LONDON — Britain and the European Union made a “catastrophic misreading” of Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin and “sleepwalked” into the Ukraine crisis, treating it as a trade issue rather than as a delicate foreign-policy challenge, British lawmakers said Friday in a scathing report.
For too long, the European Union’s relationship with Moscow had been predicated on the “optimistic premise” that Russia was becoming a democratic, law-abiding country, the report said, rendering member nations insensitive to the degree of Russian hostility toward European Union efforts to negotiate a closer political and economic relationship, known as an “association agreement,” with Ukraine.
European states “have been slow to reappraise the relationship and to adapt to the realities of the Russia we have today,” the report said, and lack a long-term strategic response.
The analytical failure and “glaring absence of political oversight” was compounded by a decline in Russia expertise and analysis in Britain and across the European Union, the report said.
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The committee, led by Rory Stewart, a member of Parliament from Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, criticized the prime minister and the armed forces for failing “to set out a clear military strategy” for Britain and for neglecting to use accumulated British knowledge about Iraq despite “the most significant threat” to international stability to emerge from the Middle East in decades.
The committee found that Britain had only three military personnel outside the Kurdish region of Iraq compared with 400 Australians, 280 Italians and 300 Spaniards.
A projection by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a British think tank, from the government’s fall budget statement says that military spending could be cut further by 36 percent in real terms in the next Parliament.
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