You're reading: Retired UK ambassador devotes himself to Ukraine

LONDON — Robert Brinkley, a British diplomat with 34 years experience, is now retired and devoting himself to Ukraine, a country where he served as ambassador from 2002-2006. He witnessed the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power.

Brinkley’s interest in Ukraine remains strong. His house is located in a quiet western London suburb. Behind the living room’s window, Mary Brinkley, the ex-diplomat’ wife, is fluffing the pillows on the sofas. She picks up the phone: “Hi. I think we are ready for your visit.”

Robert, 65, shows up in the corridor smiling. The living room is filled with sunlight and books occupy an entire wall. Pointing to the shelves Brinkley says he reads a lot especially since he retired in 2011.

“And I play the violin. I play in a local orchestra,” he says, before making himself comfortable in an armchair, sipping his coffee.

Robert and Mary Brinkley used to live in Moscow. He went there in 1979 after taking part in negotiations between the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom on the nuclear test-ban treaty.”

He went to Moscow to join the commercial department for the British Embassy a few days after Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. A downturn in relations between the Soviet Union and the West ensued with sanctions and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980.

“But we were told that we should carry on with mutually beneficial trade. So we did,” he references to the negotiations about compressor stations for the gas pipelines coming West from the Soviet Union.

“There were a number of companies including British companies bidding for that business,” he says. “I was supporting British companies.”

In 2002, he moved to Ukraine to be British ambassador: “That was what I wanted.” The Orange Revolution started in Kyiv after the Nov. 21, 2004, rigged presidential election tried to install Viktor Yanukovych. After daily street protests and a Ukrainian Supreme Court ruling invalidating the results, Yushchenko won a new election on Dec. 26, 2004.

“It was a worrying time because of the uncertainty,” says Brinkley. “We were doing a lot of reporting for London. In normal times in Kyiv we would have sent one diplomatic telegram every day but at the time of the Orange Revolution, we were sending about five a day.”

To find out what was really happening, the embassy sent their employees on the streets to speak to the both sides.

Brinkley tells of the phone call with the British Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair’s] advisor – “’Robert, is this serious or not? Is this big or not? ‘Yeah, it is big.’”

Then the diplomats received the information that the Ukrainian government was planning to break up the protests. “They would use the police; they would use the interior forces,” thinks back Brinkley.

He says that his wife Mary witnessed “the series of buses with rather muscular looking men who were the Yanukovych supporters had been waiting for the order to go and cause trouble on the Maidan.”

However, it did not happen then.

“The American ambassador of that time [John E. Herbst] heard about this and was able to make some phone calls to a very high level and it was stopped,” says the ex-diplomat.

When everything ended without bloodshed, Brinkley found himself in St. Alexander’s Catholic Church, which became a shelter for the demonstrators. “The feeling I had of relief, that it was all over and peacefully over and I, I was crying that morning in church. Just with the exhaustion.”

Today he chairs the steering committee of The Chatham House Ukraine Forum and The Ukrainian Institute in London. He is also a senator of Ukrainian Catholic University, located in Lviv.

Brinkley got an offer from the university in 2013 after he retired from government service.

“Of course, I was very pleased and I said ‘yes’ immediately. Mary afterwards said to me ‘but you never say ‘yes’ immediately to anything’,” he says, laughing. “I am a careful person. So if somebody says to me ‘I want you to do that’ usually instead of just saying ‘yes’ say ‘I will think first.”

He took the job without a second thought because of his love for Ukraine and his Catholic faith.

In 2013, when the EuroMaidan Revolution started that would ultimately oust Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014, there were a lot of “lies, propaganda and disinformation coming out of Russia,” says Brinkley.

Some of the stories in the international media were replaying what the Russian media said.

“I found myself more and more throughout 2014 going on radio and television trying to explain to people that what the Russians were saying was not happening.”

Russia attacked Ukraine because Ukraine was not a NATO member, Brinkley believes. The Budapest Memorandum – a treaty binding Ukraine to give up their third largest nuclear weapons stockpile in return for security assurances signed by Russia, the US and the UK in 1994 – did not stop the Kremlin.

“It does not include any sanctions: it does not say what should happen if a party breaks these commitments.”

Even though Russia signed on “respect for independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity which of course included Crimea,” these security assurances were ignored. The annexation of Crimea and ongoing war in the eastern Donbas have, of course, led to Western sanctions against Russia that continue today.

However, “the reaction from the Western countries should have been stronger than it was,” admits Brinkley.

About Robert Brinkley

Robert Brinkley is a senator of the Ukrainian Catholic University and chairman of the steering committee of the Ukrainian Institute in London. He is a trustee of the Keston Institute, which studies religion in communist and former communist countries. He offers consultancy advice to businesses and comments in the media.

He was a British diplomat for 34 years. He served as high commissioner to Pakistan (2006–09), ambassador to Ukraine (2002-06) and as head of the UK’s worldwide visa operation (2000–02). He had previously had two postings in Moscow (both in Russia and in the Soviet Union), as well as positions in Bonn, Geneva and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.  In 2010–11 he was seconded to Associated British Foods plc.