Bill Cash, a member of the British Parliament who led the Maastricht Rebellion against European Union integration, has criticized the EU and its Eastern Partnership and Association Agreement for the role it played in the current crisis in Ukraine.

“We do not have to be enthusiastic advocates of Vladimir Putin’s policies to recognize that this entire Ukrainian crisis was avoidable. Nor to recognize that the Crimea – handed over by Khrushchev within the Soviet Union to Ukraine in 1954 – has been and remains a vital national security and defense interest for Russia, including the Black Sea and its fleet for centuries. The European Union’s Eastern Partnership and Association Agreement were clearly anticipated to be Ukraine’s stepping stone to membership of the European Union, and probably of NATO as well. On both counts the EU has pursued a remarkably naïve foreign policy,” Cash writes on the Conservative Home website.