European Council
Dail Éireann — 2024-02-21
============================================================

Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West

He is pretty good at double standards.
The situation in Ukraine is different from that in Palestine. The attack on Ukraine was totally unprovoked. Ukraine is a democracy, not a dictatorship or a theocracy. It is also a European country, in our neighbourhood, and a country that had applied to join the European Union. Indeed, one of the reasons Russia attacked Ukraine was that it wanted to be part of the European Union. Therefore, it is different. The conflict has been going on for two years. There have been many more deaths in Ukraine, and many more people have been displaced, amounting to 6 million or 7 million at this stage. Fundamentally, however, the approach should be the same. When I meet representatives of Arab governments, I ask them why they have not done more for Palestine. Considering all the things European countries have done for their neighbour Ukraine – I am not referring to giving it weapons but to imposing the likes of sanctions and overflight bans and cancelling visas – Arab countries could do a lot more for their neighbour and their brethren in Palestine.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-02-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:42+00:00
Sitting date: 2024-02-21