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 on 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.
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This month, the Defense Select Committee of the House of Commons sharply criticized Britain for playing a “strikingly modest” role in the coalition battle against the Islamic State, noting that Britain had carried out only 6 percent of coalition airstrikes. 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 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 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, which will be elected on May 7.
