Ukraine pans Tory government for comparison to appeasement of Nazi Germany

The “worsening situation” in Ukraine caused Ben Wallace to leave a family long weekend in Europe, which he had set off on Saturday.

His remark that there is a “whiff of Munich in the air”, in a reference to the agreement that allowed German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 but failed to prevent the Second World War, was not welcomed by Ukraine.

Ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko warned that panic being caused by the West by sounding the alarm over a potential Russian invasion this week could be playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands.

“It’s not the best time for us to offend our partners in the world, reminding them of this act which actually not bought peace but the opposite, it bought war,” the diplomat told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme.

READ MORE: Waiting for a ticket out of here: What the mood is like in Ukraine’s capital

“There’s panic everywhere not just in people’s minds but in financial markets as well,” he added, warning it is “hurting the Ukrainian economy on sort of the same level as people leaving the embassy”.

Wallace said in an interview with The Sunday Times that Moscow could “launch an offensive at any time”, with an estimated 130,000 Russian troops and heavy firepower amassed along Ukraine’s border. It may be that [Putin] just switches off his tanks and we all go home but there is a whiff of Munich in the air from some in the West.”

A source close to Wallace (below) said his frustrations centred on if Putin strikes “come what may, then all the diplomacy would have been a straw man”, rather than being aimed at any European allies. Wallace arrived back in the UK from Moscow in the early hours of Saturday before heading abroad with his family, but it was understood he had already accepted he would be leaving the holiday early rather than having cancelled it on arrival.

Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis said an imminent attack is “entirely possible” but insisted Mr Wallace was not criticising European allies with his Munich remark.

The Northern Ireland Secretary told the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme: “What he [Wallace] is drawing comparison with is we hope that the conversation that he’s had, that the Foreign Secretary and others ... has a positive outcome and Russia does work through and find a diplomatic peaceful way out of this.

“But he’s expressing that concern that we’ve got to also understand the reality that while they’re having these diplomatic conversations Russia has continued to move troops, we’ve got about 130,000 troops on the borders, and therefore we’ve got to be cognisant of the reality that they could move very quick.”

A British student who fled Ukraine said people were rushing to leave ahead of potential turmoil that could “kick off quite quickly” if Russia invades.

Haider Ali, 21, from Birmingham, said students at Dnipro Medical Institute in central Ukraine were concerned about the university’s proximity to the country’s conflict-torn eastern regions.

Speaking a day after arriving in the UK on one of the first commercial flights out of Kyiv after the Foreign Office called for Britons to leave, Ali said he had urged fellow students to book their tickets too.

“I said to my friends, right, it’s going to get a lot more expensive because when it kicks off, it will kick off quite quickly. You know, we’re not that far from the border. We’re only about 200 miles, 150 miles from the border where everything’s going on in Crimea”.

Ali said there were worries that Russia could send a warship along the Dnieper River, a major waterway that flows through Dnipro, the city where his university is located, all the way to the Ukrainian capital Kiev. The institution urged students to take advantage of the commercial flights while they were still available, Ali said.