UK and EU 'badly misread' Russia

Britain and the European Union have been accused of a "catastrophic misreading" of the mood in the Kremlin in the run-up to the crisis in Ukraine.

The House of Lords EU committee claimed Europe "sleepwalked" into the crisis.

The EU had not realised the depth of Russian hostility to its plans for closer relations with Ukraine, it said.

It comes as European Council president Donald Tusk called David Cameron to discuss how the EU should respond to the ongoing violence in east Ukraine.

The Lords committee's report also said Britain had not been "active or visible enough" in dealing with the situation.

It blamed cuts in the Foreign Office, which it said meant it had fewer Russian experts and put less emphasis on analysis.

A similar decline in EU foreign ministries had left them ill-equipped to formulate an "authoritative response" to the situation in Ukraine, it said.

It claimed that for too long the EU's relationship with Moscow had been based on the "optimistic premise" that Russia was on a trajectory to becoming a democratic country.

The result, it said, was a failure to appreciate the depth of Russian hostility when the EU opened talks aimed at establishing an "association agreement" with Ukraine in 2013.