supply and deploy its collective bargaining power in energy procurement and, of course, as regards climate change, continue to invest in energy efficiency and the development of indigenous energy sources. There are still too many energy islands within the single market and greater attention needs to be paid to the development of infrastructure, especially interconnectors. This is now in the European Council's agenda of this week and this is a moment not to be squandered. On sanctions, these have given rise to some debate and there's no doubt the sanctions are hurting. The European economy is in trouble and the sanctions add to the trouble. But the sanctions also add some trouble to the state of the Russian economy. The sanctions are a signal of disapproval. It's not that they are so effective but they are better than nothing and they have been escalated as the crisis has escalated and in that sense have established a ratcheting effect of kind of one for one. They do have a cost for both sides but if you've nothing on the table, you've nothing to negotiate with if there is a negotiation in the end and in the end if there were no sanctions what exactly would the EU have to say or do in respect of the alternatives? Finally, let me turn very briefly to the common foreign and security policy. I believe that this is challenged by Ukraine and I think it poses a question. Does the European Union aspire to be the weakest 29th policy of 28 member states and the lowest common denominator in its dealing with Russia? The reason I'm posing that question is because my view is that the view from Moscow is that they have some very strong bilateral relations privileged with certain EU capitals and that the EU is something frankly that is quite marginal in terms of its presumptions. Why I would ask for example has the high representative been an absent partner at the foreign policy negotiating tables about Ukraine and Berlin? This after all is a common EU policy and if the EU is absent does it not suggest the re-nationalization of the modestly common policy that was there namely the Eastern partnership? There is much that the EU needs to get serious about. The Ukrainian crisis is a test not just for Ukraine but a test for the EU itself and this is a test that cannot afford failure. Thank you for your attention.


Like I said, I think everything I've learned has been from the Navy, straight from high school to the Navy, as far as work ethic, hard working, everything, of course, financials, gave you the ability to buy a house and extra schooling, pay for your schooling, stuff like that. So, I mean, I couldn't have done it without the Navy. That's the biggest thing when you get out.