OPINION: Our Russian ambassador and his 'insane' statement mean he has no credibility in Ireland

IT is doubtful many of us will forget the barbarity we saw on our screens and in newspapers behind those images from Bucha, a town 55km north-west of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

Those pictures are becoming as emblematic of the worst atrocities of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine as the 1995 massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica was of the war in Bosnia by the Serbs.

It took 22 years, until 2017, for the Serb leaders Ratko Mladic to be convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in connection with Srebrenica. In 22 years time it is likely Putin will be dead of natural causes. Hopefully that event will happen much sooner, whatever the causes, though I’d prefer it to happen through the rule of law.

Reputable news agencies reported that, after the Russians withdrew from Bucha, 20 bodies, all in civilian clothing, were found across a single street, one with his hands tied behind his back and a white cloth and his Ukrainian passport left open beside his body. “All these people were shot,” Bucha’s mayor Anatoly Fedoruk said, and that 280 other bodies had been buried in mass graves elsewhere in the town.

The Russians of course denied it all. They said film footage and photographs of civilian dead from Bucha was a “staged performance” by the Ukrainians. “All the photos and videos published by the Kyiv regime, allegedly testifying to the 'crimes' of Russian servicemen in the city of Bucha, Kyiv region, are another provocation,” Russia's defence ministry said in a statement.

It continued: “During the time that Russian armed forces were in control of this settlement, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions.”

All fake news then? Absolutely not. Just lies, more Russian lies. Some of those reports we saw on our screens were by some of the world’s most respected news reporters, including those of the BBC’s Orla Guerin.

Orla Guerin (not related to the late Veronica Guerin, by the way, as some assume) is from Dublin. I know her. She is one of the BBC’s most experienced foreign correspondents. She is up to the tricks of all warring regimes and is only too aware that the first casualty of all wars is the truth. Orla is also a person of the highest integrity.

I believe her, not the Russians. And not the Russian Ambassador to Ireland Yuriy Filatov, probably the most consistent if not very accomplished liar in Ireland’s diplomatic corps. In a letter to The Irish Times last Saturday he accused it “and the likes in the Western media” of having “for a long time closed their eyes on the rise of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.”

He continued: “Now the West reaps the harvest of their cynicism, hypocrisy and lies, adding to them new ones – about 'atrocities' by Russian military (who do not target civilians and at the price of their own lives try to shield them from fire and barbarism of neo-Nazi battalions).” Such nobility! As if…

Yes, this is the same Mr Filatov who in mid-February, a week before Russia invaded Ukraine, told all and sundry that the idea his country would invade Ukraine was “insane”. On RTE’s Prime Time programme he said Russia didn’t “have any political, military, economic or whatever other reason to do that (invade). The whole idea is insane.”

Instead the Russians were planning to withdraw from Ukraine’s borders at the time, he said. “What I can tell to our viewers is within maybe three-fpur weeks, the configuration of the forces in the western region of Russia will resume its normal standard posture,” he said.

Possibly we misunderstood what he meant by “normal standard posture”, but I doubt it.

Widespread international concern at the time over tensions at the Ukrainian border was “a case of collective insanity” he said. This was “made up of the, I would say, deliberate attempt by the US and the allies to inflate tensions anew,” he said.

Of course Mr Filatov has form when it comes to lying since his arrival in Ireland five years ago in 2017. He hit the ground running, so to speak. In March 2018, at a European Council meeting in Brussels, the leaders of EU member states adopted a statement declaring it was “highly likely Russia is responsible” for the attempted poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England’s Salisbury earlier that month.

Mr Filatov told Irish media at the time it was “plausible” that the British secret service may have been involved in the poisonings. A decision by Ireland to expel a Russian diplomat in solidarity with Britain was “totally unwarranted, uncalled for, senseless and regrettable,” he said.

“We totally reject the underlying notion of the so-called Russian involvement in the Salisbury incident,” he said and that it was high time Britain stopped “misleading” its own public and the international community, he said.

“We are talking here about a very serious chemical incident. It should be treated responsibly and be investigated thoroughly and openly,” he said. “Instead all we are witnessing is complete cover-up and [a blame game]. Everybody understands the absurdity of the situation yet nonetheless the political theatre goes on,” he said.

It is interesting too that many senior Opposition figures, ranging from Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, to Labour’s Brendan Howlin to Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats and leftists Richard Boyd-Barrett and Paul Murphy demanded evidence from the Government to back up its decision to expel a Russian diplomat at the time. Being a sensitive security issue such evidence can be difficult to provide publicly. Russia, of course, expelled an Irish diplomat from Moscow in turn.

In 2018 also he said there was no evidence that a chemical weapon attack in the Syrian town of Douma that year in which up to 50 people died. The Syrian army, allies of Russia, were believed responsible. Mr Filatov first queried whether it had ever taken place, then said that if there was a chemical weapons attack it was probably done by Syrian jihadists against their own people.

This seemingly contradictory position was in contrast to the position of the Russian foreign ministry which claimed that the attack had been engineered by Britain as part of a “Russophobic campaign.”

Mr Filatov said the entire episode was damaging to international trust. “We in Russia are losing the last bit of trust we have had with our western partners, which is certainly a very dangerous development,” he said.

He also vehemently denied that Russia was behind sustained cyberattacks aimed at western countries. Mr Filatov said such claims were part of a pattern that sought to portray his country as “the evil empire and the source of all evil in the world – which is, really, a ridiculous concept”.

It is increasingly difficult to find it such “a ridiculous concept.”

“We are not engaged in any cyberattacks against anybody,” Mr Filatov said then. “This is not the kind of behaviour or attitude of Russia. It’s simply a lie,” said the ambassador. And, we can take it, that Mr Filatov would recognise a lie at some distance.

Despite all of the above, and no matter how tempting it must be, the Government is correct not to expel Mr Filatov. It is not in the interests of Irish people currently living in the Russian Federation that this should happen. But Mr Filatov should be under no illusion just how far his credibility stretches in Ireland.