On October 26, 2021, after a long journey with a stopover at Istanbul airport, the PP senator for Almería Luis Rogelio Rodríguez-Comendador arrived in Odesa, the third city of Ukraine, along the Black Sea. No one was waiting for him despite being the representative of the Spanish Parliament at the joint meeting with parliamentarians from the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada that was to be held until the 28th in the port town. Rodríguez-Comendador got into a taxi and went to the hotel where he would work and spend the next two nights. He was tired and decided to sleep; he had to get up early the next morning. In front, intense days of listening, questioning and writing reports. This is how he remembers it with El Periódico de España.
The NATO is to blame for this trip. Rodríguez-Comendador is one of the twelve members of the delegation of deputies and senators (six and six) who are part of the Organization’s Parliamentary Assembly. It is a body that brings together 266 representatives of the citizens of the 29 States that comprise it, to which must be added those of the associated countries. The senator did not go to the south of Ukraine for the Assembly, those are occasions of more pageantry and pomp; He went as a member of the commission that, together with a series of Ukrainian parliamentarians, analyzed the process so that the now-invaded country becomes one more partner. He’s a more modest format and nothing mediabut very dense.
Odessa, on October 26, 2021, was a quiet, happy, cultural city. Although he had been three years earlier for a similar trip, then accompanied by more colleagues from Congress and the Senate, Rodríguez-Comendador decided to kick it good. He would do it the next day, more rested.
Sandwiches and Audis
Representatives and senators usually go on official trips in groups, although not always. Sometimes you have to go alone. Four months ago, it was the turn of a PP senator who was previously president of the Almería provincial council and mayor of Almería from 2003 to 2015.
He has been interested in military issues for a long time, he admits in conversation with The Newspaper of Spain. He is vice president of the Senate Defense Commission and has been a member of the Spanish delegation to the NATO Assembly since 2011. He has made a few trips such as the one to Odesa and has worked friendship with Portuguese and Latvian counterparts and even with a former minister of Margaret Thatcherwho until he was 80 years old was part of these entourages.
The official name that led Rodríguez-Comendador to Odesa is this: “Joint Meeting of the Political Commission with the Ukraine-NATO Interparliamentary Council (UNIC) and the Georgia-NATO Interparliamentary Council (GNIC).” Under this lengthy title, a series of merely informative sessions and interventions by the deputies themselves Ukrainians, military experts and academic professionals. As the senator points out, the material collected must ultimately be translated into recommendations of a political nature, embodied in reports that the Assembly will later analyze in the corresponding plenary session (there are two a year).
On October 27, the senator for Almería woke up early and went down to breakfast at 7:30. Between 8.15 and 8.30 the sessions began, as it appeared in the planned program. The attendees did not leave the room except for coffee at 10:00 am and lunch at 1:30 pm, which in Odessa were “terrible sandwiches”. Work resumed in the afternoon, as a rule until 6:00 p.m. From then on, free time. Rodríguez-Comendador took the opportunity to go to his room, make himself more comfortable, wrap up warm and go for a walk in Odessa.
For four hours he walked aimlessly through the streets. She stopped at the Opera and Ballet Theater, the oldest in the city, and noted that there would be a performance in a few minutes. He tried to buy a ticket, but to no avail. Everything had been sold. He stood still for a while on the famous Potemkin Stairs, where one of the most important films in cinema history was shot almost a century ago.
The movement of people and cars, the lights, the hustle and bustle showed Luis Rogelio Rodríguez-Comendador a beautiful city, more or less thriving, eager to enter modernity. There was something that reminded him of images from the 70s and 80s because together with high-end Audis old Skodas and Ladas circulated.
He detected nothing that made him fear war. While the Ukrainian parliamentarians and other experts to whom he listened attentively during the morning expressed uncertainty and doubts about the intentions of Vladimir Putin, the citizens went to the theater, drank beer, walked, went home … “Hospitable people, caring people, a city on the move“recalls the senator.
The Odesa that Rodríguez-Comendador observed and kicked on October 27, 2021 was one. The Odessa that in March 2022 awaits a fierce Russian attack is already another.
Visit to a naval base
The representatives of the parliaments of the states that make up NATO received abundant information about the context in which Ukraine was moving before the war. It seems like a decade has passed, but only four months have passed. The speakers lavished themselves for half an hour on the different angles of reality in the area and the guests asked questions and took notes. In the talks, the threatening shadow of the president of the Russian Federation.
This was the schedule for the 27th and 28th. However, it is common for the agenda of this type of trip to include visits to military installations. In Odessa, Rodríguez-Comendador and his colleagues went to the port, which is divided into a commercial section and a military section, separated by a fence. The objective of the hosts was to show the material. The PP senator was impressed, and not for the better.
“They show us a material that is obsolete. Old ships, donated mainly by the United States. The Ukrainian navy is not exactly of a certain consistency. In the military plane it is an old navy. Its ships date from the 70s and 80s. It is true that they are trying to modernize them, but they are old,” explains Rodríguez-Comendador.
than yes has some “special commands”: “Rubber boats, like the Zodiac, with more modern elements. They also have smaller boats from the 2000s. But it is an old fleet. It cannot be compared with what its Russian neighbor has, or even with what any country has Western,” he concludes.
They got into one of the boats. Dressed in life jackets, they walked around the outskirts of the Odessa coast. After the tour, they attended a tribute to those who died in the war on the Crimean peninsula in 2014. The naval base orchestra performed the country’s anthem and Western guests laid flowers on the memorial. It was exciting, the senator recalls.
The program of the third night in the city, before the return, was completed with a dinner of hosts and guests. A relaxed closing after two days of dense work. That night was the senator’s last in a peaceful Odessa. And it was the last of a Spanish parliamentarian in Ukraine prior to the invasion.
A feeling and a reflection
“On the way back I wondered if the Ukrainian colleagues were right. all of them, of different ideologies and sensitivities, showed concern was symptomatic“, remarks the senator of the PP during the conversation, in the cafeteria of the Upper House. Seen over time, “130,000 soldiers do not gather at the border to carry out maneuvers”, he sentences.
Sadly, Rodríguez-Comendador assumes that “Odessa will fall” and that “the whole Ukraine will fall”. From there, the uncertainty in capital letters. “Only one person knows what is going to happen, and that person is Putin. Nobody, I repeat, nobody can say for sure, not even heads of state, how this is going to end.
The idea of the Russians is not to stop until the Ukrainian government and Ukraine fall one hundred percent. Kiev will fall. I hope it stays there. But diplomacy doesn’t work for guys like Putin. With the Crimean war did not serve. There were sanctions, but they didn’t hurt him. Now they are more forceful, which I support. Anyway, to satraps and egomaniacs like that, if you close all the roads, they can get out of control. I think that, while keeping up the pressure, which I totally agree with, leave a small door open through which he can escape“.
The dissertation continues: “Europe was not prepared for this. We cannot be naive; we cannot be alarmist either. I do not believe that there will be a nuclear catastrophe, but what it has done cannot remain unanswered. This is a war against Europe. Putin despises Europe. Thus that the attitude of Jens Stoltenberg – the secretary general of NATO – has been important to me because Putin only respects force.